Abstract
Over the years, “Innovation labs” have come and gone in public sector organizations. At Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada, one low-key, co-design project over-delivered on client insights, service experience improvements and operational efficiencies. This case study shares one department’s success in embedding human-centered design into organizational culture by: competing against graduate design students, co-designing across the organization (from call agents, to policy, immigration officers, and communications), creating a design project alumni community, and adhering to rigorous measurement and experimentation. The case study will share opportunities and challenges that emerged from the process of embedding human-centered design (via a “non-innovation lab”) into the department.
Keywords
innovation, service design, culture, organizations
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21606/learnxdesign.2019.09011
Citation
Hum, R.,and Thibaudeau, P.A.(2019) Taking the Culture out of the Lab and Into the Office: A “Non-Lab” Approach to Public Service Transformation, in Börekçi, N., Koçyıldırım, D., Korkut, F. and Jones, D. (eds.), Insider Knowledge, DRS Learn X Design Conference 2019, 9-12 July, Ankara, Turkey. https://doi.org/10.21606/learnxdesign.2019.09011
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share Alike 4.0 International License.
Taking the Culture out of the Lab and Into the Office: A “Non-Lab” Approach to Public Service Transformation
Over the years, “Innovation labs” have come and gone in public sector organizations. At Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada, one low-key, co-design project over-delivered on client insights, service experience improvements and operational efficiencies. This case study shares one department’s success in embedding human-centered design into organizational culture by: competing against graduate design students, co-designing across the organization (from call agents, to policy, immigration officers, and communications), creating a design project alumni community, and adhering to rigorous measurement and experimentation. The case study will share opportunities and challenges that emerged from the process of embedding human-centered design (via a “non-innovation lab”) into the department.