Introduction

Innovation has become a much-used word in the public sector in the last two decades (Hartley, 2005; Osborne and Brown, 2013). As governments seek solutions to pressing issues within the inevitable financial constraints they face, they have increasingly turned to the idea of ‘innovation’ to help them address the complexity of problems with which they are grappling (Lewis et al, 2017). While innovation might be considered problematic in governmental contexts, given that it has strong normatively positive overtones on the one hand, but presents significant challenges to traditional bureaucratic procedures on the other, it is an idea that has gained currency around the world. This is in part demonstrated by the creation of many public sector innovation (PSI) labs at multiple levels of government in individual countries, as well as in international organisations such as the OECD, with its Observatory of Public Sector Innovation (OPSI) established in 2014.

Responding to this rising focus on public sector innovation, governments have begun experimenting with design-led or ‘design thinking’ approaches as a way of reframing policy issues and generating and testing new solutions to public problems (Bason, 2013; Design Council (UK), 2013; Kimbell, 2016; Blomkamp, 2018). Although seldom concretely defined, design thinking can be loosely understood as a ‘human-centred’ approach to innovation that draws from the processes used by industrial and product designers. In terms of design researchers, it is: ‘Performing the complex creative feat of the parallel creation of a thing (object, service, system) and its way of working’ (Dorst, 2011: 525). Design thinking is increasingly being looked to by organisations who have a need to broaden their repertoire of strategies for addressing open-ended and complex challenges (Dorst, 2011). This has in part been driven by a social turn (Chen et al, 2016) within the field of industrial design, as designers, inspired the participatory philosophies of theorists such as Papanek and Manzini, have sought to evolve design beyond a tool for the development of functional consumer products into a process for the collaborative development of ‘radical change’ (Bjögvinsson et al, 2012).