MUO-E8012 - Design for Government D, 01.03.2021-24.05.2021
This course space end date is set to 24.05.2021 Search Courses: MUO-E8012
A14: Develop / Co-design / Evaluate intervention
Estimated time to complete this assignment is a max. of 22h in total, per person individually and in group. This includes: stakeholder planning, conducting validations with stakeholders, desktop research, developing the design intervention visualisations, design intervention iteration and production of other visual materials to communicate your proposal.
This activity is spread between Week 8/9 - 11. Note that on Week 9, this is the only activity planned and when time could be invested the most. On Week 11, focus should shift to preparing the final presentation. That's why we recommend you to frontload the effort of this activity on Week 9 and decrease it progressively on Week 10, so that on Week 11 you'd only need 2h to finalise the design intervention and the rest be spent on the final presentation.
NO SUBMISSION NEEDED: BE READY TO SHARE ON 10.05 (3min. Story in Contact teaching)
This activity is about formalising and visualising your final proposal. To develop your design intervention, you are free to use the materials, format, methods and design process, that is more suitable to your selected instrument or type of intervention.
This activity includes:
- Production of a visual example of your design intervention: Your intervention should show a compelling example of how change would be achieved. By How we mean how the identified leverage point(s) or proposed change would happen –rather than how the intervention would technically work, or how it would be marketed and launched. The primary focus should be to choose a relevant case/situation that shows the value of your intervention in a specific and relevant context. For example, If you want to change a specific behaviour, your intervention should capilalise and reflect on the existings contextual elements and use the specific triggers of that situation. Use the contextual cues to inform about your design intervention. How users (citizens or staff) will adopt this intervention realistically?
Your intervention might be made up of a sub-set of multiple interactions or government actions. In this case, we recommend that you show high-level designs of these, rather than developing all the design materials that would be needed for each of those actions/interactions.
Your intervention might be made up of a sub-set of multiple interactions or government actions. In this case, we recommend that you show high-level designs of these, rather than developing all the design materials that would be needed for each of those actions/interactions.
- Best practice examples: Look for best practice examples and similar types of intervention. You do not need to reinvent the wheel! You can use existing design interventions (e.g. a nudge) that has been used in the same subject area or in a complete different field, and adapt it to your project brief. You are allowed "to copy" as long as you reference it. References to similar design intervention will inspire you but also they can be used as evidence to justify your proposal.
- Validate your proposal: Validate that your design intervention is valuable and that is understood by your direct or indirect stakeholders, specially your DfG partners. You can involve your stakeholders early in the development process and later, you do not have to wait until you have something finalised! Be mindful of organising co-creation workshops, as they can be time consuming. Note that the priority is to get stakeholder input, not their level of participation in designing the intervention. At this point you should think of stakeholder engagements as output-oriented meetings; every meeting has to produce a progress in your idea development. For this, we recommend you to make the conversation as tangible as possible, for example you can share initial sketches to get feedback, or ask them to produce ideas during a meeting.
- Communicate your proposal to your partners: Consider the choice architecture principles (2012, Thaler & Sunstein): Who uses? Who chooses? Who pays? Who profits?. For example, if you intervention was aimed at informing a new policy, your target audience would be policy-makers, or service providers if it was a policy implementation or service type of intervention. Consider how to communicate your design intervention for those who are responsible to take this idea further and implement it.
Frame your solution as a government action. How do they put your intervention into action? You can connect your intervention to 'a traditional type of instrument' that is familiar and known to government, so that they can relate and understand what to do with it. - Tips:
- Contextualise your intervention into specific 'human' situations (translate it into use)
- Your solutions tell a human story with a systemic perspective, use these as elements to communicate and visualise your intervention
- Use visual representations, graphics and style of illustrations that you are more comfortable with
- Choose the right level of fidelity. E.g. If you simulate a future-based scenario it is good to use graphic resources that denote that it is an 'imaginary' scenario. In this case, a combination of photography and illustrations would work well.
- It does not need to look polished! We are not doing interface design. The final look and feel of your design intervention or branding is not a priority.
- Build scenarios that are informed by real human stories that you have heard from your primary research
- Use choice architecture principles as a creative process. When is the solution triggered? Where should the first interaction or entry point happen? Within which platform/instituituon? Trigger points identify behavioural moments for a solution to be adopted successfully. Entry points are the platforms and channels of those institutions that are present in that moment. E.g. In the DfG License to heat project, they used "changing homes" as a life event or trigger point for behavioural change. The entry point of their intervention is changing the address with Posti or Kela, with whom users intereact when changing homes.
- Give your intervention a self-expanatory title! e.g. License to heat.
- Get input from your stakeholders to learn how to communicate and frame your solution
- Frame your intervention using your partners' language – or the potential owner, so that they can understand it and promote it internally
- Examples of design interventions on Miro Board (contact teaching 29.04): https://miro.com/app/board/o9J_lf5pDcI=/
- Behavioural Insights Team – EAST toolkit
- Behavioural Insights Team – Green Nudges
- Choice architecture article by Thaler & Sunstein (2012)
- Government as a System types of intervention taxonomy
"Speculative Everything" by MIT press
- 27 April 2021, 2:14 PM
- 27 April 2021, 2:14 PM
- 27 April 2021, 2:14 PM
- 27 April 2021, 2:25 PM