What options do we have in our toolkit as policymakers when it comes to policy design? Are the tools government typically chooses to wield the most effective ones? If not, how can we get government to invest in a new approach to policy design?

In episode three of our series on policy design and implementation, Colleen Pulawski (MPP ’21) speaks with Brandon Greene of the Oakland Civic Design Lab and Michael Ford in the Oakland Department of Transportation about using human-centered design to restructure government policies and services. Spencer Bowen (MPP ‘20) joins in the conversation to help unpack what we, as policy students, should take away from this application of human-centered design.

Interested in following Oakland’s efforts to use human-centered frameworks to design better government systems? Eager to learn about other teams doing similar work? Check out the resources below:  

• Check out the CDL’s website and keep up with their current and future work on Medium
• Read Brandon’s 12-week series on innovation in city government on GovLoop
• Explore Bloomberg Philanthropies’ work with i-teams across the globe or Apolitical’s Innovation Lab Directory

Transcript

Colleen Pulawski: We've been talking policy design for a few episodes now, and it's brought up a lot of questions. We know that a particular approach to designing policy results in particular policy outcomes and a different process could produce different outcomes. Our toolkit for designing policy determines whose voices are heard and how different priorities are valued. So how do we decide which tools are best? Once we decide, how do we go about using them? Are the tools we've used historically for designing policies still the best tools to use today? If not, how do we shift toward a new set of innovative design tools? Welcome to Talk Policy To Me. I'm Colleen Pulawski and today we're talking human centered design. Hi, Spencer. 

Spencer Bowen: Hey, Colleen.

Colleen Pulawski: OK. I have a question for you.

Spencer Bowen: OK.

Colleen Pulawski: If you could redesign any government policy or program tomorrow, which would it be?

Spencer Bowen: Great question. It would be CalFresh, which is California's SNAP program or food stamps. This program has been demonstrated to be one of our more effective social safety net programs, including research by our own Hilary Hoynes here at the Goldman School. But there are a lot of administrative hurdles to getting it. In California, you have to reapply every six months for this program. And these are folks who generally, if they're qualifying for SNAP or pursuing SNAP benefits, are pretty burdened in a lot of other ways, so one of my first steps would be figuring out ways to make access to SNAP easier, not by expanding eligibility, but by thinking about the hurdles we put in front of people to get that benefit. 

Colleen Pulawski: So it's really clear when we think about policies, it can be really clear to see what what the problem is. And a lot of times it can seem somewhat clear, I think about the path forward on how to do it better. But then I think getting really into the nitty gritty of redesigning a policy, it gets pretty gnarly pretty fast. 

Spencer Bowen: Yeah, I mean, even defining the problem, right. Like you have an intuitive sense of what's wrong, but like putting words to it and narrowing like we talk about here so much is hard even to start.

Colleen Pulawski: Yup. So today, I wanted to talk about one approach that is helping policymakers get a little bit more traction. And it is called human-centered design.

Spencer Bowen: Human, okay, so what is human centered design?

Colleen Pulawski: So human-centered design is this solution building framework, and it puts the needs of the people for whom you're designing front and center. So I think really similarly to what you're talking about with your CalFresh redesign. Hopefully. But the real key here is this meaningful difference to the stakeholder experience throughout the entire process. And we're really driven by this assumption that it is truly they who know best. So typically you're going to start with a discovery phase where the work is really driven by pursuing an empathic approach to understanding the problems being suffered. And this phase is often formalized at the outset of a human centered design process. But it doesn't really ever end. So then what follows is typically called an ideation phase, where stakeholders and designers all sit together at a table and they brainstorm creative tailor made solutions to this problem. And then finally, everyone engages in a process of iterative implementation where potential solutions are tested and redesigned and tested again and again and again until we finally home in on what we think for now is the perfect solution.

Spencer Bowen: It's very cool. It also sounds pretty big picture. 

Colleen Pulawski:  Definitely. So I wanted to get a more concrete sense of how human-centered design can be used by government to craft policy to design policies. So I chatted with the manager of the Civic Design Lab here in Oakland to find out more about how these frameworks are being used right here in our backyard. 

Brandon Greene: My name is Brandon Greene and I manage the Civic Design Lab in Oakland City Hall. My view of human centered design is in line with organizing principles, which is those closest to the problem or closest to the solution. And so my view is that since government is supposed to be designed and structured to help people, thats why we organize societies, the most responsive government would be looking at the ways in which policies are having harmful detrimental impacts on folks and be consistently reinventing itself to more accurately reflect the needs of the populace. 

Colleen Pulawski: OK. So we can all probably agree that government is supposed to take into account the voices of the people it serves when designing policy, right. But how government actually does that can look many different ways. I asked Brandon to paint us a picture of the status quo. 

Brandon Greene: Oftentimes policy is constructed by folks who have power in rooms unto themselves. I think in a lot of ways, government is not adequately set up to be responsive to the communities it serves. There's not a lot of inputs for information. So city council meetings, for example, are very hard to attain. They're oftentimes very long if you want to try to make it to public comment, you usually have to sit through hours of hours of things that might not necessarily be relevant to you. And then by the time it's your turn to talk, you only have a couple of minutes to try to convey your message. So what that ends up creating is those who have the most power, privilege or time can then be the ones who disproportionately wield the share of power because they have more access. And so since those kinds of public meetings are usually the most direct line to someone, it necessarily means that the public input process is somewhat diminished just by people's relative inability to attend those meetings. 

Spencer Bowen: So human-centered design is at least one way to respond to outdated modes of seeking citizen input. Does it reach any further than that? 

Colleen Pulawski: It definitely can. Brandon and the Civic Design Lab are using human-centered design to take on the task of fundamentally shifting the way government approaches policy and service design. 

Brandon Greene: When I came on board as the manager of the Civic Design Lab, I created a whole new design process mission statement, vision statement and a set of values because I don't want to do things that don't adhere to a certain value set. And so it is important to define what those values were to make it transparent. 

Colleen Pulawski: So one thing I think worth noting here is that human-centered design is not just a tool for government. It gets applied all over the place and really notably in the private sector, for product development. But human center designed for policymaking is distinct from designing for the private sector. And something important Brandon did at the Civic Design Lab is define three questions to always ask of potential projects. 

Brandon Greene: How might this project empower? How might this project have tangible impact? And how might this project increase equity? And if a project won't do those three things, it's not really work that I'm interested in doing. At the center of human-centered design is supposed to be this idea that it creates empathy. As applied, that can be true, but I don't think that it's that is always true, which is why I think there has to be this kind of layer of transparency and accountability in real value sets. 

Spencer Bowen: It sounds like Brandon is tapping into something really crucial here about using human-centered design and government. The Civic Design Lab isn't innovating to chase profits or amp up products sales. It's innovating to make life better for the communities government is responsible for. And that's pretty different.

Colleen Pulawski: Totally. And I really want to get back to that point a little bit later. But first, let's take a quick break. When we come back, we're going to take a look at how Brandon and the Civic Design Lab are using human-centered design on a current project with the Oakland Department of Transportation.

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Colleen Pulawski: Welcome back to Talk Policy To Me, where Spencer and I are talking human-centered design. 

Spencer Bowen: Let me recap. So far we've heard about how human-centered design seeks to respond to certain deficiencies in more traditional policy design tools. But how is the Civic Design Lab using it on the ground? 

Colleen Pulawski: The lab is currently collaborating with the parking and mobility division of the Oakland Department of Transportation to help redesign the parking system. So I spoke with the manager of the division to get a sense of how human-centered design is helping his team strive for super bold and innovative solutions. 

Michael Ford: Well, my name is Michael Ford and I'm with the city of Oakland's Department of Transportation. And I'm specifically responsible for managing the department's parking and mobility division. When the Department of Transportation was created, one of the things we knew we wanted to do was deliver on the city's parking principle. And one of those parking principles is that we should actively manage the parking system. And I know that sounds kind of simple, but in fact, it represents a paradigm shift in how the city of Oakland would be dealing with its parking system instead of being reactive, you know, just kind of responding to problems. We had to actively think about how programs should be tailored to respond to the particular characteristics or needs of different commercial districts or different constituencies. So it really does represent a major change from the way things had been done. 

Spencer Bowen: This sounds a bit like Brandon's ideal of a government that is consistently reinventing itself. So how are human-centered frameworks helping Michael and his team achieve this goal of active management? Is human-centered design really helping the parking and mobility division get unstuck from its history of reactive governance? 

Michael Ford: The Civic Design Lab offers a department like the city of Oakland's Department of Transportation an opportunity to look at the system, the transportation system and in general or the parking system in particular in a constituent-centered or human-centered perspective. And that's that's very different than the previous paradigm where you you wouldn't you wouldn't be looking at anything other than the entire city. It was just one size fits all. So it really didn't matter who was at the center of your analysis. After you recognize the importance of adopting human-centered design in innovating in policy, the first thing that we realized in having the opportunity to work with the Civic Design Lab was that we didn't want to rush to judgment. What the human-centered design process does is it basically forces you to step back and take the position or take the the attitude that we don't know what the problem is. We can't be sure what kinds of solutions we're gonna be putting forward because we don't know. And that means then that we need to engage in a robust effort of engaging with the community for a given initiative in ways that we allow them to tell us what their pain points are, what what they see as a missed opportunity and ways in which we can better serve them. So you put that all at the front and align that with your attitude that we don't know and that that in itself is significant.

Colleen Pulawski:  And back over at the Civic Design Lab, Brandon thinks the parking system redesign is on a trajectory toward better outcomes than if the division hadn't applied a human-centered framework.

Brandon Greene: Without sort of this partnership between the Civic Design Lab and the Department of Transportation on this particular project, I think the project might have went about its work a little bit differently than it has. Maybe we would have been solving either the wrong things or maybe we wouldn't have had this sort of myriad of things that we're looking at now. And therefore, the impact may have been a little bit more limited. Some of the interesting insights that have had us shift or ask further questions to see if the quantitative data sort of backs up the qualitative data, had been around things like street sweeping. For example, one survey respondent said that they work at night and if they sleep for more than a couple hours, they always get a ticket because by the time they get home and go to sleep, they wake up after street sweeping is happening. Some folks have said that they believe that they get tickets when street sweeping isn't actually occurring. Other folks have said that because there's the switch off every other day for their street that there is nowhere to park. So the practical effect is by virtue of owning a car in certain places, avoiding a ticket is impossible. Again, the initial framing of the project might not have had us look at that. 

Spencer Bowen: So it sounds like human centered design has the potential to be pretty effective in helping policymakers step back from the systems we want to transform and rid ourselves of any misguided assumptions about what the problems actually are.

Colleen Pulawski: Definitely. And I also really love how Michael talks about how it helps us move away from a one size fits all approach, which I just think is really crucial when we want to design policy with equity at the forefront. And together, all of this can help guide us toward more responsive, holistic solutions to pressing problems. But before I got too excited about a magical policy design approach that can fix all of our problems, I figured I should ask Brandon is there anything we should be cautious or wary of when bringing these tools into a government setting? 

Brandon Greene: A good friend of mine from the Justice Collective, which is a woman of color led consultancy in Oakland. They would always say that properly done, equity leads to efficiency, but it has to be properly done. Again, I think if done correctly, human-centered framework can hold people's feet to the fire in terms of like radically re-envisioning things and being more ambitious and there's always this notion of innovation should be okay with with failure, being okay with failing fast. I think that that is all true. But I think how we are failing fast and what we're endeavoring to do is is most important. 

Colleen Pulawski: So I want to bring it back to this public vs. private sector discussion that we alluded to earlier, because a question Brandon's comment brings up and that I'm not totally sure I have a perfect answer for is how should public sector innovation differ from private sector innovation, particularly here in the Bay Area, where we're surrounded by the move fast and break things culture of the startup realm. So, yes, government is sometimes a little stuck in the past, but how do we reconcile this desire to fail fast in pursuit of civic innovation with the reality that government is often risk averse for good reason? It has people that it has to take care of. 

Spencer Bowen: Right. This is something I think a lot about in that just my perception is like people who are talented and want to make a difference in the Bay Area oftentimes see the route to that in like the tech industry in this kind of startup world, where I think there there is a hint of this really genuine, you know, we're going to innovate the heck out of problems and make life better for people. And I think in the Bay Area in particular, we get locked into this kind of fail fast startup beat, like South Bay, Facebook, Uber way of kind of attacking problems. And it might have its place. But like you say, there's very good reason for government to be a little more cautious and plotting. It can be frustrating, but we should be confident and bold and talk about why this is a good idea sometimes, to not always be thinking like a tech industry person. 

Colleen Pulawski: So stepping away with these lessons in human-centered design, I'm still left with two big picture questions. First, as future policymakers, how can we utilize these tools to foster better policy design and what resources should we look to. 

Brandon Greene: For policymakers, I would say speak to your local organizers. I think organizers kind of have it down to a science in terms of really trying to assess the needs of people and trying to put that forth into policy solutions. 

Colleen Pulawski: And the second, maybe more crucial question, how do we get government to embrace this new way of doing? What do these frameworks need in order to thrive? 

Brandon Greene: The most important aspect is probably an attempt, a culture change, because the way the Civic Design Lab envisions doing its work is very different than the way government has operated in. So I think a large portion of the work is trying to work with staff and others to create buy in. So I think it's really important for internally, you know, my work to be thinking about, you know, how do we bring employees into the innovation process? Like what are the cultural questions internally for how staff experience their ability to have ideas and have those ideas championed. 

Colleen Pulawski: At the end of our chat, I asked Michael, as someone working in government who hopes to see these frameworks applied far and wide, if you could get anyone to listen to this podcast and learn a little bit more about human-centered design, who might it be? 

Michael Ford: I think it's a great question. Who should hear about the lessons we've been learning about the importance of the CDL and human-centered design? I've been thinking about this for a while and I think that the people that I would really like to communicate this to are the young people, whether they're still in school or whether they've just recently finished school and have just started their careers. They might find themselves in a situation that is still defined by the old ways, the old bureaucracies, the old organizations, the old policies, that the real challenge is to take advantage of these new tools and to believe that asserting the importance of human centered design in to the public sector is a critical priority. And that although there's going to be resistance, there's going to always be resistance to change, but this is also the real opportunity for for young planners, for young policymakers, you know, for for people who've just come into the public sector. And I just want to encourage them to take stock in and take confidence in this framework and that they should forge ahead like pioneers and make sure that it does take hold in the public organizations wherever they find themselves, and that they they endeavor to use it and to to make a difference, because I think it has tremendous potential to make a real difference in the lives of our constituents. 

Colleen Pulawski: To keep up with the work of the Oakland Civic Design Lab and their current initiative with the Department of Transportation, visit Oaklandca.gov. To follow more of Brandon's musings on fostering a culture of innovation within city government, check out his 12 week series on GovLoop. Talk Policy To Me is a production of UC Berkeley's Goldman School of Public Policy and the Berkeley Institute for Young Americans. To read show notes or listen to past episodes, visit Talkpolicytome.org. Our executive producers are Bora Lee Reed and Sarah Swanbeckk. Music heard on today's episode is by Blue-Dot Sessions and Pat Mesiti-Miller. Michael Quiroz is our audio engineer. I'm Colleen Pulawski. I'm Spencer Bowen. Thanks for listening.