Do you need a hammer?
On the kind of work that needs doing to make our institutions better, and who we hire to do it.
Hannah Arendt, the twentieth century political theorist, distinguishes between three kinds of what, these days, we just call 'work'. The first is labor. I hate labor. This is cyclical, repetitive and inescapable: it's what we have to do to stay alive and healthy. Cook the meals, eat the meals. Clean the bathroom. The same dull, insipid routine of insignificant actions of buttoning and unbuttoning.
Work, by contrast, is what we do to buy ourselves some freedom from the necessity of attending to our biological needs. Work has a beginning and an end, and after it's finished we have something that we didn't have before. We build a hut and now we have a hut to sit in: we don't have to do the work of finding warmth and shelter each time it rains.
Here are our design projects. We come up with a way for people to automatically fill their online grocery carts, and after it's built many people are freed from searching and clicking and searching and clicking and still ending up with the wrong amount of bananas. More to the point, we don't have to go back to the beginning and repeat the work that we've just done. We have our hut.
Even better is when these projects also fall under the definition of action: that of collectively reimagining and reshaping our shared world. Aristotle writes about telos, meaning something like 'end point', or 'ultimate purpose'. The telos of a knife is to cut. The telos of a designer is to make things, or to make things better. For me, and, I suspect, for many, it's the latter.
It's unfortunate, then, that the spaces in which the most opportunity exists for making things better - governments, healthcare organisations - are the ones where design work can come to feel the least like action and the most like labor. These organisations are where bureaucracy lives, dulling the enthusiasm of many optimists until they, too, become the kind of people who require shepherding through six careful meetings to concede that perhaps change might be (a) a good idea or (b) possible at all. Or they leave.
Some people working as designers do thrive in this environment. There are people who enjoy the work of navigating these organisational leviathans and slowly building consensus - and who are good at it. Who are happy doing what Max Weber described as the essential work of politics: the strong and slow boring of hard boards. Who don't mind showing up where they aren't, necessarily, welcome.
Andrew Knight, head of the UK Government's Policy Design Community, writes that public sector designers have a common anecdote: they spend the first 10 minutes of every meeting explaining what design is and the second 10 minutes explaining why they should be there at all. He's commissioned a Public Design Review seeking to co-create a universal value proposition for designers across government. The results are due out this spring.
I hope that with it, we can begin to be honest about the kind of work that's needed to make things better in the public sector. Is it facilitation, mediation and bridge-building? Or is it the synthesis of complex information, creative thinking and solution-finding? Is the start point a problem, or is it a group of people who don't see eye-to-eye? Do you want to end up with a solution, or would a more realistic outcome be a set of shared goals, assumptions and frustrations?
Because those are both vital, but they are different jobs. They need different people, different processes, different support. Crucially, they also need a different set of expectations: about the spaces that the people doing them will be in, the people they'll be talking to, and the kinds of conversations they'll be having.