Prototyping enables public servants making policy to mediate between actualities and potentialities but is not [yet] a legitimate evidence-producing activity, and is uncomfortable because outside of the normal range of practice. It enables flexibility in policy development, keeping things open as provisional solutions are anticipated, developed or rejected. However, policy solutions are inescapably bound up with ideological and political narratives. By revealing the genealogies shaping prototyping practice, we have shown that its characteristics can be reconfigured inside government within a new spirit of policy-making—yet this may not be able to live up to the hopes associated with such participatory, creative endeavours.

from Lucy Kimbell and Joss Bailey’s new paper Prototyping and the new spirit of policy-making. Lots resonating in this article.  Have felt this very real uncomfortable / non-legitimate organizational response to prototyping for policy. And tried to express some of that experience to Joss in London back in March when I had the pleasure of meeting with her.

However, anyone who has seen The Thick of It – let alone actually worked in government – will know that policymaking is anything but linear – or even, very often, evidence-based. Civil servants will acknowledge privately that what they do is highly political, is inflected by multiple competing drivers and interests of greater and lesser integrity, and progress requires clever manoeuvring. “Although policy is a big word that covers a lot of things, the centre ground is in making difficult – sometimes impossible – trade-offs between multiple competing aims, with limited resources, in a political context.”[8] The opaque world of Whitehall bureaucrats – the world in which design is making an entrance right now – is just as subject to the demands of agonism as the chamber of the House of Commons.

How we understand and deploy design in this context, then, and what we intend it to achieve, means making some decisions. Do we want to market design as providing solutions, presented as the logical end point of a rational process, and discussed in clear and definitive terms? Or might design (and in particular practices such as co-design) be treated as a form of negotiation between competing interests – between civil servants in different departments, or between government and publics – in the formation of policy ideas and decisions, and in the reconfiguring of actors around a particular problem?

“John Dewey’s great insights is that, on the contrary, there is nothing more complex, nothing more susceptible of mistakes, nothing in greater need of specific and constantly refreshed inquiries than to detect what, at any point, is the public’s problem. I quote: “Observations of consequences are at least as subject to error and illusion as is perception of natural objects.” (p. 29). In this sentence, what is important is the word “consequences”.

Whatever has been planned, there are always unwanted consequences for a reason that has nothing to do with the quality of the research or with the precision of the plan, but with the very nature of action. It is never the case that you first know and then act, you first act tentatively and then begin to know a bit more before attempting again. It is this groping in the dark that is so difficult to map, especially when it is done by millions of people over the life of millions of others.”