International Design in Government 2024

This month I packed my bags and headed to Helsinki for the 5th edition of the International Design in Government conference. It had been added on to the Service Design Network (SDN) conference, much like the Edinburgh Fringe was tacked onto the Edinburgh festival, but I was only attending the government edition, as were many others.

Much like the spirit of the early Edinburgh Fringe it was also very much a 'no budget' DIY affair, with sessions happening over 2 days at a number of public venues.

The event was carefully curated not only with various tracks (case studies of change making, systems - the one I focused on the most, futures, ethics and behaviour, sustainability, design for government, and dialogues) but also to represent a variety of countries. With often 4 tracks happening at the same time, for each session I attended there were others that I wanted to clone myself to see, such was the quality of the agenda.

Day 1

Pushing the boundaries of design in government: systems change and futures

Ani Leppanen and Ezi Montenegro

In a lovely reminder of the diversity of experiences in getting to international design community (or even the Finnish government design community julkis-muotoilijat) the two main organisers shared their journey to being where they are today. Ani's journey had been via policy, whereas Eze's was UX and then the hard personal experience of navigating the Swedish immigration system!

The power of community - collectively dealing with the long slog of government transformation

Kara Kane, Government Digital Service, UK, Martin Jordan, Digital Service, Germany, Viktoria Westphalen, Ministry of Justice, UK

I've seen Kara and Martin do a version of this talk before including the elements like pace layers and tools, so it was interesting to see how it develops with each iteration.

The international design in government community beginning started in 2017 with a call to action from Lou Downe, and has had conferences in London, Edinburgh, Rotterdam, an online event, and 2 tied events in the Creative Bureaucracy festival. (I did a count and I attended 2 previous events and several hours of the 24-hour remote event). 

A lot of designers are starting to burn out, and the talk reminded people that government is a long slog - US civic technologist Cyd Harrell talks about a 50 year baton-relay and the Kara and Martin riffed on this as an ultramarathon. In this context, the idea of 'keep going' (which in fact I've seen during the half-marathon The Great North Run) isn't the right analogy as in fact it's about doing the work and being able to pass it on.

They suggest that there are four forces for making change - politics that sets the context and boundaries, the organisation that you belong to, the service that you’re working on and in, and, finally, community. Hopefully luck can help you make changes in your organisation, but otherwise the community may be able to help.

Community work is often underestimated but is:

• knowledge management - they are mechanisms to help with organisational memory and learning from mistakes. Examples include design histories and blogging (kudos to the Italian government for doing multi-lingual blogs)
• capability building - even if things shut down, having materials mean people can keep running it internally for free
• Documenting practice - create repositories for talks 
• Service communities - understanding an end-to-end journey
• Peer reviews and service assessments - but done in a community driven way 
• Design system components
• Culture - the things that represent a community. This can be posters (the UK Home Office’s accessibility posters have been translated into 20 languages), stickers (bringing colour, fun and joy, and helping as a conversation starter), and events like services week 

Design for policy: experiments between futures, systems and behaviour

David Martens, EU policy lab

David's talk considered the tension between design and public sector work. A former Alto University student, he joked that his personal project Opensauna was his "most impactful project, making people sweat". He also created a project called Open Expression Support about balancing creativity and expression in public service, quoting Hungarian director Ildiko Enyedi: "doing a plan successfully is a failure for an artist, we learn from the mistakes".

He described 3 types of work he has done:

• design for policy. David defined design for policy as 'hands, eyes, brain' (which for me wasn't far away from the Design Council's 'head, heart, hand' model for design). Some of his design for policy work included the usual design processes of framing ambition and priorities as well as tensions. However he then created tension cards (short term vs long term, internal vs external, resource vs demand, value-based vs transactions, ambition vs reality) to allow for more playful collaboration.
• design for imagination - the Futures Garden project pioneered policy innovation through speculative design, namely through ideas being workshopped and then turned into videos (made by design agencies) to be shared both with policymakers and with the public. Meanwhile, David also created a river bot in spare time to listen and 'spend time with the river’ - doing 'serious policy making and also making songs about the river'. He felt all of these different techniques were important to engage the senses in a way that was fun and felt good ‘being exposed to weird experimental stuff always bodes them well’ 
• design for serious play - the Water EU project used a range of techniques to get different narratives about water, from personal stories about realising the importance of water, to local participatory research, national media discourse analysis, and finally a water reflections game to encourage collaboration while learning about initiatives. David created a game using Donella Meadows' leverage points (originally 12 but reduced to 7 for ease of playing) to show how a small shift can produce big changes. The game was shared on the organisation intranet and played monthly to ‘keep on gaming’ - bringing in different types of data and processes, and bring what is happening on the ground closer to policymaking. 

He suggested that design for policy can be:

• the pathway between what is already known and what is not known yet 
• investing in things along the way (but not too much) - avoiding the risk of wanting to make a new thing rather than build on an existing one
• bringing intimacy into work (but not too much) - be it organising events and workshops rather than creating a distance ‘I get lost on the internet’, but also still doing the usual work when needed
• bringing beauty into work (but not too much) - it’s ok that designers make things pretty, but it’s an improvisational ‘yes, and’ rather than ‘no’

Lord of the Maps: one system map to bring them all for openness in innovation

Judith Mühlenhoff, Collaborative Governance Lab, Germany

This talk was a great introduction to systems mapping and a thoughtful start to the systems track of the conference. Judith started with an example of unexpected consequences where the Kiribati government tried to stop overfishing and it not working (something not dissimilar from the famous example of the Indian government incentivising the killing of cobras).

She introduced a few different types of systems maps:

• rich picture maps
• interconnections map - start with a circle and connect the variables; or arrange around topics
• casual loop maps
• gigamapping and synthesis maps - zoom in and out and can include casual maps, but with with a focus on storytelling
• system dynamics map - showing all the things

Judith shared examples of her work with it relating to governance in Germany using the steps frame, explore, map, select, and leverage:

• Frame - important to set boundaries and constraints to avoid overwhelm
• Explore - desk research and interviews, compressed into personas (though didn’t really work in workshops as people wanted to use their own perspectives), identified 4 themes
• Map - as a group there were challenges in workshops as different disciplines had different languages. It also can be demotivating to have to map the status quo with all of its problems. Judith started analogue processes (on a whiteboard, in books and put on screen) and then crafted the map and interviewed people to make sure that it was correct
• Leverage - she looked for where positive change was already happening as ‘topics of the future' and from this created a portfolio of ideas across 5 opportunity areas and published with recommendations 

Quoting Donella Meadows' "The map is not the territory", she did note both that the map is a working document and difficult for people not in the process to understand, and that also sometimes people want to learn about the method of mapping as much as the outcomes .

Some references included the System Mapping Academy mapping toolkit in Miro, Systemic Design Association resources, Acument Academy free Systems practice course, Systems Innovation (SI) network.

There was an interesting aside that the iceberg model can be a 'bit blamey' though in the later workshop about this topic there wasn't any followup to this provocation.

What design maturity looks like and how you can get it

Susan Allen, Australian Taxation Office, Australia

Susan has been at the Australian Taxation Office for nearly 20 years. Over that time, where designers have been organised has changed many times (more recently service design and UX have been split into corporate and IT respectively) and also their operating mode and focus.

Design may still be in the ATO because of being able to be flexible over time and adapt to change.

Susan suggested that design maturity is about design going from a tool to being used strategically and gave these tips on gaining design maturity:

1. Think about continuity and change in service design - they now have two levels of design, an enterprise-high level design (plain English, enterprise wide co-design of current high level current and future states and impact of moving between them - with what detailed design needs to come after); and detailed systems of things like IT where UX comes in. Benchmarking is about avoiding unintended consequences, avoiding going straight to a solution (as not all problems are technology problems!) 
2. Don’t obsess over a design model - organisations seem to obsess over their own toolkit and designers get obsessed by it
3. People over process - a process can help junior designers and help explain the process to outsiders, however no one process will work, the expertise and the value of the designer is being able to devise their own approach so have developed a model instead. The community of practice enabled mastery through formal training to understand concepts and principles, then embodied understanding of practice and experience to becoming a professional. Using people's skills also meant being creative for example allowing both high level and detailed design to happen at the same time with some designers being in both teams.
4. Be a good partner - respect others’ expertise, meet partners where they are (empathy mapping their needs). One useful example for buy-in was changing a design workshop outline into corporate language that stakeholders valued and understood
5. Watch your language - jargon are useful shortcuts for language with peers, but not helpful when working across multiple teams. Meet people where they are and explain what when needed.
6. Governance is a design tool, get included in the organisational governance - service design is now in the ATO project management methodology ‘ what is the problem or opportunity that started you thinking about this? What would you like to be different after the project is implemented? What behaviour do you want to change? Who will be affected?’. They may not be given to people in actual checklists but can be used as meeting prompts. Design agreements are signed off by senior people, not as a defensive tool but a tool for shared understanding to make changes in a way that is not surprising and even identify gaps for future design work. ATO has help for designers to tracking work and manage it. 
7. Infuse design thinking in the organisation -  after talking about tools like Cynefin, all ATO leadership courses now include design thinking, which was a pleasant surprise when Susan stumbled upon it!

Wading in: understanding, experimenting and leading ecosystem work in practice

Eevi Saarikoski, Finnish Tax Administration

I really enjoyed Eevi's review of a 4 year tax project on real-time information, not only for the lived experience of doing it and the mistakes, but also for her generous crediting throughout of other collaborators who had helped along the way in the project. More of these please!

The work had included mapping the systems for companies. This proved complex, not only because experts weren't always aligned and there were knowledge gaps, but sometimes even what seemed like solid numbers didn't always hold up to scrutiny! The team made systems maps, interviewed experts and iterated on the maps, then created a ‘minimal viable ecosystem’  and curated 7 useful segments plotted on a 2x2 (even then still having remove some data) that was then used for later governance work.

The things they learned from doing the ecosystem mapping were:

1. Do first, framework later - start experimenting and prove value through the work. Show what you want by doing it, lead by example and do it long enough to see if it works or not. 
2. Facilitate, facilitate, facilitate - seems obvious but putting the extra effort in to facilitate the sessions and through this instilled the process into people that were not service designers. Eevi reiterated that "ecosystem work is a team sport" - the team had a group of different skills.
3. Understand just enough of the material- don’t need to be an expert with ecosystem projects (and in fact it can take 6 months even to just understand the area), but it is important to know enough to be be able to have conversations about it. If doing again would have shared vague and half baked things earlier to collaborate on.
4. When investing in tools, define how you’ll use them - did this the wrong way at first, didn’t specify the use of tools. Would do differently now.
5. One tool won’t cut it for ecosystem work and especially governance - one system map won’t change everything. The framework helps with later points of view to create ecosystem lead governance, also was a way to try and bring in qualitative data to head of ‘nicest data’ and numbers can vary so much, offers a set of lenses and isn’t perfect, also doesn’t include things that were tried that didn’t work
6. Learn to tolerate uncertainty - it’s a lot of messy circular discussions, and a small model is better than no model. 

Evening dinner

With Kara Kane and Sabine Junginger

I wouldn't normally mentioning evening events but this has talks and even activities with prompts (including switching tables!).

There is a good writeup of the dinner from the organisers on Medium.

Day 2

Design for Government: looking back and forward

Nura Salsona, Marco Steinberg and Seungho Park-Lee, with Alto University

This session reflected on the 10 year anniversary of the Alto University Design for Government course and some of its related projects such as julkis-muotoilijat.

The group suggested that the course even happening was partly due to good timing ‘we worked hard but the doors were open’. While UK policy lab's canvas was an important reference - architecture has been doing this for a long time, as well as other interventions such as nudges which have both their own history in behavioural science and even in government.

There are two courses in Alto doing different kinds of government work, one about policy and one about government. The Design for Government course had foundations in work in the early 2000s and 2008 Stira and Helsinki Design Lab (-2013) initiatives such as Open Kitchen. The question of building connections between government and designers is still a work in progress. Early work was short lived, based on stakeholders and government and ‘enough oxygen to do the work’ and ‘maybe we haven’t been as upstream as we need to be'. Now, the university is looking for options to teach in real time, both in training ‘where is the school of government meeting the school of design’ and career paths. They are also thinking about what it means to be ‘passing the baton’ and longer term relationships.

Seungho initially did work in Finland before taking the models to South Korea only to find a very different environment, as South Korea civil servants are 90% generalist with regular 6 month rotations, even if not desired.  

The Chaos Whisperers: Reimagining the Iceberg Model to map systems and address complex challenges

Diana Hidalgo, Andreea Ardelean and Jeffrey Allen, Ministry of Justice, UK

As someone who has had to create workshops, I can spot when people have spent a lot of time preparing a workshop. This was one of them. When I spoke to the The Ministry of Justice team after the session they said that they had done 2 pilots of this iceberg model workshop before doing it at International Design in Government, and it showed.

The workshop went through how to use the iceberg model to unpick complex situations and the underlying causes, in their case, the civil family and tribunal system. The team went through an example based on research—someone being bullied at work, losing their job and then losing their home—and showed how starting with the examples and then going subsequently deeper and finally to the impacts creates a means of making different elements visible.

I particularly liked the notes on how to use the iceberg: 

• Impact: what (done last - about 'a person' ) - f0r example a person has poor mental health
• Event: what (done first - usually ‘a person’) - for example, Jo is being bullied at work
• Patterns:  what (done second - what ‘people’ experience) - for example, people can’t make bullying stop on their own, people’s mental health affects ability to work
• Structures: why (done third - also the world of ‘people’) - for example, there is a rigid top-down management style that creates authoritarian work environments, mental health is not covered by the NHS
• Mental models: why (done third - 'society') - for example, people believe that if they report bullying they will be fired

The team also noted that it's hard to decide what is a structure and what is a pattern and that it's important to stay focused, for example by capturing any causal loops as scenarios to consider later.

Excitingly, the team also showed how this can be mapped with COM-B and the '5 whys' models to suggest interventions (though the team were careful to note that 'coercion' as an intervention in fact meant law)

Avoid the drawer: How to make project outcomes stick through stakeholder engagement

Jelske van de Ven, Muzus, Netherlands

Jekske's session was a lovely mix of case studies, group sharing and worked activity. All of the attendees initially shared an example of a project that was put in the drawer and what they learned from it, before Jelske shared some of her recent work in the Dutch government.

She had worked on a Dutch government income support programme. The question was ‘how could policymakers not only just theoretically understand the challenges but also feel the urgency, frustration, and hopes of people’

The digital agency challenged the ministry to not just commission pop up research and get a report but also:

• get involved by doing pop-up user research. They did this getting interview training for the team then giving them peer-practice before going to the pop-up work. The ministry found that while the stories weren’t new having a face helped them take action or see the human rather than technical systems perspective.
• take part in insights synthesis sessions - interestingly people picked out insights (quotes on stickies) they recognised, causing the bias. When people hadn’t been in sessions quotes were sometimes misinterpreted (but this can also happen with quotes in reports), however the the people who had been there corrected misinterpretation and created a larger story (a true partner creating more resilient stories fro the future). 

While the work was useful and has created momentum for more people to get involved, it also did initially run out of money as the project didn't budget for training people to do user research!

From this, we worked through examples of challenges that put projects in a drawer (be it resources, vulnerability, ownership, or other factors).