Design As Governance

These three leaders speak of their approach, of some of their experiences that they’ve held, and some of the challenges they’ve faced trying to make change, which is really what design is — adapting to change and transformation. 

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On this episode of Design As you’ll hear from:

In considering the many facets of design as governance, Lee introduces this episode with the framing of complex change-making:

Each guest then responded to this idea. In the first interview, Shin-pei Tsay speaks about this at the level of local governance, in the office of the Mayor of Boston. She invokes the idea of reimagining design in governance as works of intersectionality:

That idea also resonates in Lee’s conversation with Geoff Mulgan, on an international governance scale, in which systems change is so absolutely complex. He speaks about his new work with The Institutional Architecture Lab to begin to address these complexities, through design:

And as the conversation shifted from within public government, to aiding public policy, like the work done by Chelsea Mauldin at the Public Policy Lab, she talkes about the unique capabilities of civic design research: 

Transcript

Lee Moreau Welcome to Design As, a show that’s intended to speculate on the future of design from a range of different perspectives. This season we’re bringing you six new episodes, with six new keywords to interrogate. In this particular episode, you’ll be hearing three different design voices speak to the idea of design as governance. I’m Lee Moreau, host of The Futures Archive from Design Observer, founding director of Other Tomorrows, and professor of practice and design at Northeastern University’s College of Arts, Media and Design — which hosted the 2024 Design Research Society conference earlier this summer. There I got the chance to sit down with various guests, leaders, and speakers who are attending the conference, and we’ve compiled their voices into this episode about design as governance for you. A roundtable in three parts. On this episode, you’ll hear from Shin-pei Tsay 

Shin-pei Tsay We’re in the mayor’s office. It’s government and governance, but we’re also looking at policy because we know that policy can have that sustainability. It brings about that potential broader impact. And we’re looking at design. 

Lee Moreau Geoff Mulgan

Geoff Mulgan For me, it’s a very exciting question to think what are the institutions we could be building now, which will be in 20, 30, 40 years time, so loved and seen as as vital to life as in my country, institutions like the BBC or our National Health Health Service are absolutely core to people’s sense of well-being. We need equivalence for the future. 

Lee Moreau And Chelsea Mauldin. 

Chelsea Mauldin What is addictive about doing civic sector design work once you do it, is the the scale and the complexity of the work. 

Lee Moreau When we think about design and governance, we’re not thinking about actually the creation of governmental structures or policies, although sometimes we’re in fact designing those things. But quite often we’re talking about the negotiation and the series of conversations that design can affect and influence and help further in our effort to change the world around us. And that’s really what design is for is our, unique ability as humans to adapt to change in our life. It won’t surprise any of you that the entry point to governance through design is from many, many different perspectives. And these three leaders speak of their approach of some of their experiences that they’ve held and some of the challenges they’ve faced trying to make change, which is really what design is — adapting to change and transformation. 

Lee Moreau I’m here on location with Shin-pei Tsay from the Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics in the city of Boston. So excited to meet you, first of all, to see you on stage earlier today. And would you mind introducing yourself for our listeners? 

Shin-pei Tsay My name is Shin-pei Tsay, I am the director of the Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics for the City of Boston. The Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics, MONUM for for short because it is a mouthful,  is the Mayor’s Civic Innovation team and my work, our team’s work is really to look at research and development to help support them advance the mayor’s agenda, to support city government, but also to get out of City Hall, to bring in innovation and civics to the whole city of Boston. 

Lee Moreau I’m wondering, tell us a little bit about your background and kind of what prepared you for this role. 

Shin-pei Tsay That’s such a great question. Well, New Urban Mechanics was a term coined by Mayor Menino, so a mayor who had been the head of Boston for 20 years, he called himself a new urban mechanic. 

Lee Moreau Ok. 

Shin-pei Tsay He felt he was someone who was very effective at pulling the levers of government. And he did. He had some big developments that he got through Hynes Convention Center, for example. But he was also someone who filled the potholes and kept the lights on and was constantly in touch with constituents. But in-in this new era of MONUM, I’m thinking that what this team really needs for this new administration or, you know, administration that’s in its first term, it’s an administration that itself embodies innovation. That itself is pioneering big ambitions and initiatives. The mayor has a vision. It’s not just a policy agenda. It’s about achieving impact for all the residents of Boston. She’s filled her cabinet with change agents, people who really know how to get things done, people who are willing to go to the mat. And so the Office of New Urban Mechanics, civic innovation has to take on a different orientation. I think that what I bring to this different orientation is maybe a comfort with ambiguity, ability to see patterns, and ability to kind of anticipate what might be coming. And I think that what might be coming is a lot of work that’s very intersectional work that the government cannot solve on its own. So Boston as a city has had a huge luxury of being able to fund a lot of its big initiatives. It’s always found a way. Big parks have always had public funding. We’re entering an era where those challenges are just so much bigger than government and we need everyone on board. We need private sector, we need the entire the amazing rich civic ecosystem of Boston to be engaged. And we need to think of government as a way of channeling all that energy towards these shared goals. And so I think that sort of I think I’m like the the person that puts the scaffolding up and able to do that and to help do that can help define what impact is to help build a team that can deliver and be collaborative. So I think that’s what I bring to this. 

Lee Moreau And you wear a lot of hats. So I mean, I don’t know if you consider yourself a designer, but you’re also a director, an administrator. What’s a typical day for you like? 

Shin-pei Tsay I mean, I think you name some of it, some of it’s right at this moment because I’m less than three months and a lot of it is thinking big picture, thinking about what do we need to put in place in order for us to achieve our biggest impact? How do we grow this? So we’re building, building, building, and we’re trying to take care of things that might have been left undone. It’s it’s a lot of admin too, it’s just operating within city government. But I also think of the work as looking for those opportunities at that intersection of: so we’re in the mayor’s office, it’s government, it’s governance, but we’re also looking at policy because we know that policy can have that sustainability. It brings about that potential broader impact. And we’re looking at design, we’re looking at human centered design, we’re looking at experience— the human experience, lived experience. We’re assessing culture and we’re trying to bring all these things together. The work has to be prioritized around the mayor’s agenda or else, you know, it’s like there’s too many things to tackle and there’s so many ideas to take on. But I think I take a little bit of everything I’ve done, you know, whether it’s scale and the ability to center people in public space, to create methodologies where we’re gathering qualitative evidence in order to build a case alongside the the quantitative information so that something has a lasting impact or lasting change. And so that kind of creativity, that practice has had in assessing the human experience in public space is really important. I’m also bringing in, you know, I’ve-I worked in policy arenas where I was looking at federal policy or state policy and trying to understand how do you influence those big structures, what are the available tools, and then what are the tools that need to be created. And I bring that to /laughs/ to the work. And just I think just having a fundamental sense— 

Lee Moreau With a smile on your face, by the way. 

Shin-pei Tsay /laughs/

Lee Moreau It would appear so — 

Shin-pei Tsay Yeah, I really enjoy it. I think policy for so often is a-spatial and I think a policy is very spatial. 

Lee Moreau Okay. 

Shin-pei Tsay The expression of policy, we see it and we live it. Right, like it influence everything around us. And that’s what I try to think about a lot, is how do we make this accessible? How do we make the invisible very visible? How do we make people care about the structures that surround them that they may not just, you know, it’s not obvious. 

Lee Moreau You said intersectionality before and it actually never occurred to me, but there’s almost nothing more intersectional than government. How do you bring that to life? And actually also lead people into really a deeper understanding about how we’re going to make change? 

Shin-pei Tsay Yeah, it’s a constant I think it’s a constant struggle. I would say that municipal government tends to be very reactive as a necessity, right? It’s the front door for many people in terms of just running their, you know, getting everyday kinds of things done. Those, you know, you can’t take on innovation without also making sure that the water is clean and the streets are smooth and people can get to school, the schools are open and that kind of thing. So it is sort of the convergence of operations and big thinking at the same time because you’re accounting for the unexpected, you’re  keeping people safe. What does that mean? It’s it’s like thinking about like the, you know, .0001% incident that could happen in certain situations. So I think there is in that sense, it does bring together, you know, both the everyday and the near and the reaction to the thinking about the future and the anticipation, the anticipatory aspect across all the dimensions of operations and systems, right, so transportation and housing. I mean, across the board. Just operations, just basic services. Yeah. 

Lee Moreau So you’re sort of in your first hundred days. 

Shin-pei Tsay Yes. Yes. 

Lee Moreau How are you envisioning working with these, you were just mentioning like sort of monolithic things, like getting the water clean and schools and education, like big departments, like education, public works, etc., Like where do you see MONUM fitting within some of those other things? What’s-what’s your strategy? 

Shin-pei Tsay I think that’s where research is absolutely critical. I would say that maybe in its history MONUM just kind of followed the winds. There’s a lot of space, right? Because the city government was operating, it was running. And so they had a lot of open space to explore with this administration. You have a lot of the departments fanning out into that space because they’re driving ambitious agendas. And so I think our work has to be very rooted in what is the problem we’re trying to solve. That problem analysis, which is strategic. It’s not-it’s not completely just open ended exploration. It’s it’s trying to answer a question: Where can we where can we prioritize, where would we have the biggest impact, what is absolutely necessary to deal with today? That’s you know, I think that that research is so imperative for us to prioritize. I also think that part of the reality of this work is that your priorities shift according to political context to be happening around you, to culture, to climate even, right? So Boston just experienced its first heat wave last week. 

Lee Moreau I remember. Yeah. 

Shin-pei Tsay /laughs/ I’m sure everyone feels it very, very much. And I was thinking about the prototypes that we were kind of racing to get out the door last week with the Office of Emergency Management. How amazing that team was in deployment. They just have a mental map of where everything ought to go and be prioritized. And our team’s work is to kind of make more visible that system of deployment. How are people experiencing the setup? How are users interacting with those prototypes, with the cooling tents and the misting towers? How are we getting them around to places? How are we thinking about all the different kinds of places that could use them? And those prototypes arrived from- the identification of those prototypes as even a prototype, a cooling prototype, came from the Climate Action Plan, the Heat Resilience Plan. So research that the city had done with their environmental agencies in order to figure out exactly where MONUM could have a role in design. Our team designed these the kind of the material aspect of of those prototypes and ordered the parts and got everything put together and trained the staff. 

Lee Moreau So it’s a balance of, you know, doing your research but also being responsive. 

Shin-pei Tsay Yeah. 

Lee Moreau Flexible. 

Shin-pei Tsay Yes, very responsive. I think that flexibility and, you know, sometimes we maybe in this case we didn’t do the research. It was the environmental agency. But understanding when to draw on that research and synthesize and analyze and then bring in the human element that that isn’t necessarily a part of, you know, data analysis. The human experience is often left out. And so that’s where our team comes in. 

Lee Moreau So I have to ask you about the future. Now, you’re going to- almost approaching the end of this hundred days. But, you know, you have a kind of big boots to fill at MONUM, like there’s a long legacy and a lot of amazing work. Where do you see the future going for your work there and maybe even beyond? 

Shin-pei Tsay I think that I have- the founders and the previous leaders have had such an amazing impact. And I would almost say that in a way you could say that that version of MONUM could almost be eased off because their impact was so, so thorough. Every department is prototyping ideas or projects. There’s pilots galore. You throw a rock, you’re going to head a really interesting idea that people are excited about, right? So in the past, that was not the case, right? So MONUM has had an amazing influence across the city government and across, I think, city governments, you know, around the world. I would say that our job now is to ensure that the impact is not limited to- it’s not limited to the how. It’s not just about bringing delight. It’s about having that impact for more people, but maybe with a sense of delight and thinking about ways that we can insert that idea of sustainability, of operationalizing the change more broadly and in service of these have, as I said, like intersectional or cross disciplinary issues that I think I’m hoping that our team will be able to achieve. 

Lee Moreau That’s exciting. 

Shin-pei Tsay Yes. Yeah, super exciting. 

Lee Moreau Shin-pei. Thank you so much for spending time with us today. I know it’s busy. 

Shin-pei Tsay Thank you so much for having me. I really enjoyed it. 

Lee Moreau This week it’s the Design Research Society Conference, international global conference, 2024. We’re at Harvard University’s campus, and I’m here with Geoff Mulgan, who’s the former director or head of Nesta in the UK. Geoff, tell me a little bit more about what you do. 

Geoff Mulgan 25 years work with design. I worked in U.K. government where I ran strategy and policy. The prime minister’s office. And we used lots of designers and commissioned design. And then at Nesta, the National Endowment for Science, Technology, the Arts, again, we had a heavy involvement in design. And I see maybe as you do, pretty much everything is design. Every product, every service, every institution, everything we do, someone has had to design at some point. So it’s a kind of universal lens on the world. 

Lee Moreau And is there anything in particular that this conference brings that either because time has passed or there’s new stuff on the horizon that you’re really excited to be talking about? 

Geoff Mulgan So I threw a series of challenges at this community. Some of them are challenges which I’ve been grappling with for 20, 25 years, working with designers from the vantage point of a government. And I’ve worked in city government, national governments, European Commission and now the U.N. And there’s a huge value to some of the things designers do most automatically, things like taking lived experience really seriously and understanding-using ethnography to understand the feelings of life, the use of prototyping, experiment, rapid iteration, the visualization of options. These are all really good things and bureaucracies are terrible at them. I’ve worked in— 

Lee Moreau /laugh/. 

Geoff Mulgan —many bureaucracies. So design adds a huge amount. But then the dilemma for the designers is where you get the balance between the freshness and the creativity of novel thinking, but also respect for deep knowledge or deep practitioner knowledge. And some of those designers get that wrong. They can be a little bit arrogant. 

Lee Moreau Bureaucracy and design. Don’t necessarily go together super well but- 

Geoff Mulgan They don’t always. The UK government knows about 700 designers working in it. 

Lee Moreau Okay. 

Geoff Mulgan And all over the world we’ve seen design teams in cities and national governments. That’s becoming more mainstream. The three challenges I was really throwing at this group were, first of all, a challenge which I’ve been obsessed with for a few years, which is how do we get beyond one off projects towards the ability to picture really strategic options for a society. So what could I care for the elderly look like in 30 years time? What would a truly zero carbon economy look like? What if we took mental health as seriously as physical health? And I’ve published a couple of books on this, proposing a whole mix of different methods which could be used, linking design but also social science and computer science and so on to help us actually create models, maquettes, pictures of the possible future which we can then interrogate. That’s very normal and feels like architecture is completely unusual in respect of social change and social innovation. So that’s one. The second was about systems. We all talk about systems and systems change and so on, but I don’t think most people do it very well. There’s a lot to be said, but- 

Lee Moreau Why is that? Why is that? 

Geoff Mulgan It’s difficult. 

Lee Moreau Yeah. 

Geoff Mulgan And again, it would be surprising if anyone could change a system on their own. The really good examples and I teach courses on systems change where we have transformed whole systems are lots of things interacting together from technology and business models to laws and regulations. So as an example, the circular economy, which I’ve been involved in for decades, you know, how do you recycle your paper, your electronics, your glass, your plastics? The huge progress made in some fields is about a whole set of interlocking things contributing to systems change, so for example let’s say: paper In Europe, we recycle about 80%. Clothing we recycle about 1%. And there’s wonderful systems mapping methods which are incredibly complex and therefore useless for a decision maker. So we’ve been experimenting with methods which help someone in a city government or a national government actually decide on things like, I mean, what I got next week is last mile freight delivery, all the Amazon deliveries. How do you cut the carbon emissions from that in a city? And it’s very useful to have systems maps. But the idea is you then focus in on the actual decisions you could make. And the final one I talked about was about the design of new public institutions. I’ve launched this year a thing called The Institutional Architecture Lab, where we’re working with governments all over the world and the U.N. On the next generation of public institutions we need for things like AI or decarbonization or mental health. And it’s very striking. The business world has invented amazing new organizational forms, for better or worse, based on algorithms or search engines or platforms, whereas the public sector certainly in North America and Europe is far behind, is new institutions look pretty much like they did 30, 50 years ago. So we’re trying to both make sense of the new models, but also help the governments at different levels to design new institutions which make the most of current technology, often with intelligence at the core of the design, often with what we call mesh structures. So are linking different tiers of government and other players, often thinking about whole ecosystems of institutions and much more voice in accountability and is trying to create almost a discipline, a bit like architecture, which can draw on many other disciplines — I mean architecture uses engineering and construction and esthetics and planning and so on, but brings them together hopefully to give us great buildings. We need an equivalent for our public institutions, otherwise they will let us down. They won’t be loved. They won’t be trusted. And so this is a field where I love the design research world to get really seriously involved because we could not find any center around the world of research on this topic. Any center you could turn to for advice if you are a national government or a city needing to create a new institution. 

Lee Moreau And that’s because there’s no time? There are no resources? Or is it just because we don’t have the intellectual tools of perception to see the gaps? 

Geoff Mulgan Yeah, I think it’s partly an intellectual gap. It’s partly an ideological one. So for many years it was kind of assumed the private sector did organizational design. The public sector was bound to be slow, bureaucratic and boring. I think it is a failure, though, of the Academy. It hasn’t sort of spotted this as a need, and it does require thinking, which is as much drawing on computer science, let’s say — how do you build in AI or blockchain into your design, as traditional public administration or organizational studies or economics and so on. So this is not easy, but it’s really important because if we don’t get this right, we cannot do systems transformations of any kind. 

Lee Moreau Okay. 

Geoff Mulgan And so we’re working with the United Nations big event next year where we’ve been mapping hundreds of innovations around the world, working with dozens of governments on this next generation to showcase what could be done. Much more of the creativity is in Asia at the moment, so India, Taiwan, Singapore, China are way ahead of, I’m afraid, of the U.S. and Europe in terms of recent models. But it’s a for me, it’s a very exciting question to think what are the institutions we could be building now, which will be in 20, 30, 40 years time, so loved and seen as as vital to life as in my country, institutions like the BBC or our National Health Service are absolutely core to people’s sense of well-being. We need the equivalence for the future. 

Lee Moreau So one of the things that I have always admired about Nesta in particular is that it made processes of innovation and frameworks visible to us. Like there are tools that you produced, your teams produced, that allowed the broader community to understand how things get done, which was partly raising some awareness, codifying frameworks, things like that. How can we use some of those tools or in what way can we use some of those tools to do some of these challenge, or face some of these challenges that you’ve articulated? 

Geoff Mulgan So for me, that’s the key. And in a way it’s a kind of quietly boring thing to do /laughs/. And I’ve done it for running governments or social innovation or problem solving. As you break things down into their component parts, you get behind the rhetoric, the hot air, and you see what’s actually going on here. What are the examples, what are the methods? And as you say, at Nesta we put out lots of toolkits and guides and ran training courses on on all sorts of things really to get beyond the mystique. And there’s always a lot of hot air and rhetoric in these sort of fields and just make it tangible, make it easy to absorb if you’re a busy person working in a business or a government. And that’s exactly what we’re trying to do now for the things I was talking about. So for institutional design, we have published toolkits. We are using those working with national governments, like in Germany and Finland and Bangladesh and Brazil on live design tasks, but breaking it down into the different steps and the options and the evidence. And the thing I’m really keen to see in the next few years is the evolution of really a field which links imagination, political and social imagination to the methods of design, but also to the knowledge of social science. 

Lee Moreau So I’ve been asking everyone about their vision for the future, what they see out there. I’d love to hear yours. 

Geoff Mulgan Well, I’ve written last year two books, one for Oxford University Press, one for Cambridge University Press on exactly this, trying to explore imagination and how we do imagination better. One is was published by Hearst and Oxford University Press called Another World is Possible:How to Reignite Social and Political Imagination, which I think we badly need all over the world. And then there was a kind of spin off book I did for Cambridge University Press on the role of art called Profits at a Tangent. And what’s the role of art in social imagination? How does art help us to see, to imagine, to create different futures, not only what we might imagine for the future, but how? What are the methods we could be using to do this really well? But it’s difficult. And this year I’m chairing a project with our design museum in the UK and our main academic Research Council on Strategic Design for 2040, looking at things like food and care or the locality. And I don’t know what the answers will be. In a way it’s a process of discovery, which I hope will involve hundreds, if not thousands of people, because there’s no point, it being my vision of the future. You know, visions have to be co-created and shared if they’re going to be meaningful, and I hope at least are a prompt for how design can help us think not just about solving the immediate problems of now, but help us think ten, 20, 50 years into the future about what could be possible. 

Lee Moreau Thank you very much, Geoff, for taking time out of your day to talk to us. It was an absolute pleasure. 

Geoff Mulgan Thank you. 

Lee Moreau Design As is a podcast from Design Observer. Here’s Design Observer’s editor in chief, Ellen McGirt on what’s coming in 2025. 

Ellen McGirt So we have a new redesigned website that we’re enormously proud of. Like all great projects, it took much longer than we thought, but at the end we got exactly what we wanted, which is a much easier way to access our archives. 20 years of them, but also helps us with our overall mission, which is to amplify the people and ideas that we believe hold a piece of the puzzle of a better, more beautiful, more sustainable, more equitable, and of course, better designed world. 

Lee Moreau To learn more, visit design observer dot com. 

Lee Moreau I’m here with Chelsea Mauldin and we’re in Northeastern’s recording studio, it is June 26th, day three of the conference. Chelsea, tell our audience a little bit about yourself. 

Chelsea Mauldin I’m the executive director of the Public Policy Lab. We’re a not for profit organization based in New York City. But we do work not just with the city of New York, but with government agencies all across the country and with the federal government. And what we do is try to design policy delivery, and service delivery so that it’s more effective and delightful for all Americans. 

Lee Moreau Obviously, Public Policy Lab is an example of civic design research. But tell us a little bit more about what you’re doing in particular, and how long has civic design research kind of been enmeshed in this conversation about design research? Is this relatively recent or we’re going back decades? 

Chelsea Mauldin I mean, I think some decades. There has obviously been a long history of designers working on the civic built, the built environment, has used the skills of professional designers for, you know, hundreds, hundreds of years. I think the application of design methodologies and particularly strategic design methodologies to the delivery of services which are provided by state actors comes about around the same time that service design begins to be a commercial concern as well. 

Lee Moreau And so often for many people government comes to them through the services they experience. 

Chelsea Mauldin Sure. 

Lee Moreau How does design research help us improve those points of interaction, the quality of engagement? 

Chelsea Mauldin Well, there’s a there’s a bad old world where people who have power and authority and money make decisions about what everybody else gets. People decide this is how your service or policy is going to be delivered to you. And they don’t even maybe even think about the you. They just think I’m doing a thing and this is how I am going to enact that thing. I think what has happened in the last 20 years is a strong sense coming from all the design fields that it’s necessary to talk to the people who are going to use a product to serve as a tool or a policy in order to understand what their needs are. But even in some ways more profoundly what their preferences are, what their desires are from that service delivery, from that policy delivery. So design researchers work now with government and work in government to help understand the publics’  needs and requirements so that government can be a more satisfying provider of public value. 

Lee Moreau And historically, what have the barriers been to this type of work? 

Chelsea Mauldin There are functional barriers that have to do with the way that government works, and this could be not just the topic of one podcast, but topic of 100, which have to do with public sector procurement practices what it is to actually pay someone to do a thing for the government and the difficulties around that, public sector hiring practices. What is required to be able to hire a person for a long time? For example, most agencies in the federal government had no official and approved job descriptions for designers, so they could not hire designers because they did not have those job descriptions. 

Lee Moreau Right. 

Chelsea Mauldin So that’s a thing which is only really changed in the last five or so years that the federal government is well equipped to hire people with design skills to do this kind of strategic and user centered design. So there are those kinds of like functional barriers around how the government works. I think there are some more troubling cultural barriers, and I think these are particularly acute in the United States where there is a, I think, a deeply held belief that if you are poor, it’s your fault, like you’re poor because you didn’t try hard enough to not be poor. 

Lee Moreau Why couldn’t you get out of the situation? Come on. 

Chelsea Mauldin Right, exactly. So the services which are provided to people who are living on lower incomes traditionally have not been particularly enjoyable or easy to use because on some level, there was a sense of why. Why should we, the taxpayer, have to help you who didn’t try hard enough? So there’s been a sense that those services didn’t have to be of particularly high quality. They didn’t have to be particularly enjoyable or satisfying in as much as they were expected to be effective. They were supposed to be effective from a point of view of government cost savings, government time savings, not efficacy in terms of meaning or satisfaction for the end recipient. And this is, of course, entangled with America’s terrible history of racism when because of system actions, we have disproportionate levels of poverty amongst communities of color and there are racist attitudes towards communities of color. There is another disincentive for actually providing high quality public services that are for lower income people. 

Lee Moreau Give me an example of a breakthrough or something that you feel really good is —actually before I do that, is that a fair question? You’ve been at this for a little while. I don’t want to ask you question where you’re like, Actually, that’s bullshit question. 

Chelsea Mauldin No sure, it’s fine. I think there are two ways to think about what’s a breakthrough. I think there’s a breakthrough just in terms of saying, look at this new product or new service that has been delivered and is being delivered in the way that it’s being delivered, because there were design researchers and human centered designers of other kinds involved. I think an example of that that’s been in the news recently is a bunch of folks in the federal government have created a way for people to file their taxes for free. You don’t have to pay one of those big companies that charges you money to file your taxes. It’s a federal government service. Why are you having to pay some commercial third party to essentially submit government forms? They’ve designed a relatively simple and easy way for Americans to be able to file their taxes for free online. And that really came about through the dedicated effort of a bunch of people who use design methodologies in order to make things simple and easy. I think the other way in which design methodologies have fundamentally changed government is more in a way of changing the way that people who work in government, who are not designers think about their responsibilities. Even people who are not designers who work in government now, I think have a increasing awareness that they have a responsibility to think about the experience of citizens and residents when they are receiving a policy enabled service. So in some ways I think that’s almost the more fundamental change than any one single product. It’s changing the approach and mindset of a public servant who’s then going to spend 30 or 40 years working in government and change their frame for what they think their job is and what they think their responsibilities are. 

Lee Moreau So it’s almost the introduction of design ethics into this domain, which is a little shocking because it’s felt like design ethics took a long time to actually gel. 

Chelsea Mauldin Yeah, I mean, we don’t even have the release of the Belmont report, which established kind of global frameworks for ethical human research until the mid-late 70s. So, you know, the government has done a bunch of stuff for a bunch of time without really engaging in what are the ethical responsibilities toward the people who are going to be most affected. 

Lee Moreau So I want to ask about funding because –

Chelsea Mauldin We take money in every legal form. 

Lee Moreau It affects all of us, right. And I think there is a subtext to this entire conference, which is sometimes design research is seen as a nice to have additive, whatever. But you have very acute funding concerns, I’m sure, given the kind of domains you’re operating in. Tell us about those challenges. 

Chelsea Mauldin Well, it’s as I alluded to earlier, there’s always an issue with procurement in government. I mean, if you were running a commercial firm of some kind and you would like to procure the assistance of my team of designers and design researchers, you can just come to me and say: Hey, Chelsea, let’s do this project. And we would whip up a scope of work between us and or between our lawyers, and we would probably execute it in a couple of weeks. Like it wouldn’t be that hard for you to decide that you wanted to spend money on us to give you a service or product, and then we would be delighted to engage in that. When it’s a government contract, on the other hand, the government typically has to put almost all contracts out to bid, because the idea is that in government, actors shouldn’t be able to like hire their cousin with the public’s money to do some project that it has to be public that the public has to be able to see. How is the government planning to spend money and then the process of firms or organizations saying, I would like to be the one to provide that good or service that has to go through a documented process of submitting a bid, it has to be evaluated in all the exact same ways that all of the other bids are evaluated, etc., etc.. As you can imagine, this takes months, if not years to get projects off the ground. And that leads to there also being a kind of monoculture of service providers in government, large organizations that can, you know, afford to have a whole government procurement team that does nothing but submit bids to government agencies. All that to say. One of the first barriers to having the funding to do the work is actually navigating the process of of forming a legal relationship with government so that you can do the work. If you can surmount that either by winning that bid or by finding an alternate source of funding, for example, from a philanthropy or other sources, there are different questions, which is, is that source of funding sufficient to the complexity of the project that you are taking on? What is addictive about doing civic sector design work once you do it is the the scale and the complexity of the work. You know, I personally have, you know, written words to go on a form that gets sent out to 40 million Americans every quarter, and that thing that’s being sent to them is intended to help people manage their health care and manage their Medicare benefits. Once you work on that scale and with that level of potential impact, it’s really hard to say: I am going to be prepared to work on a smaller scale where my work is not so directly affecting people’s well-being. 

Lee Moreau So your group is called a lab. 

Chelsea Mauldin Yeah. 

Lee Moreau Which is, I can imagine, maybe not the most obvious word for working with some of the government agencies that you’re engaged with and so forth. How does that- why are you describing yourself as a lab? I love it personally, but I’m wondering how it plays with with the people you work with. 

Chelsea Mauldin I mean, I think it is particularly when we started, which was we decided to set up the organization in 2010. At that point, it was profoundly more experimental even than it is now. We would go around and talk to people in major social service agencies and they just literally had no frame of reference for design having anything to do with social policy. Design was, you know, somebody making you a fancy dress for the Oscars, or giving you cute throw pillows for your couch. 

Lee Moreau It’s a juicer or something.

Chelsea Mauldin Yeah, it was it was nothing to do with the strategic delivery of billions of dollars worth of government value. So I think the lab helped people conceive of what we were doing as experimental. And in some ways that gave them a frame of reference for it, which was that, we’re going to try stuff. They’re going to ask us to work in different ways. They’re going to have strange ways of being. They’re going to, you know, want to write on the wall with their dry erase markers. You know, and that was helpful for framing the work as being so mething that was going to exist in a kind of different way of working than what they were expecting or what they were used to. 

Lee Moreau So as you think about the future, we’re here at a conference which is a moment to reflect a little bit. Where do you think we’re heading? And it is an election year, I’ll say that again, which is both exciting and terrifying. Where are we going? 

Chelsea Mauldin I think that whatever the outcome of the U.S. presidential election, there is still going to be a significant amount of design research to be done. And I don’t actually think that design research is inherently partisan in any way. I think that there are all manner of things that are of interest to the left, and there are a whole set of other issues that are of interest to the right. And in either of those cases, it is useful for the government to understand the people’s perspectives on what those priorities are, what it whoever the president is. So I think there’s design research aplenty to be done. And on the federal level, there are now pretty well established offices and agencies in the federal government that are staffed by civil servants, that are not staffed by people who have a political affiliation. So I think that the work the work is going to continue regardless of who is elected. The fundamental work of delivering government services will presumably continue. 

Lee Moreau Well, that gives me hope. Thank you for that. Thank you for that. I was expecting a totally different response, but I’m grateful for that one. 

Chelsea Mauldin Let me just say one last thing about people who work in government. Like, I think that there is a really bad and damaging and untrue narrative about people who work in government that somehow they’re, you know, not great at their jobs or they’re not trying hard or something. I don’t know what that is in my personal experience, not what is going on. There are incredibly dedicated, hardworking, thoughtful, civic minded people who work inside of government and who try every day to find clever ways to deliver value to Americans without regard to those people’s political affiliations. There is not, I don’t think, any attempt to deliver services to some people and not to other people. I think that and that good work of those dedicated public servants is going to continue no matter what. 

Lee Moreau I’m grateful to them. I’m grateful for you. Thank you so much. 

Chelsea Mauldin Thank you so much. 

Lee Moreau Thank you again to Shin-pei Tsay, Geoff Mulgan and Chelsea Mauldin for sitting down with me. Design As is a podcast from Design Observer. For transcript and show notes, you can visit our website at Design Observer dot comslash Design As. You can always find design ads on any podcast of your choice. And if you like this episode, please let us know. Write a review. Share it with a friend and keep up with us on social media at Design Observer. We’d love to give you a seat at our roundtable however we can. Special thanks to Maxine Philavong at the Northeastern Recording Studio and Design Observer’s editor in chief, Ellen McGirt. This episode was mixed by Judybelle Camangyan. Design As is produced by Adina Karp.