Tricky like a Leprachaun – Navigating the Paradoxes of Public Service Innovation

This chapter explores the challenges facing those designing to ensure equitable access to public goods in times of austerity. It briefly describes the wider context of the financial austerity seen to be driving the reform of local government services in the UK between 2010 and 2020, and warns against an efficiency-led approach to public service reform that forgoes experimentation that might improve effectiveness.

It illustrates the impact of these reforms on public service innovation by reflecting on examples of the ‘collaborative design experiments’ of the Public Collaboration Lab, an action research partnership between a London council and researchers, staff and students from the University of the Arts London that explored a new way of building and developing local design capacity for service, policy and social innovation.

It proposes that pubic service innovation in a climate of austerity is ‘tricky’, rather than solely complex or ‘wicked’, in that challenges appear to be deceitfully and craftily constructed. The chapter concludes by reflecting on the relationship between ‘designerly’ approaches and practices and the ‘trickiness’ of this design context.