Articles
2025
Service Design for the Public Sector
Challenges and Opportunities to Design for the Complexity of Public Endeavour
Source: diid - Disegno Industriale Industrial Design. (2024)
Summary: This paper argues that service design must adapt significantly when moving from a commercial to a complex systemic context. It suggests that a standard "toolkit" is insufficient for what the authors call "wicked problems," which require a deeper understanding of their unique properties and constraints.
Gist
The central idea is that you cannot simply copy-paste Service Design methods from the private sector and expect them to work for the public sector.
The authors argue that public sector challenges are "wicked problems" they are incredibly complex, deeply rooted, and have many conflicting stakeholders (e.g., politicians, citizens, different departments).
Therefore, for Service Design to be truly effective in government, it must evolve. It needs to be less about just making a service "user-friendly" and more about:
Understanding the deep, systemic, and political nature of public problems.
Having a specific "knowledge base" to deal with these unique challenges.
The paper is a call for a more mature, robust, and specialized form of Service Design that is built specifically for the complexities of government.