Other ways of looking at policy-making: A support for the 'design for policy' research

Abstract

Designers are increasingly being employed within government and the public sector, leading to a growing scholarly interest in understanding how design approaches, methods, and tools may affect policymaking. This inquiry has been carried on by design scholars in a field called “design for policy”. The present theoretical paper argues that such interest, whilst timely and relevant, has been hampered by a simplistic conceptualisation of “policy”, rooted in the authoritative instrumental view of policymaking and exemplified by a staged vision of the policy process (i.e., the policy cycle). The paper will review the shortcomings of this way of seeing policymaking by referring to the main critiques of authoritative instrumentalism. Then it will propose alternative ways of overcoming this vision by developing a theoretical and conceptual framework applicable to the empirical study of data-centric policymaking practices. The purpose is to support design researchers in developing empirical investigations for the “design for policy” field.