Public servants are under pressure to deliver increasingly personalised and localised services, with ever greater efficiency. Radical innovation has long been seen as the means of delivering this agenda, and the Design Council believes that if innovation is at the table then design – the practical discipline that links creativity and innovation – must be there too.
The Design Council has recently commissioned research to understand the dynamic of design and innovation in the public sector. This work has led us to identify two myths that need correcting – for the benefit of the public sector and the design industry.
Myth 1: Local councils don’t innovate
Local councils use various terms to describe the task of finding new approaches to delivering public services. While some talk of innovation, others talk about re-designing or re-engineering their services. Just under half of the local authority service directors interviewed said their organisation had fundamentally “redesigned” their services over the past two years (see figure 1).
Councils also see themselves as innovative, although in most cases “fairly” rather than “extremely” so. All of the 17 directors from “strong performing” councils (4-star overall rating or improving strongly in the 2007 CPA scores) rated their authority on the innovative side of the scale, suggesting that, for many, innovation and strong performance go hand in hand. For some of the local authorities we spoke to, innovation was being harnessed in a specific area of the council, often to address a specific problem. In others it was spreading across departments and services. Whatever the circumstances, it is clear that the challenges involved in delivering public services over the next few years will be increasingly dependent on new ideas and ways of doing things.
Our study also reflects the findings from an Audit Commission survey of local authorities in 2007, in which nine in 10 claim that their authority is “always looking for new ways of doing things” and nearly as many accept “the risk of failure in trying new ways of doing things”.
Local councils
How would you describe the degree of change to service delivery in your authority over the past two years?
Description of change to service delivery
- Partial redesign 48%
- Fundamental redesign 41%
- Incremental design 11%
Source: Design Council 2008
Myth 2: Design techniques are only used by the design industry
The research found many instances of design techniques being used, such as creative thinking, prototyping, user observation, and involving users in the design of a service.
“Design” is not owned by the design profession; there is widespread use of design techniques without them being recognised as such – but there is little structured use of what might be called a design approach. Many service directors claim to have purchased service design, but this constitutes just a tiny part of the design industry. In addition, when local authorities look for partners to help improve services, specialist consultancies and local government agencies feature more prominently than service design agencies.
Why is this? Design continues to be viewed in traditional, physical terms such as products, buildings, leaflets and logos, rather than as a way of thinking that can be applied to services, and turn creativity into innovation. Designers saw this as a barrier to working with the public sector. They were frustrated by procurement processes that are geared to “buying widgets” rather than purchasing creative services, and attitudes that see design as part of the cost of delivering a service rather than an investment in the quality of its outcomes.
Local authority
“We’re having to be innovative because we’ve got a lot to do.”
In any case, can we prove a relationship between innovation and design? Our research looked for a direct link between the role design plays within an authority (as defined by the respondent) and the overall performance of that authority as defined by the Audit Commission’s Comprehensive Performance Assessment (CPA). The findings suggest a number of relationships:
- There is a strong positive link between how innovative a council perceives itself to be and its performance
- There is a positive link between the role design plays within an authority and its performance
- There is a very strong link between perceived innovation and the role of design within an authority
It is important to note that correlation does not imply causation, so we cannot say, for example, that design being integral to a local authority directly causes its performance to improve. But we can be sure that a link exists; the perceived importance of the
role of design within an authority goes hand in hand with independently assessed strong performance – as does a greater sense of innovativeness.
What is the future for design and innovation?
Seven in 10 of the service directors surveyed believe they will use design elements to a greater extent over the next few years. In our view this represents clear momentum towards local authorities and public service providers exploiting the well-spring of
design expertise in the UK. In response the design industry needs to understand better the current set of policy challenges, and to recognise the scale of innovation already being achieved without “Design”.
Methodology
The research followed a multi-stage approach in which each set of findings informed the next phase. Six interviews were conducted with designers in October and November 2007, giving us a sense of the challenges faced by designers in trying to sell their services to the public sector.
Thirteen interviews then followed with senior civil servants across nine different departments and agencies, including those in explicit design-commissioning roles (eg head of communications) and those with much less involvement with design (eg head of strategy). Interviews at local government chief executive level then followed. Twenty interviews were carried out with local authority chief executives, deputy chief executives and other senior strategists, as well as two ‘design friendly’ senior respondents from regional/local government agencies.
An online survey followed in January and February 2008, completed by 44 service directors within ‘top-tier’ local authorities. Service directors were chosen from the six areas that are accorded individual ratings within the Audit Commission’s CPA framework: social care (adults), children and young people, housing, environment, culture and best value.
With an original sample of 741 names, the final response rate was six per cent; while lower than anticipated, this figure is not exceptional for an online survey of this nature.
Vanilla Research, working with Warren Hatter, now of Ripple PRD, carried out this work on behalf of the Design Council.