I recently attended an event at the Danish Embassy on “Designing Policy” that was organised by the Associate Parliamentary Design & Innovation Group. The event was to address the challenge of designing policy while highlighting the opportunities by learning from the experience of MindLab in Denmark. If you don’t already know, Mindlab are a cross-ministerial innovation unit that use innovation and design methods to improve the development and delivery of policies in Denmark.

Experiences were shared by Christian Bason, Director of Innovation at Mindlab and there were responses from a panel of experts from design and policy such as Jill Rutter of the Institute for Government, Lucy Kimbell of the Young Foundation, Aviv Katz of the Innovation Unit, Ailbhe McNabola of the Design Council and Richard Harries of the Department for Communities Local Government.

The examples from Mindlab were inspiring but from a design perspective they are common sense. Lots of designers would be asking why don’t we already use user-centric methods, micro-macro ethnography, co-design and co-production when developing policy? Surely we should better understand the communities and people we are developing policies for by exploring, experimenting, protoyping, failing, testing and improving continuously?

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