Morning Lightning Talks

In this session, we’ll hear from policy-makers about case studies, strategies, and methods they’ve used to do policy prototyping. Some of the talks include:

Evidence-based prototyping in UK policy-making

At the Policy Lab, for the last four years we have been exploring the intersections of design, digital and data-science in policy-making. The Lab’s existence is born of a recognition that government needs to become more open, more connected to its citizens concerns and more collaborative with external experts and academics.

In today’s fast changing, highly interconnected, culturally diverse world our current approaches to policy-making need broadening to become more flexible and responsive.  The current dominant ‘intelligent choice’ mode of policy-making works on the premise that problems can be resolved through ‘best practice’ evidence-based approaches using empirical methods.  In contrast, ‘next practice’ seeks to create new propositions, testing them in context in order to learn, adapt and actively shape our understanding of the problem-solution space itself.  This means applying new tools and techniques, prototyping policy, to test ideas, whilst also navigating between the different cultures of critical inquiry and appreciative inquiry.

Such approaches are at the heart of some of that Lab’s latest projects, including the Industrial Strategy Ageing Grand Challenge as well as our recent work on Maritime Autonomy.  Here we have been applying speculative design and design prototyping to a range of topics from housing to cybersecurity.

Andrea Siodmok, Deputy Director at the Cabinet Office leading the UK Government’s Policy Lab and Open Innovation Teams

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Lean Policy: What tech can teach policymakers

In making policy for rapidly evolving challenges, policymakers have much to learn from the prototype-test-iterate method of product design.

Zvika Krieger, World Economic Forum Center for the Fourth Industrial Revolution

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Prototyping for prototyping: navigating the methodology wilderness

There is no one way to prototype and if you want to be ready for any type of public policy challenge, you need to build up a diversity of methods and approaches. But how do you know what is out there and if it is right for your situation? The OECD Observatory of Public Sector Innovation tackled this challenge and prototyped a Toolkit Navigator for this purpose. Learn about how it was developed and how to use it for your next prototyping project.

Angela Hanson, OECD

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Chicken or the Egg: Prototyping to create policy or policy development to create prototypes

We will discuss two examples of cities who developed prototypes of innovative solutions to improve residents’ lives: one started with a policy solution and the other started with solutions that will become policies. Which is better?

Stephanie Wade, Lead at Bloomberg Philanthropies

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Making Policy Intuitive and Accessible

How do we help government officials best understand, access and implement a new policy framework? The IMF is piloting an interdisciplinary process including designers, economists and policy specialists to build a suite of tools to achieve this outcome. This talk shows how that happened.

Elad Meshulam, Creative Lead at the International Monetary Fund