Introduction

Governments see themselves as increasingly confronted with complex or wicked problems (such as climate change and migration). Characteristic for such issues is that many different stakeholders are involved, with different ambitions, interests and perceptions. A solution for one actor may imply an increase in problems for others (Head, 2008). At the same time, citizens’ expectations of public services have increased (Armstrong et al, 2014; Kimbell, 2016; Bailey and Lloyd, 2017; Bason, 2017). In this context, design approaches are seen as a promising way to provide smarter and more agile ways to empathise with these actors and their problems, and to find mutually beneficial opportunities and solutions (Armstrong et al, 2014; Bason, 2016; Mintrom and Luetjens, 2016).

At the same time, thinking about design for public issues is far from new. Some 50 years ago, Herbert Simon already called public administration (PA) a design science. That implies, in the view of Simon, that this field is different from the natural sciences since it studies the artificial – or human made – instead of the natural and, as such, deals with the contingent instead of the necessary – with how things might be instead of with how things are. Design ‘is concerned with how things ought to be, with devising artefacts to attain goals’ (Simon, 1969: 133). In Simon's view, the core of designing is the ability to deal with situations as one encounters them by both diagnosing the problem and devising a way to deal with it. Whether that solution is the design of a material artefact, a treatment plan for a sick patient or a social welfare policy does not really matter. The idea of PA as a design science has since then been underlined by several scholars in the field (for example, Shangraw and Crow, 1989; Frederickson, 2000; Meier, 2005; Walker, 2011).

However, it seems that the current attention on design and design methods aligns with a different approach to Simon’s. Recent applications of design methods involve the use of design or policy labs, design charrettes and other experimental and exploratory approaches.