Public Interest Designers
Learning how to bring designers into French government
In June 2019, a cohort of 20 Public Interest Designers — Designers d’Intérêt Général (DIG) in French, began working in 16 different French public administrations. The designers applied for specific projects and have been hired for a duration of 6 to 12 months. For most of them, it’s their first experience working in government. Just as for most of the administrations, it’s their first time working with designers.
The Public Interest Designers program aims to introduce design to the public administration, help civil servants and designers work together and deliver better services for citizens. The program works by choosing and proposing impactful projects for the designers to work on, financing their monthly pay of 3500 euros and helping them see their project through.
For those who know the French public innovation scene, the pitch may seem familiar. That’s because Public Interest Designers was inspired by Public Interest Entrepreneurs, a program that is open by design and shares its methods and results.
What was the need for Public Interest Designers?
A couple of observations informed the creation of Public Interest Designers. On the one hand, administrations need designers to better understand the needs of citizens and come up with the best solutions where public service is concerned. Most of them understand the value of a user-centered approach, but do not have the means to recruit designers. Budgets for hiring people are low, the usual process for hiring in government is long, and it takes some convincing of management to let teams hire designers.
On the other hand, most designers would gladly work for the administration, but they feel that the work environment might not suit their methods and general approach.
Where the inspiration came from: Public Interest Entrepreneurs
The same observations were made a few years earlier concerning the need for professionals with tech skills in general. The answer to that was the Public Interest Entrepreneurs program — Entrepreneurs d’Intérêt Général (EIG) in French. Every year, it hires a cohort of data scientists, developers and designers for a 10 month period. In teams of two or three, they work within an administration on a specific problem, mostly linked to data and public service delivery. The program was launched in 2017 and is currently coaching its third cohort.
EIG is part of Etalab, the French mission for open data and open source. That’s one of the reasons why sharing is at the program’s very core. We have a website: entrepreneur-interet-general.etalab.gouv.fr which describes the purpose of the program, documentation online: doc.eig-forever.org to share details on how the program works, and open datasets to be transparent on our use of public money. We call it ‘open-sourcing the program’.
While building the Public Interest Entrepreneurs program, we realized over the years that design and designers played an important part in making tech projects succeed. We shared this with administrations and made sure the number of designers grew in our cohorts. Meanwhile, the French government decided to put an emphasis on UX design and design communities. ‘Forking’ the Public Interest Entrepreneurs program and experimenting with its methods with a cohort of designers was the next step.
Our ambitions for Public Interest Designers
When it comes to design in government, the playing field is huge. We help administrations work successfully with designers in order to build a portfolio of proofs of concept: design in government is useful, design skills are worth hiring for and establishing within the public sector, public service can be delivered differently thanks to design.
The same goes for Public Interest Entrepreneurs which shares a common goal with Public Interest Designers: to inspire other administrations, nationally, locally and internationally. We share our methods and results in the hope of seeing others reuse our model and develop their own Public Interest programs.
This is part of a more general theory of change that we endeavor to spread: when you mix different skills and roles within an organisation that seek the same goal — to improve public service — you can really have an impact.
Learning from each other
Public Interest Designers was inspired by Public Interest Entrepreneurs, which was inspired by the American Presidential Innovation Fellows program. And our programs are regularly inspired by public innovation initiatives around the world: the UK’s Government Digital Service, Code for America and other ‘Code for’ organisations, Germany’s Prototype Fund program, and Italy’s Designers Italia (to name only a few!). All these initiatives have one thing in common: sharing. They share what they learn and what they do, how and why they evolve and what impact they have.
It’s a strong community that helps each member not only reuse what has been done, but also investigate new questions. The one we are investigating right now and would be glad to discuss with the International Design in Government community is: how do you ‘open source’ design?
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Miljkovic Sophie works as communications and ecosystem manager at Etalab, the French government’s mission for open data within the Directorate for Digital Services.
