Policy Needs to Meet Practice

How do we influence the influencers, the policy makers?

Some of the concerns that I have are around how we develop policy into action.

Whilst as designers we know how to act in situations, in the service design context a lot of our actions can easily get disconnected from policy issues.

I would like to quickly use a metaphor to explain this in the area of technology. Artists, designers and technologists are very well acquainted with methods and approaches to being able to make technology far futures become technology near futures. If you think about it we have many channels and media in society which help translate what desirable technology for our future might be in embryo for now, to make it into something that we would perhaps want to see and want to have happen.

But when it comes to imagining social far futures, as designers and as many disciplines in academia we seem to have a dysfunction or disconnect in terms of how we connect policy into action.

So whilst designers are great in using modelling and prototyping techniques to manifest the nature of things, when it comes to manifesting the nature of a policy into a local engagement we can sometimes fall very short of the needs.

Some of this revolves around how we collect knowledge and data at a local level, and how we translate that into policies that will scale up. Scaling up is a massive issue, and thinking through the moral consequences of what we act on – in order to be able to understand how that’s going to have a bigger impact on policy in the longer term – is something that we haven’t sorted out yet.

How do we influence the influencers, the policy makers? It's is a big task for education, and it’s a big task for curriculum development..

Associate Dean of Research and Innovation at Northumbria University, Robert leads the Centre for Design Research at the University and is a PhD supervisor of a number of design students. He worked on Dott 07 to develop Intersections conference on Design.