Assessing design approaches' political role in the public sector

Abstract

Governments across the globe are increasingly deploying design tools and methods to explore new ways of public policy-making and governance. Such design approaches are often portrayed as politically neutral. Building on contemporary research that argues the contrary, this paper proposes a framework for making their political dimension explicit by distinguishing between the artefacts, techniques, and discourses that compose them. This article is based on an interactive session held at DRS2018 titled 'Smuggling ideologies? Inquiring into the underlying ideas embedded in design for public governance and policymaking', where design practitioners and academics piloted the proposed framework, and follow-up interviews with some of the participants. An analysis of the discussions in the session and the interviews revealed the recurrence of certain themes, in particular the reinforcement of existing power relations and the encroachment of market logics into the public sector through the introduction of design approaches. The recurrence of these themes in the discussions, we argue, shows how the proposed framework makes visible the underlying political conceptions in the design approaches, and thus how it can contribute to the awareness and understanding of the political implications of (the otherwise proposed as neutral) design tools and methods utilised in the public sector.