Hi All,
I feel compelled to contribute to this one given Ken's shoutout (thanks
Ken).
In short, the political process by which representatives are selected to
manifest observable changes in the city/state/nation etc is a design
process. Yet, the politicians are rarely ever 'designers' because their
process rarely moves beyond the first one or two steps of designing. Many
people I have worked with like to espouse a skill in 'policy design,' yet
time and again, evidence reveals that it is more like 'policy conjecture.'
Their expertise is typically drawn entirely from formal publications and
academic theory, and if you have read Joi Ito's recent book *Whiplash, *he
makes an excellent argument on why theory driven practice is less effective
than practice driven theory. If you pick up the book, look for the the
reference to scholars in Paris diagnosing the Venetian plague... amazing
story.
I draw the distinction of design and politics on a few particular lines.
Of course these lines are blurry, exceptions abound, and hopefully the
lines get blurrier over time. But in short, what makes my work different
than my colleagues is that I expect a design process to result in some kind
of observable, concrete output. The output could be something simple -
like a road - or complex, like a written law. The output is not a new
theory, or a strategy, or a framework or a report on recommendations... it
needs to be something real or very quickly generates things that are real.
A law, for example, is only a few lines of text, but overnight it can shift
entire economies. A report of policy suggestions could be a design product
- but its probably not a good one. The outcome/impact of that output should
be a broader transformation or a direct link to other outputs to prompt
emergent repercussions.
Politicians and individuals who work within political institutions do
engage in design processes, but they are not "designing like designers", in
that their their products are typically grounded in a stakeholder process
(great!), risk assessments (lovely), and finally a guess about what 'should
be done' based on the input and assessments (oh no!). The process is
driven by the subjective values of the stakeholders to be then modified and
reconciled by the perceived reality of assets and constraints. This
rational process strives to be scientific, with a reliance on observation
and evidence, but is entrenched in countless meetings of unstructured
dialogue in search of a discrete solution. Note, the legacy of Horst Rittel
is not taught in law school or public policy programs. Yet as designers we
can recognize that this kind of planning process is ill configured to
determine complex organizational and socio-technical processes in a
fast-moving and uncertain world. It takes too long to elicit a result,
which may become quickly misaligned to participant needs, and thus has a
great cost. Another process is required.
In this framing, design is the opposite of a risk analysis - it is a risk
reduction on what we can and should do, that leads to a map of possible
paths toward preferred destinations. A design process will yield a
collection of validated options for the next concrete steps into the
future. Imagine, for a moment, a mine field... placing a flag on
discovered landmines is not the same thing as determining the best option
to the other side (like not through the mine field). The work of
politicians - by and large - has zero input on operationalizing their
policy. They only say "discover a new continent" and expect the agency
apparatus to get there. Better politicians recognize that choosing the
destination is easy and getting there is hard.
To illustrate what I mean, tomorrow I will conclude a 6 month effort at the
EPA. It has been very challenging. The job for which I was hired was
vague - "get us toward a paperless, electronic workflow." They already
spent millions of dollars on this and have failed enough they want to try
something new - so they found a designer. While Drawing isn't a design
requirement, in this project has admittedly been instrumental, but only
because there is a necessity to get information out of peoples heads and
make it visible to then shift from 'meetings' to structured/productive
interactions.
To do this, I have had to teach hundreds of scientist to draw. By
extension, rapid prototyping has been instrumental to build evidence on
'what next' and iterations have been recorded. Because many scientists
find design to be subjective and anecdotal, I have also had to apply
traditional tactics such as statistics to achieve stakeholder confidence.
For example, my user research and participation has been conducted with
proper statistical sampling measures (95% confidence and interval of 2).
The scientist now see the design process as more scientific than their own
method and it has generated massive commitment. From this work my
colleague and I have built and deployed enterprise scale socio-technical
software and information management system for pesticide
review/research/approval that will adapt in response to changing political
conditions. It didn't cost anything but our time. Cool stuff.
The outcome of this kind of work is not political. It started as political
in the mess sense of - what should we do? And shifted toward procedural -
how do we validate what we think we should do? It also shifted to the
material - what physical channels, forms, and artifacts embody the most
direct interface between objectives and process? These steps never take
place in a government agency.
Of course tomorrow, there is an 80% chance I will walk in and some guy will
say "we are just going to by X from Microsoft/Salesforce, because we just
need to solve the problem with a technology we can buy" and all strides
will be cancelled out. Why? Because thats the political process.
- Mitch
PS. I guess its worth noting that in over a decade of work in this domain,
not once have I witnessed an elected representative walk into any
government agency in the US to learn 'how' the work there is done for more
than maybe 2 hours. Same with the UN - there are field visits, but these
spot checks tend to illicit only brief impressions, not expertise.
Interestingly enough, when I lived in Afghanistan I saw much more process
integration between elected officials and on-the-ground efforts, but that
is an entirely different rabbit hole.
- Mitch
On Thu, Feb 2, 2017 at 7:57 PM, Terence Love <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Dear Mauricio,
>
> Government policy design is a large well-established design field (taught
> in universities - but not usually in Art and Design schools ) in which
> people create designs for government policies to be enacted - see for
> example https://handbook.unimelb.edu.au/view/2017/POLS30035
>
> From experience, many politicians are only peripheral to the government
> policy design processes.
>
> It’s a bit like executives of vehicle manufacturers who say something like
> 'I think we should next manufacture a five door hatchback', and their
> order to produce the designs for the new 5 door hatchback goes to the
> vehicle stylists and engineering designers.
>
> Did the executives 'design' the car?
>
> It’s a parallel question as to whether politicians actually 'design'
> government policy or whether their role can best be seen as them
> instructing policy designers to design the detail of the policies.
>
> Government policy designers are usually public servants and government
> policy design is usually undertaken within the public service, but, as the
> recent evidence from the US, UK and Australia is showing, government policy
> design may also be undertaken by organisations and individuals outside
> government who wish to direct the actions of government and the nations
> involved.
>
> Behind the work of the public servants undertaking government policy
> design are an army of policy design researchers undertaking the design
> research to provide the evidence for the policy designers. It is something
> many of us on this list do: For example, this half million $ design
> research project
>
> https://www.indigenousjustice.gov.au/wp-content/uploads/mp/
> files/resources/files/2014-eval-community-patrols.v1.pdf
>
> Best wishes,
> Terry
>
> ==
> Dr Terence Love
> FDRS, AMIMechE, PMACM, MISI, MAISA
> Director
> Design Out Crime & CPTED Centre
> Perth, Western Australia
> [log in to unmask]
> www.designoutcrime.org
> +61 (0)4 3497 5848
> ==
> ORCID 0000-0002-2436-7566
>
>
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