Design and Organizational Change in the Public Sector

The demand of a new generation of public services is leading to a systematic exploration of what design can do for public organisations. If the rapid growth of service design practices spread the idea that design is not just focused on tangible artefacts, the effects of their introduction in public organisations are still underestimated. This article explores the ongoing trend of the adoption of design as a practice to deal with the innovation of public services through the discussion of three cases, in the light of the hypothesis that the introduction of design knowledge in public institutions should be reconnected to the management of their organisational changes. In particular in the analysis of the cases the authors discuss evidences in favour of a new interpretative framework in which the design of new artefacts (service, processes and solutions) can be described as a powerful yet implicit agent of change.