The difficulties of what it takes to drive innovation from within government are manifold and rooted in institutional culture. Deputy Chief of NYC Department of Education’s iZONE , Seth Schoenfeld, provides insights into the various ways social and political problems can be reframed as design problems from a government’s perspective.
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Seth Schoenfeld: Designing Public Goods – Schools, Policy, Markets
Christian Bason: Design for the Public Good
How can design be used for the transformation of public governance? Through his work at MindLab, Christian Bason outlines how design attitudes help public managers interact with new service models and innovation approaches. His research explores how design bridges the gap between policymakers, end-users and practitioners, to better address complex social problems.
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Nigel Jacobs: Building the Human-Centered City
How can a city government help create the ‘human-centered city? From “transcending data” to “rethinking public infrastructure,” Nigel Jacobs, Co-Founder of New Urban Mechanics – a civic innovation incubator – describes the challenges to building a culture of government innovation. Can government even in principle innovate for the public good?
Nigel explores the efforts of New Urban Mechanics to drive public sector innovation from within government, drawing upon the resources, skills and talents of the city at large to press forward and solve perplexing public issues.
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Cara George: Design for Capabilities
What are the opportunities that emerge from instilling design capabilities in federal employees? Cara George, Designer-in-residence in the Lab@ OPM details the immersion projects and design-thinking workshops they use to introduce creativity in government and federal public servants.
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Sarah Schulman: From Designing For to Making With
From Designing for to Making With, InWithForward uses ethnography, research and prototyping to turn social safety nets into trampolines. How can co-design be used to bridge formal systems and informal systems, enabling positive behavior and outcomes? Dr. Sarah Schulman, co-founder of InWithForward, asks how practitioners can co-own change with everyday people, turning service system processes into feedback loops.
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Chelsea Mauldin: Co-Designing and Co-Producing Public Service
Public Policy Lab works to improve public services by increasing the public sector’s capacity to solve complex problems through design methods. Executive Director Chelsea Mauldin highlights the various efforts of her organization to negotiate change in NYC by integrating design tools into the work of policy officials. Included in the presentation is the official release of the Rockefeller-supported Designing Services For Housing, a joint-project between PPL, Parsons DESIS and NYC Department of Housing Preservation and Development.
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Gabriella Gomez-Mont: Designing from Somewhere
How can a lab push government to take risks, involve citizens more deeply, and encourage the right to co-create the city through civic innovation and urban creativity? Gabriella Gomez-Mont tells her journey as the Director of Laboratorio Para la Ciudad in Mexico City.
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Joeri van den Steenhoven: Periodic Table of Social Innovation
What are the various models, approaches and configurations that constitute the emerging terrain of labs and public innovation places? Jorie Van Stoeenhoeven, Director of the MaRS Solutions Lab, introduces the periodic table of social innovation elements, and how labs can create environments conducive to social change.
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Bryan Boyer and Justin W. Cook: Strategic Design & Social Innovation
The intersection of design and social innovation is attracting growing attention. An increasing number of practitioners and enthusiasts are convinced that strategic design is key to unlocking some of today’s most pressing challenges. But what does it mean in practice? How are leading practitioners employing strategic design to inform policy, generate new enterprises and shake systems? This lecture with Helsinki Design Lab, a project initiated by Sitra, the Finnish innovation fund, explored how strategic design processes can be used to invent new means of effecting change in policy, business, and civil society.
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François Jégou: From the Design of Public Services to the Design of Public Policies
Building on the experience of a series of recent action-research projects, Jégou, founder of the sustainable innovation lab Strategic Design Scenarios, will question the current way public action is conducted and discuss opportunities and limits for design to support a co-evolution between social innovation and public innovation.
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