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Let’s design policies, together.

Explorations in the intersection of design thinking and public policy

By Parushya

Public policy is the elaborate set of tools utilised to better the lives of a population and create a sustainable existence on the planet. In this bag is a mix of resources and research material; an understanding of sociology, models of economics, interdisciplinary randomised evaluations and an unending plethora of academic and experiential learnings of ages. What might not surprise you however is that Design Thinking is not an often found tool in the kit of any practitioner dealing with public policy. Design thinking, while recently gaining traction in a few governments across the world and whose role UNDP has recognised in public service, is still an unexplored platform for a majority of policy makers.

Our team had been employing and experimenting with various tenets of Design Thinking in the course of our work. We decided to take a leap in this pursuit when a delegation from Stanford University’s International Policy course visited India recently. The model developed by the IIC team to improve nutritional intake of sanitation workers interested the delegation and they wanted to understand this methodology. Sticking enthusiastically to the foremost tenet of Design Thinking - to empathise - we designed a hands-on workshop where we shared our recipe of employing design thinking in ensuring a more bottom-up process of policy formulation.

The workshop consisted of a case study which we had developed around our research and co-design sessions. Working on the framework of "Co-Design-Define-Make East", we shared our experience of co-designing sessions and the insights we gained from them. The qualitative data that we  gathered across our interactions through co-design sessions with 300+ municipal sanitation workers was vividly rich in terms of the socio-economic premises in which the workers live. Another positive externality that such a group-based interaction exudes is an enthusiastic involvement of beneficiaries (the workers here) as stakeholders in the further process of policy making. We also explained how this makes for a strong trust building exercise that induces stronger interest in next steps.
 

Our next step was to define specific outcomes before starting to formulate a policy. The stress was on the need to have, as much as possible, a data-based specific target, objective, and outcome. This ensures that all our discussions are aligned well with stakeholders and in the next step every designer (stakeholder) is on the same plane. This step requires interactions with beneficiaries as well as significant involvement of experts and implementers: nutritionists, doctors and MCGM officials in our case. This is particularly vital to understand the constraints and premises which will encapsulate the policy intervention. The above two steps were simulated for the workshop in the form of following case study.
 

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After gaining an initial understanding of the policy problem at hand, we welcomed the delegation to the most innovative and interactive step of our methodology - Make EAST. EAST is the acronym for EASY-ATTRACTIVE-SOCIAL-TIMELY. It is a framework developed by the Behavioural Insights Team of the British Government to suggest policy changes. In this workshop we experimented by tweaking this framework and trying to see if it can align an interdisciplinary group towards a more synchronized pattern of decision making. After having everyone understand the data that had been supplied in the sample co-design case and ensuring everyone understood why the given exact outcome was the one that they had to work towards as a policy maker, we divided them into groups of 5 and asked each group to brainstorm possible interventions according to the framework supplied below.

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The columns' headers had the full-forms of the EAST framework written as a feature. The rows signified various aspects involved in the policy of providing nutritious meals to the workers: delivery, payment, quality control, communication/ awareness about nutrition, and a few blank columns to fill up with any aspect which the group considered crucial.

Each box had space to be filled with any practice or intervention. The brainstorming groups had to fill up these boxes according to their ideas which would make any row entry-intervention making the outcome and hence policy become more like a column feature. For example, a discounted bulk coupon system can make the nutritious meal easier and more attractive to buy.

The aim of this practice was to come up with important elements that had to be part of any programme and hence should be included in the policy. Later steps to this framework included provision for including important elements that make the programme EAST into a policy in a more robust manner. The eventuality of success and acceptance of policy formulated thus, is much higher than otherwise disconnected substitutes, because here the most basic parameter for acceptance - the human behaviour of beneficiaries - is taken into account at all steps.

Albeit brief, this session generated a few new ideas in terms of interventions and some modifications to this framework. However, undoubtedly the success point for this workshop was that a new methodology was floated and discussed that could be adopted to design policies in a human-centric way, rather than just framing them in a top-down and often disconnected approach. And yes, by the end we agreed that, when Steve Jobs had said that “Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works”, it is equally, if not more, true for public policy as it is for consumer electronic products. Because at the end of the day, isn’t the ultimate ideal goal of both is to make lives easier?

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