What if design could transform the way we think and make public policies? Proposing a new model: the Policy Design Journey

For about 15-20 years, a rather small-yet growing-community of designers started getting involved in public policy innovation and public problem solving activities. Those design activists (willing to work for the common good, public welfare and social justice) have decided to apply their design skills, tools and methods in order to help public authorities of all levels (from village, to city, metropolis, national governments, or EU commission, etc.) reset & solve public problems and/or fix public policies and public services. « Designing better policies for people, by people » could be their motto. In parallel to working on solving public problems, designers have also spend energy on training civil servants and sometimes elected officials about their design approach so as to empower them in replicating, once the designers are gone, some design-inspired techniques and tools such as co-design with users, involving citizens in policy ideation, prototyping and experimenting before implementing, etc. By doing so, designers slowly spread their know-how to equip public authorities with design skills and progressively transform them. At the same time, we started seeing the first public authorities which would offer to designers real official design positions within their own administrations. Designers would not be only consulting for public authorities but transforming public authorities from within (often linked with the creation of public policy innovation labs). If it's still too early to discuss the success and impact of this strategy on the long term, we can already observe that by applying design methods to policy making, a new way of creating policies is emerging, one inspired by design. In this paper, we'll propose to draw a new guiding approach to policymaking inspired by design. To do so, we will build upon the initial critics of the policy cycle model such as the one of Lasswell drawn in 1957 (still in use today as a reference model) which, despite its clarity and simplicity, is purely theoretical (too linear, too static and too rational) and never takes place in the « real world » and question the actionability of policy threads or streams model as proposed by Howlett in 2015. Then, we'll look into how, in practice, designers have, through practice, « tinted » policy making with their own methods to finally, extract and draw a new model for policy making, one which would build upon the design thinking & doing methodology (questioning the double diamond of the UK Design Council) but also the design « spirit » (capacity to improvise, to detour, to navigate at ease through uncertainty, etc.). Considering public policymaking from the angle of a "journey" could enable designers but also public authorities to embrace the fact that true policy design is an unwritten voyage, made of choices, options, creative detours, opportunities, trips to the unknown, etc.