This article is written by Bruno Rizardi, Cofounder of Catálise, a social innovation studio in Brazil

Design has become an important — but unfortunately often misunderstood — concept that is seen as at the heart of innovation.

But the standardisation of the design process into "design thinking" frameworks, tool-kits, sprints and step-by-step methods, has made it much more a recipe for innovation rather than a way of thinking and doing. While it is great that design has reached places we previously would not have dared hope for - such as public administration - we should be careful to think that this practice can be summarised into a formula.

Today, there are two very different ways of practising design in the public sector. One, that I will call facilitating design, is when designers facilitate the process, but are not involved in the discussions and do not share their view point. The other, the genius design, is when designers mostly dictate the way that things should go, especially in creative activities, such as coming up with new ideas.

Both of these approaches are problematic. First, facilitating design occurs because there is a belief that design can be replicated as a formula. Although design methods help a lot of people to start and apply design in a step-by-step process, design is much more than that — including knowledge and discussions about ergonomics, behaviour, semiotics, communication, usability and aesthetics. Those should not only be embedded into a method, but also be a part of the discussion, where designers share their viewpoint, instead of being neutral facilitators.

On the other hand, genius design occurs because there is a belief that creativity is a gift that very few people have, and so, they should be treated as a primal source of good ideas. In that way of doing things, designers dominate the discussion, and people participate in a very limited way. That happens mostly in highly hierarchical organisations, where one person comes up with all the ideas and other people have to make it happen.

My role as a designer is not only to present a method (facilitation design) nor make all the decisions (genius design), but to translate design in a way that will make sense for public servants.

The problem with both these approaches is that design is much more than a method or a stroke of genius — it is a professional practice that requires training, experience and knowledge on how to create. It is true that we are all designers, in the sense that we all can change our surroundings by creating things, but in the same way most people are able to run, very few are professional athletes.

The messy design process

Doing design is a messy process.

It does not start and end in a linear fashion — it is a fluid, back-and-forth, uncertain, iterative and sometimes unexpected practice. This is because as we are creating something, we are also learning how that thing works by experimenting, testing and tweaking it. Sometimes great ideas lead to dead ends. Sometimes, bad ideas inspire us to great solutions. Design dips into intuition, creativity and qualitative assessments, and that way of working is very foreign for people who are used to linear, rational and quantitative work.

The public sector is, traditionally, organised into bureaucratic institutions that impose a way of working that is highly hierarchical, linear and rigid. As design is absorbed in the public sector, it gets watered down mostly in the shape of a process. That is why the famous double diamond is so well accepted in public service: although it is not its purpose, it gives a linear step-by-step formula for innovation through design. To successfully develop a design practice for governmental challenges, we need much more than a method — it is important to have design experts helping to build a design culture that praises experimenting, collaboration and user-centred services and policies.

Learning a design mindset is hard work, and requires deconstructing certain mental models and practising other ways of viewing and understanding the world. That is why we need designers in government

As design-based projects are deployed in government, the need for a new culture of work that is very different from traditional bureaucratic processes gets more and more pressing. Sometimes, these projects are done as step-by-step processes, falling into traditional ways of working, which excludes design from the process entirely.

Working as a design consultant for several projects at GNova, a federal government innovation lab at Brazil's National School of Public Administration, I have learned to deal with the frustration and anxiety of teams that are pushed out of their comfort zones by trying a designerly way of working. That led me to acknowledge that my role as a designer is not only to present a method (facilitation design) nor make all the decisions (genius design), but to translate design in a way that will make sense for public servants.

In that way, design can be a part of the public sector as a mindset, as a way of thinking, not only as a process or a myth. So, it won't really matter if you follow the double diamond, a sprint, or any structured design method, as long as you work with a user-centred, collaborative, empathetic and creative mindset, you mostly end up doing design.

Working with Brazil's Citizenship Ministry, GNova had the challenge of creating an innovative policy that would help low-income people generate income through entrepreneurship.

Our biggest challenge was that the government's initial solution — a website — did not work for their users, as most of them had trouble with digital platforms. But it took ethnographic design research for the public servants to realise that — they met the users and realised how biased and skewed their view of them was.

By working with in-depth interviews, these servants were able to empathise with citizens and profoundly changed their perception about them. This not only affected this project in particular, but other initiatives their department was working on. Later on in the project, these servants kept telling us how important it is to meet the users and how that experience had changed their way of thinking about policy.

Learning a design mindset is hard work, and requires deconstructing certain mental models and practising other ways of viewing and understanding the world. That is why we need designers in government: our mission is to bridge this transformation, bringing the design as a practice and translating it to the reality and challenges of the public sector.

This mission will require that designers learn about governments and vice-versa, experiment with design methods and create a way of doing design that acknowledges political, social and institutional challenges we might encounter in governments. That should be done by bringing design's values of empathy, collaboration and experimentation as a new way of thinking and doing, not as steps to follow. — Bruno Rizardi

(Picture credit: Unsplash)