the thick of it
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?
Lovely bit of writing from Jocelyn Bailey in the UK on agonism, policy, and design. From Whose Utopia, Designing for a Pluralist Society. The title immediately triggered my memory of reading Friedmann’s open letter to Manuel Castells entitled The Good City: In Defense of Utopian Thinking (PDF). More of a good history of utopian thought and impulses in city planning theory than anything, but the Corb image and word had a pretty strong recall function on the Joss Bailey post...
