Applying design in public administration: a literature review to explore the state of the art

Abstract

The attention for applying design-oriented approaches in public administration has increased significantly. Applying design is seen as a promising way to deal with wicked problems and create more responsive policies and services. We aim to contribute to the debate on the value of design for public administration and the development of the latter into a design science by conducting a systematic literature review into the empirical applications of design. We analyse the goals, processes and outcomes of 92 empirical studies. Based upon this we distil six design approaches, varying from traditional scientific and informational approaches to innovative, user-driven and thus more ‘inspirational’ approaches. The more traditional (science-driven) approaches still dominate the field. The impact of these types of studies is correspondingly low. We argue that further developing and refining the whole range of design approaches can foster both the scientific rigour and the societal relevance of a design-oriented public administration.

Behavioral brittleness: the case for strategic behavioral public policy

“…Navigating these more ambitious and ambiguous challenges may, therefore, require cultivating a greater appreciation for speculative and generative problem-solving modes (getting the right idea) as a co-equal complement to analytic and evaluative ones (getting the idea right) (Saltelli et al, 2020). Employing this more proactive, abductive approach complements BPP's familiar 'evidence of'proof of what workswith 'evidence for'testimony for what could beto generate hypotheses and solution components that integrate less obvious, but still plausible, scenarios into problem framing and policy intervention design (Biesta, 2007;Schmidt, 2020;Hermus et al, 2020). Addressing brittleness in these situations may, therefore, lie in an increased willingness to be strategically 'vaguely right rather than exactly wrong' (Read, 1920).…”

“…The ability to iterate in the interest of systems-level outcomes may be even more critically important in quickly evolving instances like Covid-19, where second-and third-order implications of interventions occur on an unusually short wavelength and adopting good behaviors like mask-wearing and handwashing have been shown to result in risk compensation (Mantzari et al, 2020) and substitution effects (Adams et al, 2018;Yan et al, 2020). Although the use of prototyping as an evaluative mechanism in BPP has become increasingly common (Hermus et al, 2020), its application as a generative device to test directional or exploratory thinking when formulating public policies or design public services is still fairly nascent (Mintrom & Luetjens, 2016;Kimbell & Bailey, 2017;Bason, 2019;van Buuren et al, 2020). However, this notion of prototyping concepts, rather than solutions, can also provide significant benefit to the development of more SBPP; just as participatory design embeds broader perspectives into solution development, prototyping early thinking to inform problem definition can better ensure that eventual policy interventions are solving for the right things.…”

“…The fields of 'design thinking' or human-centered design already contribute lightly to behavioral problem-solving through insight into end-user contexts and notions of empathy, but their potential to contribute more substantive input into hypothesis and solution development in a policy context has yet to be fully conceptualized and developed (Schmidt, 2020). Encouragingly, 'design science' has more recently become recognized within public policy and public administration as worthy of study and application (Shangraw & Crow, 1998;Barzelay, 2019;George, 2020;Hermus et al, 2020). Still, making BPP problem-solving more strategic may require recentering hypothesis development and problem-solving from a singular and top-down activity owned by behavioral policymakers to a more broadly collaborative one.…”

How to implement policy: Coping with ambiguity and uncertainty

“…As policies tend to mandate certain procedures, behaviours, management tools or resources, we must separate those factors from how organizations operationalize them in order to understand policy implementation. In recent years, scholars have begun to consider how policy design issues impede implementation and impact where outcomes ultimately fall on the continuum from success to failure (Compton and ’t Hart 2019; Hermus et al 2020; van Buuren et al 2020). To this end, Hudson et al (2019) suggest a five‐fold framework for assessing policy design versus the policy implementation: (1) context (i.e., the socio‐political or technical environment that can influence implementation); (2) clarity (i.e., the extent to which policy goals are clear and consistent); (3) complexity (i.e., the system conditions and organization by which policy is implemented); (4) collaboration (i.e., the extent to which multiple agencies work together during implementation); and (5) capacity (i.e., the extent to which governmental units are able to perform tasks).…”

Policy design or organizational design: On the relevance of the study of public policy and administration

“…Since then, numerous empirical studies on possible associations between organization structure variables and behavioural/policy variables have appeared, although not as many as one would have expected (for overviews of the literature, see Egeberg 2012; Christensen and Lægreid 2018; Egeberg and Trondal 2018). However, an explicitly formulated and comprehensive organizational design focus within a PPA context, specifying dependent and independent variables, has been lacking so far (Lægreid 2018; Hermus et al 2020; van Buuren et al 2020). However, Egeberg and Trondal (2018) aim to establish such a framework.…”