Abstract
Public sector organizations have been increasingly turning to design in their pursuit to innovate and address pressing challenges that seem intractable through their existing ways of working. Design’s presence in the public sector is still a relatively recent phenomenon ridden with many challenges. Through a study of three municipalities in Sweden, we present tensions designers face as they work their way to build design capacity. We argue that making a place for design in organizational systems and their ways of working requires skillfully navigating these tensions. We describe each tension in terms of their contradictions embedded in dualities and discuss designers’ ways of managing them. Practical applications for design and public administration are also discussed.
Keywords
design capacity, organizational change, public sector, service design
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21606/iasdr.2023.458
Citation
Boztepe, S., Linde, P.,and Smedberg, A.(2023) Design making its way to the city hall: Tensions in design capacity building in the public sector, in De Sainz Molestina, D., Galluzzo, L., Rizzo, F., Spallazzo, D. (eds.), IASDR 2023: Life-Changing Design, 9-13 October, Milan, Italy. https://doi.org/10.21606/iasdr.2023.458
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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
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Design making its way to the city hall: Tensions in design capacity building in the public sector
Public sector organizations have been increasingly turning to design in their pursuit to innovate and address pressing challenges that seem intractable through their existing ways of working. Design’s presence in the public sector is still a relatively recent phenomenon ridden with many challenges. Through a study of three municipalities in Sweden, we present tensions designers face as they work their way to build design capacity. We argue that making a place for design in organizational systems and their ways of working requires skillfully navigating these tensions. We describe each tension in terms of their contradictions embedded in dualities and discuss designers’ ways of managing them. Practical applications for design and public administration are also discussed.