Abstract
Public-sector innovation units across Latin America increasingly use design methodologies to reimagine policymaking and service delivery. However, fragmented and inconsistent documentation continues to limit institutional learning and sustained impact. This study maps how public design is practiced through a multilingual literature review of 84 sources (from an initial corpus of 700 sources) analyzed across English, Spanish, Portuguese, and French. Coding findings at institutional, project, and individual levels reveals four critical patterns: inconsistent terminology hindering synthesis, uneven geographic coverage leaving vast regions underrepresented, superficial methodology documentation describing tools without unpacking adaptation or context, and striking temporal gaps with minimal longitudinal evidence linking pilots to sustained policy change. These findings expose how scattered documentation prevents innovations from compounding into embedded governance capacity. Our analysis is the first step in building an open repository that builds collective memory in a field too often starting from scratch.
Keywords
Public Design, Latin America, Public Sector Innovation, Knowledge Mapping
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2026.753
Citation
Bosch Gomez, S., Gaspari, L., and Rosado, T. (2026) Sustained Memory for Public Design in Latin America, in Simeone, L., Gray, C. M., Verhoeven, A., de Götzen, A., Bakırlıoğlu, Y., Zohar, H., Stead, M., and Buwert, P. (eds.), DRS2026: Edinburgh, 8–12 June, Edinburgh, United Kingdom. https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2026.753
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Included in
Sustained Memory for Public Design in Latin America
Public-sector innovation units across Latin America increasingly use design methodologies to reimagine policymaking and service delivery. However, fragmented and inconsistent documentation continues to limit institutional learning and sustained impact. This study maps how public design is practiced through a multilingual literature review of 84 sources (from an initial corpus of 700 sources) analyzed across English, Spanish, Portuguese, and French. Coding findings at institutional, project, and individual levels reveals four critical patterns: inconsistent terminology hindering synthesis, uneven geographic coverage leaving vast regions underrepresented, superficial methodology documentation describing tools without unpacking adaptation or context, and striking temporal gaps with minimal longitudinal evidence linking pilots to sustained policy change. These findings expose how scattered documentation prevents innovations from compounding into embedded governance capacity. Our analysis is the first step in building an open repository that builds collective memory in a field too often starting from scratch.