There’s an idea I’ve held for some time and want to share with those interested in—and perhaps holding strong opinions about—it:
Design research should have a seat at the policymaking table.
This is not about design researchers gaining more prominence or some belief that design research is a panacea for all our society’s woes.
Rather, I believe design research can be additive to the many inputs that currently inform the development and ultimate implementation of a policy, moving everyone involved closer to closing the gap between intention and outcomes.
What Design Research Can Add to Policy Making
Research and data already play a huge role in policy making, and come in through a number of channels:
Public comment periods
Calls from and meetings with advocates and engaged constituents
Research from think tanks and research institutions
Inquiries initiated by policymakers’ offices
In such a robust knowledge environment, I believe there’s still room and value for design research. To understand why, let’s look at an example from the field of architecture, where I first cut my teeth on design and design research.
Imagine you’re part of a design team designing a new school building. You sit down with a group of teachers and ask them what they’d like in their new building. Inevitably—I know because I’ve heard it—you hear, “more outlets.” And of course, that’s a very reasonable response. At this point, you might scribble “more outlets” in your notepad and move on to the next question.
A skilled design researcher, however, would document that need and then dig deeper to find the currents below the surface: the values, motivations, desires, fears, wild ideas, existing hacks, assets, and aspirations underneath the stated need. Playing out this example, you might discover: teachers don’t just want more outlets. Instead, they desire flexible spaces that can be reconfigured over time—spaces that allow for experimentation with new technologies and are easy to use and adapt so teachers can focus on pedagogy and students can focus on learning. With these fully expressed ideas in mind, “more outlets” becomes the bare minimum.
The same things can happen in a policy-making environment. Below-the-surface currents are often much harder to identify than surface-level, stated needs. Yet these currents offer far richer data for informing a design, be it a physical space, a policy, or anything in between.
Quantitative and academic forms of research can convey the breadth of a signal or sentiment, but design research can uncover the “why” behind them and provide direction on what responses—that is, designs—are desirable and promising.
Developing a Deep Understanding of the Human Experience
A few months ago, I asked my teammates and fellow design researchers at Coforma, “When have your research findings in a product environment helped you unearth insights, develop recommendations, or design solutions that pertained to an upstream service, organization design, or policy?”
I was flooded with examples such as:
“At the outset of a project to develop a new tool, we realized that the product would be stronger with a defined and aligned-upon set of outcomes for the broader program initiative. The team, led by the researcher, facilitated outcomes workshops, which had the effect of developing greater clarity and vision internally within the agency.”
“During initial discovery work on a project to design a tool for users to submit data files, we uncovered the need to focus on the back-end experience of agency staff who would be receiving and processing files. For a successful user experience, the entire service, along with the interdependencies and ways of working within the organization, needed to be accounted for.”
“On a project at an agency where rulemaking happens annually, we heard from users that constant change was causing fatigue, confusion, and frustration, particularly those from less-resourced organizations. After providing this information to the agency’s policy team, they’ve made a conscious effort to minimize the number and breadth of changes that happen in a given year.”
As design researchers, we often uncover challenges and opportunities that impact the work we’re doing and, if addressed, could improve outcomes for constituents. We see these challenges and opportunities because of the particular spot we occupy, at the nexus between intention and impact. Yet many of these sit beyond the boundaries of our defined scope of work—at the policy and programmatic level—where no amount of product and design updates will truly address and resolve them.
Understanding how to build and implement a product requires building a full-ecosystem picture of the service or program it supports, the policies that led to it, and the humans who will interact with it.
Design researchers meet with multidisciplinary stakeholders and engage subject matter experts; we pull in existing secondary research when available to build out a picture of the broader issue landscape, and we use various methods to learn from those with firsthand experience with the issue or product. Through interviews, prototyping sessions, co-design activities, and a whole host of other methods, we aim to understand the lived realities, behaviors, pain points, motivations, and aspirations of our products’ end users.
In this work, we find ourselves at a unique intersection, often able to identify the mismatch or breakdown between the intentions and assumptions that informed policies, rules, and services, and how actually implementing them impacts people.
Sometimes, we have lines of communication open with agency heads and can directly discuss changes upstream. More often, however, while our business owners within the agency are sympathetic, their hands are tied.
Where Exactly is “Upstream” in Policy Making?
Within any particular government department or agency, there are teams of people responsible for overseeing the day-to-day implementation of particular services and programs. We’ll call them program teams here, although they have various names and compositions.
Upstream from them, there are teams and leaders who are involved in making, updating, and revising the rules by which any particular policy is implemented. Further up, we find policymakers—legislators, their staff, and internal or external collaborators who formulate policies and make them official.
Further upstream, still, we find a truly open-ended space, where many hands are involved in identifying and framing problems and opportunities the government could respond to.
Every step in the policy-to-product stream has a design equivalent that can be applied: service design, organizational design, and policy design. Design researchers can be instrumental at each step:
For program teams, we can holistically study program audiences—both those who use the program as well as those who administer it—and identify ways to better meet everyone’s needs.
For rule- and policymakers, we can make abstract data concrete by studying and elevating lived experiences. We can get early, in-depth feedback on proposed policies or policy changes from a range of perspectives, particularly those whose voices are not represented by lobbies, professional associations, or other organized bodies.
In that open-ended space, we can study hard-to-define issues, weaving together the experiences and expertise of those closest to it—those impacted by it, those who work on it, those who study it—to create holistic pictures, frame findings digestibly, and facilitate prioritization activities so that clear opportunities emerge to build consensus around.
It isn’t that design research isn’t happening upstream at all within the civic sector. The past 10-15 years saw the emergence of service design units within a number of federal agencies, which have provided human-centered research design services and capacity building. Many municipal governments have innovation centers that conduct design research to engage local residents and design and improve city services grounded in real human experience.
At the federal level, however, the primary focus is still on producing and refining digital products. This is in part due to the genesis of design and design research at the federal level, which stems from the botched launch of the healthcare.gov platform and digital initiatives the Obama administration shored up afterward to prevent future failures of that scale. It is also due in part to the ways through which most constituents interact with the federal government, either indirectly through a state or local-level intermediary or through a digital interface.
By the way, this orientation isn’t exclusive to the US. As Becky Miller, a designer working in the UK government, observed, “Design” has become synonymous with “digital” there as well, and traces the conflation back to the government’s digital modernization process that began in 2010.
Models for Moving Design Research Upstream
Here are three models that move design research upstream, presented here from the most lateral move to the furthest leap.
Model 1: Design Research Opens Bidirectional Communication Channels. The first option starts with a familiar scene, wherein companies like Coforma partner with agencies around specific, pre-defined products, but the key difference is that we have tentacles upstream. We—project staff, and immediate stakeholders within the agency—have open, flexible, bidirectional lines of communication to agency heads and others involved in rulemaking, organizational prioritization, organizational design, and other teams, as relevant.
As we learn through our research about constituents’ pain points that can’t be addressed entirely by an update to the product, we dialogue with the appropriate parties to discuss what’s possible and how, if at all, upstream systems could evolve to be more responsive to constituents. Conversely, as new rules or revisions are being considered that impact the product, researchers could provide existing research or conduct new studies to gain insight into the probable reception or impact of new and updated rules.
This option doesn’t look like a massive shift at a glance: discrete products or product suites would still be a central focal point. But this would, to varying degrees, require shifts in organizational culture and ways of working. It would necessitate greater collaboration across departments internally and a pull—even if limited—on others’ time beyond our direct partners. Building trust and making the case that design research is valuable upstream will require intentional effort and time.
Model 2: Design Research Supports Department Leadership. The second option places researchers in the offices of department leadership. In this option, researchers are tasked to work within mandates from Congress and support agency leadership in determining priorities. They set rules by adding human-centered research into the mix of research and data being used to inform decisions. Researchers at this level are doing strategic “macro-research,” as described by Judd Antin, intended to guide agency decisions that impact their overall direction. Questions informed through human-centered research might include:
What insights does the agency need to determine a particular strategy?
How should the agency prioritize goals and rulemaking for the next several years?
Which constituent problems, product, and design trends should agency leadership focus on over the next several years?
What changes and trends to our context—socioeconomic, technological, environmental, and beyond—will really matter for the agency, and how should we respond?
As Antin alludes to, having researchers in the room with decision makers prevents message dilution that can happen when there are multiple rounds of “telephone” involved in communicating human-scale research up to them.
Model 3: Design Research Integrates with Policy Making. The final option is the wildest and most provocative, in my opinion, but potentially also the most powerful. Here, design researchers are embedded into policy-making teams. Design researchers work alongside policymakers—senators and representatives, as well as their staff—as they identify and frame opportunities to improve constituents’ lives, develop draft policies, debate them, get feedback and iterate on them (perhaps even pilot them on a small scale), and finally finalize the policy. Design researchers could even participate in campaigns and listening tours to facilitate deeper conversations and develop insights that ultimately inform the platforms politicians campaign on.
Policies are typically founded on—and sometimes overwhelmed by—an immense amount of data. That data—which is often quantitative and abstract, or weighted towards the interests of particular organized bodies—only stands to become more holistic, evened out, and rooted in the realities of constituents’ lives by human-centered design research.
Ultimately, policies should be informed by a deep understanding of the people they are intended to serve and support. Design research is a way to achieve that depth of understanding. We don’t study people from a removed, academic, broad vantage point, or by grouping people into highly generalized demographic swaths. We learn from people—often with people, collaboratively—to understand and respond to their concrete realities and core beliefs.
As I said at the outset, by no means do I believe design research is a panacea that can fix everything. That said, I do believe it is an important vehicle to understand constituents—and thereby understand each other—on a deeper plane that extends far beyond digital products. Perhaps moving design research upstream, in turn, moves us all one small step closer to achieving the oft-quoted ideal of “a government by the people and for the people.”
Deep gratitude to Neha Varma and Monika Pathak for providing feedback, Tanya Wheeler-Berliner and Amanda Harr for editorial guidance, Alyssa Liegel for lending her graphic design expertise, and everyone from Coforma and beyond who provided examples and shared their experiences swimming upstream with me.
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