The single most successful driver of social change is ‘Design’- Melinda Gates of (Gates Foundation), not the media, IT, technology, activism, but Design. Design is often associated with luxury, products and consumerism but it has never been or not anymore!. Design is everywhere. ‘’Design is devising a course of action aimed at improving an existing situation into preferred ones’’.
From how you create your weekend shopping list to how you manage your wardrobe, how managers schedule and delegate tasks and how governments make policies—Design has no boundaries.
Here, our intent is to infuse design thinking into policy making to enable us drive the change we desire in Nigeria society because no matter where you look, you see wicked problems waiting to be solved. Corruption, poor maintenance culture, poverty, unemployment, insecurity demand new ways of thinking. It is not to say that our government or institutions lack the political will to tackle these nor funding or manpower. It is just that our approach is not sustainable and only scratches the surface.
Take for example, corruption: Convicting one governor for corruption will not make others to not be corrupt, why? Because corruption is a system problem and not just a ‘people problem’. If people perceive the system to be weak, they will try to manipulate it just to see what happens. But design gives us the capacity, skills, tools to tackle problems such as corruption from a different mindset by exploring the boundaries of systems such as corruption involving varying talents, citizens, governments together with a combination of technology and digital tools.
How do we design? We start by understanding the users, empathizing with them via research methods like ethnography & observation to pick out trends and uncover needs even latent ones, then we come together to create and co-create with all stakeholders via idea generation and workshops. We prototype service ideas or policy visions and then we test these ideas with a small sample of users before we implement. Design is never finished, so we continue to iterate and improve with feedback from the ‘real users’.
We believe this methodology is very useful for the government and the social sector as we begin to seek an improved governance and quality of life from the government. Budget cuts, depleting natural resources, moribund infrastructure are constraints that design can work around in our economy.
Design is more like policy. Search every government document and you will see the word ‘Design’ in almost all of them but used in a practical way to mean: ‘making things better or creating a new version’.
The future of policy in Nigeria lies within design and design thinking and our capacity to apply and scale this across board. We can enable change by translating ideas into policies, and policies into services that will create meaningful citizen-experience for the people–This is what governance is all about. When the ordinary man on the street opens the tap and water flows from it.
Our vision at PolicyLab is to turn the process of policy making into services that serve the people using design because design is about conceiving ideas of a better future and finding ways to make them happen. Join us to make this change a reality.
Charles Ikem
Executive Director, PolicyLab Africa