Designing Policy Objects: Anti-Heroic Design

This chapter in the edited collection 'Tricky Design: The Ethics of Things', explores the growing use of design expertise within government to explore policy issues and develop and test responses through an auto-ethnographic analysis of my being based in a team of civil servants. I propose that instead of ‘heroic’ accounts of design solving policy problems, acknowledging the metic characteristics of design helps explain how ‘design for policy’ in government can proceed by resisting dominant norms and creating ongoing local accommodations.

With growing numbers of ‘policy labs’ and design workshops in government, it is important to critically assess what kinds of ‘design’ become possible inside public administrations. To explore this, the approach taken is auto-ethnography, a form of qualitative research that treats my subjective experience of being inside the civil service as data, analysed through the lens of metis, a Greek term that suggests craftiness and resourcefulness. I spent a year working part-time within Policy Lab, a team in the UK government, funded by an AHRC research fellowship, and alongside this tried out using design methods as a local activist in my neighbourhood. These vignettes offer insights into the practical accommodations that design makes in response to contradiction and uncertainty.