Design and OrganizationalChange in the Public Sector1

by Alessandro Deserti and Francesca Rizzo

Alessandro Deserti

Francesca Rizzo

Introduction

M any countries still do not show clear and strong signs of recovery fromthe global economic downturn that started in 2008, which is causing a

structural lack of resources, particularly affecting the public sector. Theeconomic, demographic, social, and environmental long-term challenges call fordeep changes, questioning many of the assumptions that have underpinnedpublic services and posing new challenges for institutions, policy makers, civilservants, and communities. While austerity measures were adopted all over theworld, societal challenges are intensifying: youth unemployment, elderlyhealthcare, immigration, social inclusion, and other wicked problems presspublic institutions with the contradictory request of delivering new services orrestructuring the existing ones, achieving higher effectiveness with fewerresources.

As a few studies have pointed out (Ashworth, Boyne, and Delbridge, 2009;Diefenbach, 2009), the usual solution—cutting budgets and trying to makepublic organizations more efficient by transferring models and practices fromthe private sector—is limited.

Research on organizational management and social studies has a longtradition of binding the competitiveness of an enterprise to its capability tocontinuously change its culture by overcoming organizational dogmas andpursuing innovation (Drucker, 1995, 2002; Hamel and Prahalad, 1994; Hameland V€alikangas, 2003). While organizational change theories recognize thecomplexity of the phenomenon of change within organizations and thereforedisplay a systematic and holistic attitude, the managerial practice is charac-terized by many models and techniques that seem to be derived from areductionist way of thinking, thereby producing formulas that can be easilysynthesized and turned into slogans and procedures applicable to a variety ofsituations with minimal adaptation. Even if there has been harsh criticism ofthe fast turnover of these managerial models and techniques that led analysts todescribe many of them as fads, the practice still seems to prosper (Collins,2003; Miller and Hartwick, 2002).

1This work is the result of the joint effort of theauthors. Nevertheless, Alessandro Desertidirectly edited sections 1, 2, and 3 and conclu-sions; Francesca Rizzo directly edited sections 4,5, and 6.

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ART ICLE

In a more general frame, thevery idea that managerial models andpractices can be extracted from acontext, abstracted, and turned intoformulas that can be transferredsomehow independently from thecharacteristic of the receiving contexthas often proved wrong. This didnot occur just in the shift from theprivate to the public sector, but inthe first place in the private sectoritself (Miller and Hartwick, 2002).This is especially true for publicorganizations, where too often thetransfer of models from the privatesector is tried, assuming that whatworked there could be simply repli-cated to reduce inefficiencies andenhance productivity. Recent studiesunderline how this assumption isfundamentally wrong, showing howthe lack of grounding for these newprocesses and the unwillingness ofparticipants to become involved playan important role in strengtheningthe natural resistance to change,often leading to unsuccessful trans-formations (Cunningham and Kem-pling, 2009; Lines, 2004). Thisphenomenon can be ascribed tomany reasons, but we would notethat the entrance in the publicsector of the large managerialconsultancies, always in need ofready-to-use formulas, is playing aquite relevant role.

Proposition

The adoption of nonsituated inno-vation recipes is quite distant fromthe mainstream of the design culture:

design literature strongly recognizessituatedness, human-centricity, andparticipation as the bases for buildingsuccessful innovation processes andtools (Ehn, 2008; Gero, 1998;Sch€on, 1983).

The aim of this article is to builda link between this design perspectiveand the issue of organizationalchange in the public sector, high-lighting the dynamic relation betweenthe operative and the strategic levelsof change, as a way to overcome someof the limits and inefficiencies of theestablished practices.

Our proposition is that theadoption of participatory designknowledge and tools in the develop-ment of public services—an emergingtrend responding to a diffused needof building a new generation of moreuser-centered, efficient, and cost-effective services—requires (andimplies) change in the organizationsthat deliver them and that the morethe design practices are new to theorganizations, the more the changeshould be relevant (Deserti andRizzo, 2014).

Until today, the only notableinvestigation of this topic can befound in the work of Sabine Jungin-ger, who connected the introductionof human-centered design practices inpublic bodies and in private compa-nies and the change in organizations(Junginger, 2006, 2008; Jungingerand Sangiorgi, 2009).

Even though we can document afew cases of public bodies thatintroduced design in their practices—

for example, the introduction of“experience-based design” in the UKNational Health Service or the casescited in Junginger (2006)—and theexperimentations in this field now areflourishing, their focus is primarily onthe changes to the services, while verylittle reflection is being produced onthe change within the organizationsthat are supposed to manage them.There seems to be a widespread ideathat the introduction of user-cen-tered practices will work per se,without the need for facing theproblem of change in the hostingorganizations. Most of the changesobtained through the new practicesare thus affecting the superficial level,while at deeper levels the establishedculture, mindset, habits, and practicesare still dominant. The redesign ofthe interface of the public services is aclear example: we may have a numberof new Web sites, applications, andtouch points redesigned according touser-centered practices, but the back-office procedures and their under-pinned culture often remainuntouched. This might be inter-preted as a matter of time becauseaffecting the deeper levels can take amuch longer period, but for surethere is also a question ofintegration and appropriation ofthe new practices within theorganizations.

Here we should underline that,even if starting from Nonaka andTakeuchi (1996), a quite strong lineof thinking looks at innovation as aproblem of knowledge creation and

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management, and most of theapproaches to innovation focus onthe change of the offering more thanon the change in the organizations. Inthis respect, participatory designpractices display an even stronger biasbecause they draw attention to theend users and see solutions as a resultof their context of destination ratherthan as a result of their context oforigin. This bias is opposite to that ofthe self-referential attitude of publicorganizations, and per se this couldbe good because it can create apositive clash, leading to the changeof an established attitude. At thesame time, the focus on the exterior(citizens or end users) and the claimfor an outside-in transformationposes the problem that little reflec-tion is being made on how publicorganizations can internalize andintegrate the new knowledge andhow the change process can befostered or managed: this omissioncould easily lead to rejection of thenew practices or confinement of themto a cosmetic role.

We also note that, even if thebody of knowledge on the introduc-tion of design in organizations isquite strong, it was primarily devel-oped with reference to private com-panies, with a particular emphasis onlarge multinational corporations thatwas only recently extended to smalland medium-sized enterprises (Ack-lin, 2011). The interaction betweenthe introduction of design as a newapproach in public organizations andthe management of their change thus

appears as a relevant node thatshould be investigated. In our per-spective, this investigation can leadnot just to finding ways of combiningthe already existing change manage-ment knowledge and practices withthe already existing service designknowledge and practices, but to theconstruction of a new frame, in whichboth disciplines can influence eachother, introducing elements of nov-elty for both.

Design and the ambidextrousorganization

The existence of a constant tensionbetween innovation and preservationwithin organizations is widely recog-nized in innovation studies. Litera-ture highlights how establishedorganizations tend to defend theirstatus quo and how innovation mustfight its way up to emerge (Ansoff,1990; Rumelt, 1995). The reasonsfor this conservative attitude havebeen explored (Schalk, Campbell,and Freese, 1998; Schein, 2004;Zeffane, 1996) and connected tomany internal and external factors,which all turn into a general lack ofincentive to abandon a certain pres-ent for an uncertain future, generat-ing a quite common situation inwhich business as usual tends toovercome innovation. In this frame,innovation and change are oftenregarded as a last chance that mostorganizations embrace only when theestablished practices do not workanymore. Hamel and V€alikangas

(2003) note that organizationsshould develop resilience—the capa-bility to “continuously anticipate andadjust to changes that threaten theircore earning power, and changebefore the need becomes desperatelyobvious” (p. 52). In most cases,radical change as a last attempt tosurvive actually comes too late: thecompetitors have already acquired adominant position, the resources aretoo limited, the time is too short, andso on. In this respect, Treacy (2004)argues that breakthrough innovationshould be pursued as the last growthstrategy because in the long run,“radical changes usually get beaten bythe slow and steady approach of theincremental innovation” (p. 29).Building on this, Norman andVerganti (2014) recently reconnectedincremental and breakthrough inno-vation to two different designapproaches, questioning some of thetraditional assumptions around user-centered design.

The idea that the capacity ofmanaging the established practicesand that of innovating and changingin a reactive or proactive way can bebalanced was actually discussed inorganizational studies many yearsago, with the introduction of theconcept of ambidextrous organization(Duncan, 1976; March, 1991).Ambidexterity can be primarilydescribed as the balance of exploita-tion and exploration, which makesorganizations capable of relying onefficient and profitable solutionswhile continuously searching for new

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and better ones. Even if the conceptis established, the ambidextrousorganization faces quite a few struc-tural, cultural, and operative prob-lems in shifting from the theoreticalmodel to its implementation.

Ambidexterity can be built bydevoting a part of the organization toinnovation while keeping the restfocused on exploitation or by intro-ducing the attitude of innovating in apervasive way that involves all thecomponents of the organization inthe exploration activities. The adop-tion of both the solutions must becarefully considered: the first mayencounter problems of integrationbecause it may lead to the creation ofinnovation units or areas operating(or perceived) as separate bodies; thesecond may encounter problems ofprioritization because the usual dailyactivities may prevail over the onesdedicated to innovation. Anotherrelevant problem is that explorationand exploitation employ differentthinking modes, very difficult to runsimultaneously. Here is where designgets into the picture, because it isused to playing in the intermediateground between exploration, typicallyrepresented by its capacity of dealingwith the chaotic front end of inno-vation, and exploitation, typicallyrepresented by its capacity of dealingwith new product development andengineering. According to Martin(2009), the use of a complex mix ofdeductive, inductive, and abductivelogic is a typical trait of designthinking that makes it useful not just

to bring sparks of creativity into staidorganizations, but also to balanceexploration and exploitation, over-coming the typical “bias towardreliability” (Martin, 2009; Sutton,2001) that characterizes establishedorganizations.

The introduction of design practicesin the public sector

The demand for smarter solutions bya new generation of citizen-centeredservices is leading to an increasinglysystematic exploration of what designcan do for public organizations. Therapid growth of service and experi-ence design spread the idea thatdesign is not just focused on tangibleartifacts, but also on processes andinteractions that can be effectivelydeveloped by assuming the perspec-tive of the end users, putting them atthe center of the projects andinvolving them as actors rather thanas clients (Bannon, 1991) and open-ing the way for advanced participa-tory practices (Ehn, 2008; Manziniand Rizzo, 2011).

In many countries, public orga-nizations are introducing design tofoster innovation and change, with aparticular emphasis on the develop-ment of a more user-centeredapproach.

Over the last 10 years, quite afew service design consultancies havespecialized in working for the publicsector: Thinkpublic, Live|Work;Design Continuum, Experientia,Engine, Reboot, and Snook, to men-

tion just a few. Even IDEO, a bigplayer, now features “Public Sector”(but also “Organizational Design”)within the range of its expertise.These consultancies are involved insmall service projects and in largepolicy reforms and are helping publicorganizations to assume a new per-spective, overcoming establishedpractices.

Governmental organizations andNGOs such as Nesta and the DesignCouncil in the United Kingdom orMindlab in Denmark are also playinga relevant role in pushing the designapproach to the innovation of publicservices, brokering the experimenta-tion of design-led projects and de-risking the introduction of newpractices in a sector that has alwaysbeen quite conservative. The strategicguidelines of the European Union on“Design for Growth and Prosperity”(Thomson and Koskinen, 2012)enforced this trajectory, underlyingthe importance of a human-centeredperspective in the innovation ofpublic services to build a bettersociety. The report “Restarting Brit-ain 2: Design and the Public Ser-vices” (UK Design Commission,2013) emphasizes the role of designin the transformation of the publicservice system, presenting it as a freshapproach to rethinking policy,professional practice, and servicedelivery.

In our view, experiments withthe application of design in thepublic sector are being applied intwo different but complementary

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directions. The first can be called“people-centered services”: itstretches from traditional user-cen-tered design to the co-designmethod, relying on the intensiveinvolvement of end users inresearch, prototyping, testing, andimplementing the services, with theaim of improving usability, qualityof interaction, and users’ experi-ences. The second can be called“people-led services”: it stretchesfrom co-design to co-productionand aims at developing new public–private–people partnerships toco-produce solutions with users/citizens.

Along these two directions, wecan document the blooming ofinitiatives, professional structures,projects, programs, and recommen-dations. At the same time, even ifthere is some long-term experience(Junginger, 2006), we have tounderline that the introduction ofdesign culture in the public sector isstill in its initial phases: designmethods and tools are still largelyunknown by public institutions, anddesign knowledge is still far fromhaving entered public organizationson a large scale, affecting dailyprocesses and underlying culture.The European Commission’s (2009)public consultation pointed out thatthe most serious barrier to thebetter use of design in Europe (78percent of responses) is “lack ofawareness and understanding of thepotential of design among policymakers” (p. 7). Even if much has

been done, recent studies point outthe difficulty of legitimating designin the new field:

It is important to remember that forthe public sector to commissiondesign agencies to address socialchallenges was, and still is, a big leapin thinking. Design is not typicallyassociated with creating social solu-tions within the public sector. With-out the backing of key organisationslike Nesta and the Design Council,and the promotion of innovation (i.e.trying new processes and methods toproduce innovative results) by theGovernment, a design agency pro-posing to tackle an inadequate publicservice or improve a health or socialinequality would have seemedabsurd. Even with the work of thesekey organisations and the innovationagenda, for many it still is. (Cook,2011, p. 25)

Moreover, we have to remarkthat the ongoing initiatives andexperiments of introduction of designin the public sector are primarilyfocused on the direct results: there isa wide and documented interest inhow design can change public ser-vices, making them more accessible,usable, effective, participatory, moneysaving, and so on. Other than intro-ducing generic objectives such asmaking public organizations morecitizen-centric or more efficient, upuntil now there has been almost noconcern about how the change of theservices and of the practices adoptedin their development should be

reconnected to that of the publicinstitutions.

The introduction of design methodsand tools in the redesign of publicservices: case studies

In order to deepen these aspects, inthe following we examine three casesof redesign of public services, withthe perspective of reconnecting theintroduction of new design knowl-edge to the change in organizations:

• The design of new services forneighborhood-based communi-ties in the frame of the My-Neighbourhood Europeanresearch project

• The design of new services foractive aging, which is being con-ducted in Helsinki within theframe of the DAA Europeanresearch project

• The introduction of public–socialpartnerships (PSPs) in thedevelopment of new public ser-vices in Scotland

These three cases are represen-tative of three different ways andlevels of experimenting with theintroduction of design culture inpublic contexts through smallexperiments or projects for a newgeneration of public services.MyNeighbourhood is piloting publicand collaborative services forneighborhood-based communitiesexperimenting with a participatoryapproach and looking for ways toscale up the solutions. DAA is

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collecting evidence from already-con-ducted experiments attempting toaffect the policy level. The PSPproject of the Scottish Government isexperimenting with new forms ofpartnerships to deliver public ser-vices, introducing design knowledgeinto the construction of networks ofparticipants.

These three cases will be dis-cussed to derive empirical evidenceand key findings, which will bereconnected to a theoretical frame-work to build new knowledge and tostimulate future studies.

Case 1. MyNeighbourhood: Thedesign of new services forneighborhood-based communitiesMyNeighbourhood is an EU-fundedresearch project (www.my-neigh-bourhood.eu) started in January2013 with the goal of applying servicedesign methods and tools in fourdifferent European neighborhoods toidentify and support the establish-ment and the scaling-up of grassrootsand community-based initiatives,through the adoption of a Web-based service platform. The project isoperating in a typical information andcommunication technologies researcharea, introducing the idea thatadvanced participatory design meth-ods can foster the innovation ofpublic services.

At the core of the MyNeigh-bourhood vision is the idea of col-laborative services (Baek, Manzini,and Rizzo, 2010) as solutions thatmay match the need of balancing the

technical “smartness” of cities withthat of increasing participationthrough the development of softersolutions based on public–peoplepartnerships (Rizzo and Deserti,2014).

Through the co-design activitiesconducted in the four piloting sites,MyNeighbourhood developed inno-vative partnerships, deeply challeng-ing the public institutions byinvolving them in unprecedenteddialogue and interaction activities.

In Milan, the project deliveredtwo collaborative services—QuartoFood Club and Quarto Gardening—currently under experimentation inQuarto Oggiaro, one of the city’smost run-down peripheral districts.

Quarto Food Club matches theneed of delivering food to elderlypeople who are not in a condition toself-prepare it with that of their socialinclusion. The service idea is todeliver meals to a group of eldersliving in the neighborhood, creatingfor the occasion a kind of social spacein the local hotel and cateringmanagement schools, where elderlypeople can enjoy the meal together,getting in touch with each otherand with the students who takepart in the experiment as they carryout their own practical trainingactivities.

Quarto Gardening is based onthe same structure and gives to themunicipality the possibility ofexploiting the competences of thestudents of the local agriculturalschool to take care of some of the

green areas in the neighborhood.This service is made possible thanksto the agreement between the man-agement of collective green areas(Municipality of Milan and PublicInstitute for Social Housing ofMilan) and the local agricultural highschool.

Both services also respond to thesecond neighborhood issue—youngpeople’s unemployment woes—exploiting the involvement of thestudents from the local schools, whoreceive credits for the practical train-ing and, at the same time, thepossibility of real work experience.

Fostering new principles ofmutual partnership, MyNeighbour-hood is experimenting with the idea ofproviding local services and creatingpartnerships between public bodiesand the local citizenry and operators,introducing a new rationale bound tothe public–private–people partner-ships as the result of complex partic-ipatory design processes.

Here we would underline thatMyNeighbourhood is experimentingwith service design not only as amethod to design innovative andpeople-centered services but also asa set of competences that maytrigger changes in the public orga-nizations involved in the develop-ment and the delivery of the newservices. The new processes aretransferred and internalized by theemployees through a long-termprocess of engagement in the designexperiments. The team working onthe implementation of the new

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services is composed of researchers(the authors of this paper amongthem), professional designers, andemployees from the Milano munic-ipality. The project is thus matchinggrassroots experimentation with thelarger strategic goal of introducing asystemic perspective in which thepublic sector, citizens, and localstakeholders work together in envi-sioning and co-producing new solu-tions. This perspective gives to thepublic actors the opportunity ofinteracting and dialoguing with cit-izens without losing contact withthe real problems (bottom-up tra-jectory), while at the same timedefining priorities and buildingsolutions around a meaningful long-term vision beyond the acknowl-edgment of local needs (top-downapproach), thus revealing unex-plored space for democraticgovernance.

Case 2. DAA: Design-led innovationfor active agingDAA is an EU-funded researchproject (http://daaproject.eu) thataims at scaling innovative and yetsustainable solutions for elderly care,combining the expertise of care spe-cialists with that of service designers.The project involves a network ofcities acting as pilot sites in which toexperiment with the development ofnew policies.

The EU 2020 Strategy identi-fies demographic aging as one of themain European long-term chal-lenges, requiring innovative solutions

and improved policies to enablebetter social and healthcare serviceswith less money and fewer caretak-ers. In this frame, the new formsof value networks, directly involvingthe citizens as co-producers within apublic–private–people partnershipscheme, are seen as promisingpractices that could be upscaledto obtain a systemic change(Murray, Caulier-Grice, andMulgan, 2010).

The DAA project goes one stepbeyond the ongoing hands-on exper-iments of designing social innovation,because its goal is not introducing newservices, but learning from already-established innovative solutions,improving the innovation capacity ofthe city administrations and public-sector policies. The expected outputsof the project thus include eight cityimplementation plans and a guide-book on the introduction of designpractices in the public sector. The caseof Helsinki, one of the piloting sites,will offer a better understanding of theoverall project.

In Helsinki, the target group ispeople over the age of 65 who arereceiving informal care in their ownhomes and regular and temporaryclients of home-care support ser-vices. The project aims at diffusing anew, more flexible service provisionmodel involving personal budgetingand creating a network of serviceproviders to support it. With thisnew kind of service planning andbudgeting, the elderly can organizetheir own support and services in a

more independent way. The maingoal of the project is to identify theleverage points within a complexsenior care system—that is, policyareas and management practiceswithin the city of Helsinki andservice departments of the nationalgovernment—in which a shift willbe needed to sustain and scale thenew model. The overall objective ofthe design intervention in Helsinkiis to make policy makers and man-agers understand on a strategic leveltheir importance and role in theinnovation process. To achieve thisobjective, the project aims at makingchanges in three different but con-nected layers: policy and strategycreation, service delivery, and peopleand communities.

In the frame of this project, theinteraction among actors operatingwithin these three layers is seen as akey factor in aligning different per-spectives and ways of perceiving theproblems and evaluating the solu-tions. Because the project has juststarted, results are still to be obtainedand evaluated, but this trajectorydraws attention to the constructionand management of complex net-works of public and private operators—the focus of the following case.

Case 3. The PSP project of theScottish GovernmentThe Scottish Government is com-mitted to ensuring that the thirdsector is able to play a full role inpublic service reform through greaterinvolvement in service design and

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delivery. To tackle this vision, it hasput in place the PSP project (Scot-tish Government, 2011b), aiming atencouraging routine use of co-pro-duction in the design of publicservices and supporting the develop-ment of PSPs:

The purpose of the PSP Project isto select partnerships to co-plan andpilot the design of services whichcontribute to the delivery ofnational and local outcomes. Thesedesigns were intended to inform thespecification for future services,which the lead public authority wasexpected to procure at the end ofthe process. (Scottish Government,2011a, p. 6)

The underlined project assump-tion is that PSPs can enable thedelivery of public services more effi-ciently and with more human-cen-tered outcomes for the users ofservices by putting co-production atthe heart of service design.

The project is structured in threemain stages:

• Third-sector organizations workwith public sector purchasers todesign a service.

• A consortium of public sectorand third-sector organizationsmay conduct a short-term pilot,helping to refine service deliveryparameters.

• The service is further developedto maximize community benefitbefore being competitivelytendered.

A period of PSP piloting is thusmeant to help experimenting with thenew practices before implementingfuture solutions. The project suc-cessfully met its objective of selectingpilot partnerships, within which theapplication of service design methodsand tools could be experimented.The project was thus turned into astructured program led by the Readyfor Business consortium, whichincludes governmental institutionsand private partners, with the aim ofbringing on the experimentation tobuild strategic exemplar PSPs.

Besides the centrality of co-pro-duction, PSPs have the added benefitof giving all partners the opportunityto test out new service designsthrough piloting. This allows opera-tional issues to be addressed and userfeedback to be incorporated into thefinal design of the service.

The results of the experimenta-tion conducted along the project arenow being evaluated to give feedbackon the adoption of the PSP model inthe delivery of services on a largerscale. The lessons learned includeconsiderations on the question ofmanaging organizational change inparallel with the adoption of newprocedures and the construction ofpartnerships and networks (Readyfor Business, 2013). This must beseen as a long-term process, going farbeyond single experiments andrequiring years to be implemented tothe stage of full adoption and inter-nalization of the new knowledge.

Discussion

Previous initiatives around theintroduction of design culture inpublic contexts have generally beenmore concerned with the structure ofthe offering than with the structureof the organization providing it. Theabove-presented cases document adifferent attitude, based on theawareness that the introduction ofdesign culture may require explicitprocesses of organizational change.

In our perspective, the initiativesand the experimentations describedin the cases introduced above can beinterpreted as ways of building anambidextrous frame around thepublic organizations, creating parentstructures or embedded areas meantto introduce design knowledge withinthe systematic exploration of newways of doing things.

With respect to this issue, thecases show different levels of elabo-ration. MyNeighbourhood is devel-oping small-scale experiments; theserisk not affecting the overall cultureof the involved municipalities due totheir size, and thus ways to scale upthe solutions must be devised. DAAstarts by recognizing that risk andtries to address it by developingframeworks for interpreting experi-ments and transferring insights thatcould affect the vision and the poli-cies of the organization. The case ofthe PSPs in the Scottish Govern-ment shows a strong awareness thatthe change in services and that of theorganizations cannot be untied and is

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thus operating in a reverse way: fromthe policies to the experiments andback to the policies.

In our empirical experience withthe MyNeighbourhood project (andwith previous ones), the participatoryconstruction and the prototyping ofnew services at a small scale appear tobe a way of triggering a process ofchange in the public institutions thatare about to introduce them. Thesmall-scale experimentation may pro-duce different effects—for example:

• Connecting a change to thecompetences of the organizationby situating these experimentswithin its specific context andculture

• Engaging employees in the pro-cess of change by involving themin the development of the newsolutions

• Introducing the idea that thechange strategies must becomedynamic and adaptive by con-stantly informing and assessingthem through the results of theongoing experimentation

The DAA case shows the pos-sibility of building an intermediateplayground, in which a participatoryand situated approach can be intro-duced through the dynamic interac-tion between the operative and thestrategic levels of organizationalchange. In this frame, organizationalchange can be described both as aprecondition and as an effect of theintroduction of new ways of doingthings.

The case of the PSPs shows theneed to shift the attention from theeffectiveness of the single solutions tothe possibility of pursuing a widerimpact through the introduction ofnew policies aimed at designing andexperimenting with new ways ofdelivering services and using theexperiments to assess the policies andto foster change within the organi-zations involved.

The passage from the success ofthe experimental projects to thereview of the policies is far fromsimple and automatic. Turning newsolutions into new practices seems torequire a different role for design:striving for a massive change of theprocesses through the dynamic inte-gration of the operative and thegovernance levels, that is, informingthe policies through the results of theexperimentation. Within this frame,we see a major space to revise theprocesses of change of organizations:integrating bottom-up and top-downtrajectories, breaking the bordersbetween inside and outside, andintroducing new forms of partici-pated change management (Fig-ure 1).

The cases show how the con-ception and delivery of the newservices might be bound to thecreation of networks and partner-ships that in turn require the devel-opment of new policies. Some of theservice design tools—for example,“actors mapping,” “stakeholders’matrix,” “system mapping,” and “ser-vice blueprint” (Figure 2)—seem to

put both feet into the field of orga-nizational change without a soundunderstanding of its complexity.

Organizational change issues areactually unknown to most of thedesigners: the abovementioned toolsmight guide them in defining con-veniences and triggers for all theactors and stakeholders, but theyseem to miss the awareness thatchange is not a mechanical process.Even if you find good motivationsfor change, that change will notnecessarily be welcomed by theorganizations that are supposed toundertake it.

Another relevant point that wecan draw from the cases, confirmingwhat we have already mentioned, isthat the introduction of a user-centered perspective per se does notseem to be enough to establishadequate new practices. The DAAcase clearly shows how the focus onthe end user should be balancedwith the understanding that theintroduction of new practicesrequires a continuous mediationwith already-established practices.From this we derive the idea thatthe very concept of participationshould be revised, shifting from thetraditional user-centered design per-spective to that of “complex partic-ipatory design,” in which all theactors and stakeholders should beinvolved as co-designers. Building onthis, cases also show that, wheninnovation is carried on through newforms of networking, the process ofchange should not affect only the

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public institutions leading it. In thecase of the Scottish PSPs, theongoing evaluation (Ready for Busi-ness, 2013) highlights that, to jointhe partnership, third-sector provid-ers and public sector organizationsboth have to change their existingservice models:

Whilst the public and social economysectors appear to take a favourableview of the concept of PSP, inpractice, it is apparent that there is aneed for culture change within bothsectors. The co-planning approach,the method recommended by thisevaluation, requires participants inboth sectors to enter into partnershipas equals. There have been times,within all three pilots, where theimportance of this, and the time ittakes to make this happen, has been

underestimated. (McDonald, Wil-son, and Jack, 2012, p. 3)

These new forms of partnershipalso highlight how public and privatecan be seen as a continuum ratherthan as opposites: the construction ofcomplex partnerships calls for thecapacity of change for both sides,rather than relying on the commonview that the public can becomeefficient and cost-effective only byimitating the private.

The lesson learned during theexperimentation with PSPs suggestsconducting an internal analysis beforecommitting to the change journey.The evaluation of the pilot projectclearly identifies change managementas one of the key issues, explaining that“if there currently is not the capabilityor capacity to properly drive through

this change in your organisation, thena change management plan can bedrafted . . .” (Ready for Business,2013, p. 5). We would say, in astronger way, that, whenever a pro-gram of introduction of designknowledge takes place, a change man-agement plan should be drafted.

Conclusion

The cases above show that embed-ding the practices of design in publicbodies requires the management oftheir organizational change. If theintroduction of design knowledge cantrigger positive effects, there are alsomany issues that should be carefullyconsidered.

The analysis of the cases showsthat the trajectory of the smallexperiments is easier to implementbecause it does not affect the wholeorganization from the very beginning;however, it could be at the same timea source of major obstacles to the realintegration of new knowledge withinthat organization because it might ineffect create a binary system withpotential conflicts between the newand the established culture. Withrespect to this risk, the cases showthat concurrent strategies can beimplemented, as with the design ofan interactive playground in whichthe results of design projects can bemanaged together with long-termvisions and strategies, to be inte-grated in the organizational practiceswithin the perspective of a long-termcultural change.

Figure 1. Participatory framework for organizational change.

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With this paper, we want toprovide a new frame for the investi-gation of a participatory approach toorganizational change, introducing aninterdisciplinary perspective. Disci-plines dealing with innovation shouldconsider the interaction between therenewal of the offering and thechange in structure and processes,promoting the interchange of knowl-edge with the disciplines dealing withorganizational change.

Reprint #15091DES85

Acknowledgment

We developed some of the resultspresented in this paper within theEU-funded project MyNeighbour-hood, Grant agreement N. 325227.

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Author biographies

Alessandro Deserti is a full professorin the Department of Design atPolitecnico di Milano. His researchfocuses on approaches, processes,practices, and tools for the develop-

ment and management of design anddesign-driven innovation. He hasworked on applied research andconsultancy for many companies andinstitutions in Italy and abroad,coordinating projects at differentlevels: strategy, tools, and methods;product development;communication; and exhibitiondesign.

Francesca Rizzo, PhD inTelematics and Information Society,is Senior Lecturer at the Universityof Bologna’s Department ofArchitecture, where she teachesdesign studios. She has worked onvarious European and nationalresearch projects in the field ofinteraction design and service design.Her current research topic is servicedesign, especially in the area of thepublic sector. She is the author ofmany articles published in the pro-ceedings of relevant conferences andin journals. She has been a visitingresearcher at Aalto University,Finland, and a visiting student atthe University of Louisville inKentucky.

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