RESEARCH & TEACHING

Policy by Design


What changes when we apply the tools of design to the way policy gets made?

Policy is often designed around institutions, systems, and abstractions. But the consequences of policy are lived by people. I became interested in what might happen if policymakers approached those people not simply as constituents, beneficiaries, or data points—but as people with behaviors, constraints, aspirations, and lived experiences that could inform how policy itself gets designed. 

This question became a body of work spanning research, teaching, experimentation, and practice.


THE RESEARCH
While much has been written on the case for better technology in the public sector, the same attention has not been paid to design’s place in the policymaking process. I wrote this paper based on the belief that design can and should play a key role in the public policy space. In six chapters, this paper provides an overview of the policymaking process as it is today, presents a reimagined policymaking process with design at its core, and lays out the path toward building a class of "policy designers".




THE CLASSROOM

 In partnership with professors from Columbia and MIT, I co-created and taught a graduate course bringing policy and design students together to work on complex urban problems. We combined systems thinking, research, stakeholder engagement, and prototyping to test what each discipline could learn from the other.




THE EXPERIMENTS


How can we translate the practice of prototyping to the world of policymaking? Find out as I take you through an example using the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.