Service Design in the Public Sector

The digital transformations revolutionizing so many aspects of contemporary culture are also dramatically changing government services. Designers have an important role to play in these shifts. A wide range of government services— from applying for birth certifications to voting and paying taxes; from immigration applications to citizenship and permitting processes—are becoming available in digital formats. This extension of government services from traditional countertop services to digital access means that governments are hiring designers to build these online applications and platforms. This redesign of services, when including human-centric research methods, enables citizens to have a say in the government decision-making process (Stewart, Dubow, Hofman & Stolk, 2016), and has resulted in exciting design opportunities as well as significant challenges. In this thesis, I elaborate on the practice of service design in a government context, from micro and macro perspectives, using three case studies. In the first case study, I will give an example of how governments are transitioning to redesign specific public services using Agile principles. Agile describes how prototyping and development teams experiment with different possibilities in short “agile” periods of time, allowing real end users to contribute their insights. Using rapid prototyping methods such as Agile helps provide simple and useful ways for citizens to find, use, and contribute to the design of government services. This first case study will describe agile practice in the rapid prototyping lab at Ontario Digital Service (ODS), an organization under a provincial government ministry. In the second case study, I will describe how governments practice service design from a broader perspective. This example comes from my work with Public Digital Innovation Space (PDIS), an organization under Taiwan Open Government. PDIS contributes to facilitating public collaboration with citizens and the government under a mandate from the Taiwanese ministry called Open Government. In this case study, the service design organization is tasked with encouraging citizens and other stakeholders to participate in the government decision- making process and social discussions. In the context of my Master’s research, it was important to investigate ethical issues in bringing neo-liberal rapid prototyping methods to government service design (Kimbell & Bailey, 2017). The final case study outlines a workshop I held with fellow design students to investigate one ethical issue in design; power dynamics within multidisciplinary teams. I had realized that there was a lack of discussion around design ethics in the public sector.