Abstract
For Supreme Audit Institutions to live up to the expectations of Parliament and the public and meet the needs of the public sector organisations they audit, they need to break out of their traditional knowledge-driven role of public spending watchdogs. Human-centred design offers an alternative to more knowledge: knowledge-in-action. Yet, the current frame of auditors restrains them from experimenting with alternatives. This study shares our experiences as in-house designers at the Netherlands Court of Audit of enriching the current focus on siloed public administration with citizens’ perspectives and of finding alternative ways to increase audit impact. Moreover, we show the crucial role that in-house designers can play to help auditors break out of their audit profession in a manageable, non-disruptive way, while staying true to their fundamental principles.
Keywords
Supreme Audit Institutions; in-house designers; innovation; human-centred design
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21606/iasdr.2023.769
Citation
Meijer-Wassenaar, L.,and Bakker-Joosse, M.(2023) In-house designers to break out public sector auditing in a manageable way, 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.2023.769
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Conference Track
shortpapers
Included in
In-house designers to break out public sector auditing in a manageable way
For Supreme Audit Institutions to live up to the expectations of Parliament and the public and meet the needs of the public sector organisations they audit, they need to break out of their traditional knowledge-driven role of public spending watchdogs. Human-centred design offers an alternative to more knowledge: knowledge-in-action. Yet, the current frame of auditors restrains them from experimenting with alternatives. This study shares our experiences as in-house designers at the Netherlands Court of Audit of enriching the current focus on siloed public administration with citizens’ perspectives and of finding alternative ways to increase audit impact. Moreover, we show the crucial role that in-house designers can play to help auditors break out of their audit profession in a manageable, non-disruptive way, while staying true to their fundamental principles.