How do policy and design intersect? Three relationships
本文批判了将设计与政策关系简单归结为实践清单的文献,提出设计对政策的关系不仅是“为”政策服务,还包括“与”政策合作和“对抗”政策,并构建了工具性、即兴性和生成性三种关系类型,帮助更批判地理解政策中的“设计转向”。
‘Design for policy’ is a prominent framing of the intersection between policy and design. Here, we ask, if design is ‘for’ policy, then what exactly is it doing? We make a critique of literature that explains the interaction of design and policy by listing practices (prototyping or visualisation, for example) but that misses the reasons why those practices are being used. We build on and advance scholarship that anchors design in relation to the demands, constraints and politics of policy making, taking account of the quite different forms a relationship between design (as a thing) and policy design (as a process) can have. Within this debate we propose that design’s relationship to policy is not always in service to (‘for’), but also sometimes ‘with’, and even sometimes ‘against’. We set out an original typology which differentiates roles of design in policy along the lines of their ultimate purpose, scope and terms on which design and policy interact. We identify an instrumental relationship, in which design is a tool to support achieving specified goals of policy making; an improvisational relationship, seeing design as a practice enabling policy making to be more open in the face of unfolding events and experiences; and a generative relationship where design facilitates the re-envisioning of policy making. Through our analysis and proposed typology, we aim to address overly specific and overly homogenising understandings of design in the policy space, enabling a more critical understanding of the different intents and implications at play within the ‘design turn’ in policy.