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policy design rebrand

Derisking decision making

Service design is very much a T-shaped job. You cover everything from research, through to protoyping and testing, strategy for launching and scaling something, and telling the story of it all along the way. So when I joined Policy Lab in 2019, hired as a ‘service and communications designer’, there was the low-hanging fruit of keeping the blog active but also the more interesting, strategic piece of work on telling our team’s story - what we were doing and why it mattered - why you should care about it.

Uncovering the why of Policy Lab was a probably the most interesting puece of work I’ve done as a civil servant. It was a design project in itself. It involved digging back into the history of Policy Lab, (I read nearly every single one of our blogs), multiple workshops with our team, and a process of osmosis working on our projects alongside policy makers, to understand their motivations and what policy actaully is.

Inspired by the GDS poster tumblr and art school. The history of the poster as a campaign tool goes back to the printing press.

Talked about as ‘open policy making’ opening it up to ... they all talk about what they are doing but not why. I’m a bit of a fan of David Hiatt’s work. In particular his book on DO Purpose. People get behind brands because they believe in why they do what they do. The purpose. In my humble opinion, and in my experience in working in user-centred policy design, the reason for using user-centred or open policy making approaches and methods, is ultimately to derisk decision making.

I believe that that evidence-based policy making needs a rebrand! So I made these posters and this little video. I also wrote a few blogs.