Fifteenth International Conference on Design Principles & Practices

Abstract

The intersection between innovation, new capacity building, and the public sector has merely been explored from an educational perspective. With the rise of innovation spaces in governments that promise to shift the state of affairs, or at least start to steer the administrative apparatus to enable preferred futures, the circumstances seem to be favorable to consider how to train designers otherwise as to be able to respond to the complexities of public bureaucracies from an emergent and local perspective. These innovation offices aspire to carve space to envision and device novel forms of creating public policies and implementing them, many times through enhanced or digitized public services. Thus, as design thinking, systems thinking, and service design become central to their operations, trained designers are falling behind with what they can contribute. They are not prepared to perform in such intricate environments which require designers with the capacity to adapt and reframe the issue from multiple perspectives. Design education has the potential to spearhead an educational transition towards disciplinary hybridity, where hard and soft skills are developed with equanimity in the classroom. As these new avenues of practice open for designers, this paper aims to illustrate the structural form in which a hybrid course between design and policy might be constituted. Two case studies are presented, the first within the School of Design at Carnegie Mellon University, in Pittsburgh and the second at the Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México, in Mexico City.