Making Design Capabilities Work in the Finnish Public Administration

While the existence of design-led practices in the public sector are beginning to take shape in the public sector the question of how and why such practices are absorbed, adapted,or sustained by institutions remains ambiguous.... [ view full abstract ]

While the existence of design-led practices in the public sector are beginning to take shape in the public sector the question of how and why such practices are absorbed, adapted,or sustained by institutions remains ambiguous. While public innovation labs and digital service units of various kinds represent one of the key sites for exploring this phenomenon, design capabilities – skillsets, competencies, and attitudes –are to be found at various levels of central and subnational government as well as within inter-organizational collaborations. While design thinking and human-centered design have become prominent ideas that travel globally, this paper argues that certain glocalizations are at work. The idea of designcapability can be seen as an abstract concept where the construction of meanings are subject to discursive struggles among actor constellations and processes of translation and editing that render it compatible to existing organizational and administrative cultures (Czarniawska & Sevon eds. 1996, Akrich et al. 2002). Inline with Michel Callon’s “sociology of translation” (Callon1986) I understand translation as a process of shifting an ontological different element into a stable network, a net of arrangements. Callon specifies that actors are not conceived as individual human beings, but are combined to a network of discourses,institutional and material infrastructures, technologies, policies and their implementation, standardizations and so on that together influence the way in which the world is and can be seen by humans,and further controls but also secures the way we behave and think. The research question I pose is how are design capabilities being instrumentalized and institutionalized in the Finnish Public Administration? Empirically, I follow a constellation of actors involved in design-led activities at selected sites in Finland to study the assemblage of socio-technical practices,meanings,and relations that are encountered by public officials and public managers. The within-case qualitative analysis compareshow translators cultivate a range of epistemic objects and artefactsinorder to createpolitico-epistemic authority. Zooming in on selected practices I show how their epistemic authority is built by (1) producing a specific type of document (object dimension); (2) establishing specific procedures and temporal templates (temporal dimension); and(3) attributing roles and competences (social dimension).

References

Callon, M. (1986). Some Elements of a Sociology of Translation:Domestication of the Scallops and the Fishermen of St Brieuc Bay.In J. Law (Ed.), Power, Action and Belief: A New Sociology of Knowledge? (pp. 196– 223). London: Routledge.

Czarniawska B. and Sevon, G. (1996) Translating Organizational Change, Walter DeGruyter & Co.

Li, J. (2014) Design Capabilities in the Public Sector, 19th Design Management Institute: Academic Design Management Conference, London, September 2014.