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Dynamic design

Lewisham Council chief executive Barry Quirk, co-chair of the Design Commission, talks to PSE about the importance of good design in public services.

When considering how to transform public services to cut costs but improve delivery, design is an essential yet often overlooked element. The Design Commission has published an inquiry into the redesign of public services, highlighting how Government could use social design to achieve the elusive ‘more with less’.

PSE spoke to Barry Quirk, co-chair of the commission and chief executive of Lewisham Council, about why constant redesign is discounted as a valuable way of delivering service change across the public sector.

Reappraising services

In conventional times, design is useful because it enables prototyping from a user perspective.

But Quirk said: “When we’re looking at making major reductions in our budgets and changing our organisations quite substantially, design is even more important – much more important”.

The approach challenges the local government sector to go back to the original purpose of a particular service and “fundamentally reappraise it”, allowing managers to step away from the way things have always been done and take a more innovative approach.

“Whatever we’re doing at the moment, however the service is organised, different institutions are involved in delivery. Whatever it is, it is the product of some prior design – and an awful lot of ineffi ciency, waste and duplication is a consequence of some of the bad design of yesteryear.”

Increasing the use of intelligent design could fundamentally change the relationship between Government and citizens, Quirk said: “Designers should be tribunes of the people, not providers.”

Using past experience

He added: “When we’re looking for innovation in service delivery, an awful lot of the assumptions from Government are that innovation stems from a new policy.”

But design uses past learning of users’ experience of the service and the impact of previous policies to improve and modify its offering.

Service-led innovation considers experience at the front level and how those costs could be reduced.

“It’s what you’re learning from. Why are you learning? To devise something new at lower costs.”

Constant change

Despite the sector clamouring for stability, redesign will necessarily be constant, Quirk explained. The idea that there was a single magic bullet is “simply impractical”.

He said: “Different cohorts of people and generations have different preferences, needs and expectations, what is rightly personal, social and public value and how they could best get that.

“This requires a continued and dynamic change of designed services. It’s not that we’ll go to a new platform and that’s where we’ll be for the next 30 years: it will be a continual redesign.”

Quirk offered the example of modern libraries having expanded on their original remit by offering wi-fi and public spaces as well as simply lending books.

“We’ve got 19th century facilities, housing 20th century services that we’re now repurposing for the 21st century – and doubtless this will change again in the next fi ve, 10, 15 years.”

No panacea

The type of service depends intrinsically on the demand and preference available for it, he clarifi ed, and as these change over time, so our services will necessarily change as well.

Quirk compared the current approach to policymaking to “chasing a better mousetrap”, or fi nding a single, fi x-all solution to a myriad of complex problems.

“There’s no panacea. You’ve got to reduce your costs, improve your productivity, redesign the service and apply all those things, to all of the services, all the time.”

This did not mean that it would be unending change, and with it the disruption of transformation. Quirk added: “There will be breakthrough moments”, such as internet access for learning services.

A human-based approach

“There is a presumption on the part of a lot of policy people that design is a kind of arty waffl e,” Quirk said. “Actually you’ve got to be quite hard-headed to convince people who are service managers to change their approach and to change how they work with the public.”

To make the current system work better takes up a lot of time and resource, but redesigning it is “a much harder skill.” These skills may be undervalued by public sector managers, he warned. “They think their organisation is like a car, it needs to be engineered. Actually organisations are socially constructed and therefore you need people that understand how people value things more than you need engineers.”

Quirk highlighted the need to change this perception in both Government and the wider public sector. “It’s not always the people with the most scientific or mathematical background that will be of most use when trying to change organisations”, he said. “Actually they’d do better to get designers with a human-based approach.”