In the previous section, a short overview of the public sector innovation has been provided to readers. Once we also identified the reasons for innovation, there is still a question that needs an answer: why does the public sector decide to work together with service design to address changes and transformation? 

Design – particularly service design – can provide all the methods and tools for effective and successful innovation. Innovating the public sector assets requires time and right strategies, but most of all, it requires a radical cultural and mindset change inside and outside the public administrations, objectives that service design can help to achieve. Going back to the Table1.2, if we accurately analyze the factors that ensured the corresponding innovation, it is possible to recognize some key elements proper to the service design discipline, such as the stakeholders' involvement during the process, users importance for the decision-making process and the capacity building approach. 

Service design puts users and stakeholder in the centre of the idea generation, and this makes the discipline one among the most powerful approaches to deal with societal changes. What makes service design unique compared to similar disciplines is its focus on systems and on organizations, something that allows is to deal with transformation and change within organizations, particularly public ones. “Service design breaks down the front-stage and backstage of the customer experience in a way that helps align organization and business capabilities with customer needs, wants, and experiences” (Quicksey, 2018).

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Drafting an univocal service design process is difficult, if not impossible, since one of the most important principles is the reiteration and the continuous adaption of elements to the reference context. This means that this challenge is unique, and as this also the approach and methods used by service design to overcome it. 

Nevertheless, there are some common patterns in the phases that almost all the service design projects follow (both in the private and in the public sector). These five steps are observation, brainstorming, testing, refining, and evaluating and have been linked to five groups of activities by experts (Whicher, Swiatek, & Cawood, 2013):

- framing the challenges: identify the current state of the art, which are the issues and main problems that users experience, going deeper into the users’ analysis phase;

- concept development: once the challenges are identified, understand the opportunities as a starting point for the ideas generation. This phase includes brainstorming sessions possibly involving also finals users and other actors of the system/proposal;

- prototype development: the testing development helps the shift from concept to a workable idea;

- prototype testing: this phase involves a specific group of users that tries the proposal to find issues and opportunities to improve the service;

- full-scale delivery & evaluation: service designers and service providers work together to collect users’ feedbacks, understand the impact of the proposal, make additional changes and correction.

The table below summarizes the main methods and tools of service design, connecting them to the five phases just taken under analysis (Table1.3).

Table1.3 - An overview of key service design methods and tools 

Accordingly to Christian Bason, chief executive of the Danish Design Centre, a real innovation approach can’t really happen without involving professional service designers. To begin a real path to change, the public sector needs practices and methods coming from the service design discipline, such as prototyping to comprehend users’ necessities, data visualization to give an impactful appearance to the developed proposals and make the stakeholders' behaviours visible, and the designers’ skills in user research.  Designers bring innovative approaches: co-design, creative workshops, ideas generation activities, all those specific practices that stimulate civil servants to come up with new and disruptive ideas, that they wouldn’t have developed alone. In fact, the power of service design lies in the fact that it is a future-oriented discipline, capable of envisioning later scenarios and foreseeing users next needs and attitudes. Additionally, the discipline also follows a defined path that shifts from the mere abstract concepts toward the concrete project, reiterating and improving proposals along the entire journey (Camacho, 2016).

The collaboration between the world of design and the public sector has its roots in the past. Historically speaking — quoting the words of Stéphane Vincent and Romain Thévenet — “a socially-anchored design approach dates back to pioneers like the Austrian-American designer Viktor Papanek (1927–1999), who stressed the importance of designers’ societal responsibility and strongly pushed in favour of sustainable design, not for an elite, but for people with real needs” (Vincent & Thévenet, 2013).

Those first interventions were mainly product-oriented but, years later,  the service design practice started also collaborating for the final services delivery at the beginning of the 2000s in the UK, where new policies of the time aimed at stimulating the civic involvement, have prompted design agencies to open up toward the public sphere. Almost simultaneously, MindLab was set up in Denmark. It worked for sixteen years, until 2018, as a multidisciplinary group of experts with several backgrounds (design, business, marketing, sociology, etc.) which aim was to bring a user-centred approach to the governments' projects and activities (Guay, 2018). These two were doubtless the pioneering examples that helped the interest in public sector innovation rising among the service designer practitioners. In fact, this signed only the beginning of a series of projects linked to the public sphere. Since then, interest in the topic has been growing as well as examples of design organisations, groups or agencies that have started working with or for the public service (Figure1.10).

Figure1.10 - Design for public policy: timeline (2013). Source: Abstract from “Design for public policy: 100 people, 70 organizations, 15 countries”, an infographic by La 27e Région, June 2013 - Full infographics on www.la27eregion.fr 

The first chapter presented a general introduction on the public sector and its shifting toward changes and innovation, but why do some governments decide to turn specifically to the service design discipline to activate this transformation?

Existing literature proves that in recent years, an increasing number of governments at local, regional and national level, together with international institutions and public organisations, has opened up to the adoption of methods, approaches and tools from the design world (Bason et al., 2017; Bason, 2010; Camacho, 2016; Mulgan, 2014; The economist, 2013). In this complex and articulated panorama, the term ‘design’ has been associated with several labels and terms, such as the attributes ‘strategic, macro, public, civic, business, human-centered, social’ or the nouns ‘design thinking, co-design, co-creation’ (Meroni & Sangiorgi 2011; Armstrong et al., 2014).
Nonetheless, what unites all these concepts in the public context is the fact that they are no longer only referred to the design of physical and tangible outputs, but rather to “a diverse set of approaches to, methods for, and ways of thinking about intentional processes for creating societal change, generally focusing on public policies and services” (Bason et al., 2017).
It is therefore clear that design does not represent either embodies the unique driver for innovation in the public sector innovation landscape, but that the discipline plays an important role among interdisciplinary and bigger groups that bring together people from different backgrounds - policy makers, social scientists, economists, anthropologists, civil servants (Polaine, Løvlie, & Reason, 2013). This distinctive miscellaneous environment activates and triggers a profitable ground for the transformation that current governments seek for.

The focus of the present work is specifically the service design discipline, that is now widely considered as a promising tool to drive change in the public sector because of its democratic and creative ways of working based on a human-centered approach. A large number of public bodies around the world have been and are trying to apply and embed service design principles in order to modernize service delivery, innovate services and policymaking, and eventually change the way they work (Mager, 2016). Indeed, service design helps people to reason differently about the challenges they deal with and how to move away from starting with a solution, focusing more on long term outcomes and effects rather than immediate outputs (Moritz, 2005).

Figure2.1 - Source: 98 responses. Service design client sectors, Scoping Study on Service Design: Arts&Humanities Research Council, Design Council, ESRC, Final Report 2012. 

As the Service Design Network’s 2012 Final report - aimed at mapping the current situation - found out, today the public sector is already the largest client for service design (Figure2.1), and the demand is growing. Deepening these data, it is also interesting to see in which areas of the public sector the service design field is working the most: healthcare occupies the first position, followed by education, communication, youth and transportation tied for fourth (Mager, 2016) (Figure2.2).

Figure2.2 - Source: 189 responses. Results from online survey conducted by Service Design Network (SDN) from July to August, 2016. Question: “In which areas have you developed projects for the Public Sector?” 

In the 2016’s ‘Service Design Impact Report’, thanks to its global approach and the large number of members - around 30000 people -, SDN organization has been able to collect and summarize a lot of information from surveys, interviews and researches, identifying in this way five key areas where service design is contributing in order to help innovation in the public sector. The first one is ‘digitalization’, as a way to exploit innovative technology to re-invent the relationship between governments and citizens as well as a method to increase the efficiency of public services’ delivery. The second area is ‘citizens engagement’, where, starting from its own approaches and user-centered methodology, service design supports and encourages a new process of direct dialogue between citizens and the public sector. The third is ‘training and capacity building’, where service design shifts toward the direct training of public servants, in order to teach them all the skills and capabilities they need to improve and innovate the service system by themselves. The fourth one is ‘organizational change’, since very often organizations and processes are not ready for embracing an innovation path and they need to be revised and changed if a real innovative impact is desired. The fifth and last one is ‘cultural change’, where service design activates a radical mindset shift to start looking at public issues, relationships and systems in a different way.

It is possible to distinguish two different levels of interaction between the discipline and the public sector, which offer a different contribution to the innovation process: we speak about ‘internal collaboration’, when design is embedded directly into the government system, in the form of in-house units, dedicated departments or teams, while the ‘external collaboration’ happens when design capabilities come from the outer environment (Bason et al., 2017; Mager, 2016).

More specifically, a distinction can be made between: 

- Embedded designer: A full-time strategic-level employee responsible for developing organisational design capacity, as well as for specific service redesign programs;

- Internal agency: A service design unit (normally multidisciplinary) works with other parts of the organisation on a project-by-project basis;

- External agency: Consultancy from an independent design practice on a project-by-project basis (Mager, 2016).

In the case of external design agencies, we can refer to the PPP (public-private partnernship) model, namely an usually long-term collaboration between one or multiple government departments and a private company. Public-private partnership are structured to provide a specific public asset or a set of services (Deloitte, 2019).

The present academic scene presents a lively debate about which of the two dimensions of interaction is most effective. In many cases, having internal collaborators that have deep knowledge about dynamics and existing ongoing processes, activates innovation in a faster and easier way (Carstensen & Bason, 2012; Kimbell, 2015). In other cases, it is important for public organizations to have external opinion and help, both to adopt a new approach and also to see problems and solutions from new perspectives (Whicher, Swiatek, & Cawood, 2013). 

Accordingly to OECD (2017) understanding where the teams are located within the public organization is relevant to evaluate the kind and amount of influence they play and their dexterity to work towards specific goals within the contextual limits they have. On the one hand, many of them are “centrally based, reflecting the cross-cutting nature of innovation as an activity, but also the leadership and support they enjoy to carry out their actions; organisations close to executive power might thus be the most effective at delivering results” (OECD, 207). This may also reflect some governments’ attitude toward innovation itself: some countries have always had an inclination towards change, which has driven these contexts to shape their structure accordingly over the years. In this case, it is possible to refer to pioneer examples who embrace innovation-focus teams and departments since a long time, some of which belongs to the core analysis of this thesis - United Kingdom, Finland, Singapore (Manzini & Staszowski, 2013; Stokes, Baeck, & Baker, 2017). On the other hand, “independence and distance from the executive power might provide innovation teams with greater freedom and organisational flexibility but their voice might not be heard: while removal from executive power might enable them to be more creative and radical, they could face greater challenges in demonstrating their impact” (OECD, 2017). Although external groups help more in the adoption of different points of view, they may find difficult to effectively communicate with governments’ departments and gaining an effective impact toward innovation could represent a greater challenge for them.

Although the available analysis and researches have not come to a final agreement on which is the more profitable scenario of interaction to drive innovation, they found that proximity to government and executive leadership affects innovation teams’ mission and mandate (Puttick, Baeck, & Colligan, 2014).

In order to understand the ground of challenges that contemporary governments are facing, when we deal with social issues, we need to remember that usually, they represent what the experts named ‘wicked problems’ (Rittel & Webber, 1973). These are not ‘simple’ problems: rather, they are complex challenges directly or indirectly linked with many other little issues, that make their resolution difficult, if not impossible. They require the adoption of different methods and solutions because they are not usually solvable with a standard ‘problem-solving’ process (Kolko, 2012; Schaminée, 2018; Polaine, Løvlie, & Reason, 2013).  This concept was first presented in 1973 by Rittel and Weber, who described ‘wicked problems’ through a decalogue of characteristics. Then, in 2009, Martin revised the previous theory, summarizing the ten peculiarities in a shorter list of four points that characterized this phenomenon: causal relationships are unclear and dynamic;  the problem does not fit into a known category; attempts at problem-solving changes the problem; no stopping rule (OECD, 2017). The existence of this kind of challenges is not uniquely linked to the public sector, but the description fits most of the small and big problems that governments face nowadays. In 2008, Korsten mapped within a system of axes four different types of problems, accordingly to the level of knowledge and consensus which characterizes them. Thus - as the following diagram shows (Figure2.3) -, in the four quadrants it is possible to make a distinction between 1) simple problems, 2) ethical issues, 3) scientific issues and 4) wicked problems (Korsten, 2008). Simple problems are well-known by a large number of people who also share a consensus on their entity and the importance of solving them; ethical issues involve a spread knowledge about them, but the impossibility of reaching a consensus on the solution (i.e. the existing debate about vaccines); thereafter, the third category - scientific issues -, regards those challenges that, despite the endorsed agreement on how to solve them, needs the gathering of a lot of scientific knowledge to be solved; lastly, wicked problems lack every possible type of awareness or understanding, nor consensus that can somehow help their resolution. It is important to point out that the adoption of design approaches is not logical either useful if we refer to the first three groups of problems: instead, in the last case, design can markedly contribute to the resolution of wicked issues (Schaminée, 2018). In fact, design practice and, particularly, service design - thanks to its methods, tools and approaches - can lessen and ‘soften’ wicked problems, thanks to the focus on empathy, the use of abductive inference and the large usage of prototyping techniques (Kolko, 2012). 

Figure2.3 - Four types of issues (Korsten, 2008) 

Existing literature provides numerous findings that present the main reasons why the discipline is linked to the public sector innovation. First of all, seeking for innovation, service design is one of the main topic currently connected to this term: it is relatively new and is continuously changing and evolving, something that allows it to bring always newness into companies and organizations (Kershaw, Dahl, & Roberts, 2017). Moreover - as stated in the introduction - more and more governments are trying to better meet citizens’ needs: consequently, thanks to its main focus on users, service design has largely become the principal ‘weapon’ to face and answer their request. Additionally, another important aspect that triggers public sector interest is the discovery of examples coming from other pioneer countries. Existing researches prove how important is to show current practices and working examples in the field, in order to increase the awareness on what service design do and is able to deliver in terms of innovation (Mager, 2016; León, Simmonds, & Roman, 2012).
Service designers, by their side, are always looking for new and intriguing challenges. For this reason, they are increasingly interested in taking up projects for the public field: both because they see a lot of potential in such a large segment of the market and also because this represents a unique opportunity to reach a very large audience. Moreover, the public sector represents the perfect ground for experimentations and prototyping of new ideas (Polaine, Løvlie, & Reason, 2013).