And a special shout-out to those who helped spread the word: more than half of our applicants said they heard about the project through a friend or colleague, so we appreciate everyone’s efforts to send great people our way!

We’ll be moving quickly to review the applications and interview candidates. (The final split of applicants by category is to the left, so our aspiring research fellows have the stiffest competition.) Watch this space for the announcement of our class of fellows later this month.

On Wednesday, April 24, from 6:30 to 8:30 PM, the  group will hold its inaugural event, An Evening of Civic Innovation. Public Policy Lab director Chelsea Mauldin will present on Public & Collaborative, PPL’s ongoing project with the NYC Dept. of Housing Preservation & Development and Parsons DESIS Lab. The evening will also include presentations from three City employees who are using technology in innovative ways to improve government services.

The event is free, but registration is required.

During the spring and summer of 2013, we’ll be investigating the high-school admissions process through the experiences of students, families, administrative staff, and policymakers. Ultimately, we hope to inform the development of supports that assist students — particularly those from low-income and non-English-speaking families — in making more informed decisions when selecting a high school. We’ll also use this initiative to test approaches for iZone’s ongoing use of design-based innovation methods.

How to Apply

We are currently no longer accepting applications from professionals interested in participating in this project. We will award three fellowships, for design research, visual design, and project strategy.

Please read the complete Call for Fellows background document [pdf], then visit our online application form to apply. The deadline to apply is May 5, 2013.

Program Activities

Finding Consensus

To begin, we’ll focus on project planning, goal setting, and team-building activities. The core project team will include DOE staff, private-sector professionals who receive fellowships from the Public Policy Lab, and executive leadership from both project partners.

Building Understanding

The project team will then carry out a range of ethnographic and co-creative exercises with users to capture their needs, preferences, and lived experience. We will synthesize and visualize these insights, create preliminary conceptual designs, and identify opportunities for improving service delivery through additional co-design, rapid prototyping, and testing.

Sharing Findings

In our final phase, we’ll compile and revise our research findings and recommendations, then create a presentation and report (or other artifacts) to share internally and externally. Look for our findings to be shared in Q3 of 2013.

The New York City Department of Education is the largest school district in the country, with more than 1.1 million students and 1,700 schools. Each year over 75,000 students participate in a complex school-selection and application process to gain admission to city public high schools.

The Public Policy Lab has formed a partnership with the New York City Department of Education’s Innovation Zone (iZone) and the Office of School Enrollment to explore opportunities for improving the high-school admissions process. During the spring and summer of 2013, we’ll be investigating the high-school admissions process through the experiences of students, families, administrative staff, and policymakers.

Ultimately, we hope to inform the development of supports that assist students — particularly those from low-income and non-English-speaking families — in making more informed decisions when selecting a high school. We’ll also use this initiative to test approaches for iZone’s ongoing use of design-based innovation methods.

Program Activities

Finding Consensus

To begin, we’ll focus on project planning, goal setting, and team-building activities. The core project team will include DOE staff, private-sector professionals who receive fellowships from the Public Policy Lab, and executive leadership from both project partners.

Building Understanding

The project team will then carry out a range of ethnographic and co-creative exercises with users to capture their needs, preferences, and lived experience. We will synthesize and visualize these insights, create preliminary conceptual designs, and identify opportunities for improving service delivery through additional co-design, rapid prototyping, and testing.

Sharing Findings

In our final phase, we’ll compile and revise our research findings and recommendations, then create a presentation and report (or other artifacts) to share internally and externally. Look for our findings to be shared in Q3 of 2013.

Photo by Chloe Dietz under Creative Commons License

One interesting example is the UK Cabinet Office of the Behavioral Insights Team, or the “nudge unit.” They began work in July 2010 “to find innovative ways of encouraging, enabling and supporting people to make better choices for themselves.” The team has been employing a variety of empathic-based research methods – behavioral observation and psychology – to sculpt services on a small scale through iteration and evaluation. As a result of their innovative methodologies and proven outcomes, the team is no longer a peripheral experiment, but a core component to policymaking.

Some of their initial successes: 1. Personal text messaging was used to increase the repayment rates of court fines. One can assume that the channel in combination with the human tone proved to be effective. 2. Scenarios like – “9 out of 10 people in your area have paid their tax on time” – were written into documents that encouraged tax repayments. The focus on social capital influenced behavior; tax repayment rates were improved. While this list is quite straight forward, it shows potential.

David Halpern, director of the Behavioral Insights Team, writes in The Guardian that by “scrutinizing our [public] services from top to bottom with a behavioral lens…by shifting our focus, and resources, from treating expensive symptoms to acting on behavioral causes; and by reshaping services from passive delivery to…nurturing the capacity of citizens to help themselves and each other,” public service designers, policymakers, and social innovators have the ability to improve the quality of service outcomes while enhancing people’s lives.

This is the third of three related posts on empathetic and behavioral aspects of service design by Public Policy Lab fellow Liana Dragoman; also see part one and part two.

Thumbnail image via The Guardian.

Krznaric says, “Empathy is about social change…a revolution of human relationships…We need new social institutions. For example, an empathy museum…a place, which is not about dusty exhibits…but an experiential and conversational public space…” where people can connect with others and come to understand the lived realities of the individuals who pick their coffee beans or lead their country. Collective empathy has shown to be transformative for individuals and societies because it deconstructs the language of assumption, control, and power through its practice.

How does this approach relate to the work of designers? Many social innovators and public service designers draw on sincere forms of collaboration in order to ignite positive social change. Participatory service-design research methods—like ethnography, behavioral observation, co-creation, and iteration/testing cycles—support service designers in the act of meta-designing for outrospection, or creating contexts in which people can perceive the experiences of others and respond empathetically.

These methods bring to life outrospection in order to drive the co-design of service systems, and ensure that those systems have the capacity to support personal histories and social context. With an empathic lens, service designers begin to be able to see, feel, or comprehend what is not obvious beyond their own context and desires and generate real opportunities for social and cultural change.

This is the second of three related posts on empathetic and behavioral aspects of service design by Public Policy Lab fellow Liana Dragoman; see part one. Part three is coming soon.

Per a meta-design framework, service designers do not create, control, or even design the experience for users; they develop a living system of purpose-driven tools, resources, and infrastructure that guide the making of an experience. That experience is animated, lived, or designed by the person or people who actively participate in the exchange. As such, service users and providers are ‘allowed’ to be active problem solvers, not monolithic consumers of information who are asked to unlearn who they are in order to fit into the design of a service.

People inherently bring their stories ‘to the table’ – their personal histories, biases, habits, influencers, social context, values, and emotions. While some of these stories are invisible at the surface, they are variables that deeply shape the way people read, process, and interact with the world around them. Personal histories influence the manner in which people negotiate themselves within a service framework and can impact the outcome of the exchange.

Why is meta-design an important consideration? It provides the language, time, and space for service designers to embrace and nurture the ‘messiness’ of what it means to be human in authentic and productive ways. It humbles designers through its empathic potential, and opens them up to new, previously unimagined applications of their work. When service designers intentionally or unintentionally design for ‘control,’ ignore how people read an interaction, or develop non-participatory situations, the transformational components and effectiveness of that service can be compromised.

This is the first of three linked posts on empathetic and behavioral aspects of service design by Public Policy Lab fellow Liana Dragoman; see part two. Part three is coming soon.

Last year, a national design contest called for redesigns of the record, to meet four objectives:

1. Improve the visual layout and style of the information from the medical record
2. Create a human-centered design that makes it easier for patient to manage their health
3. Enable health professionals to more effectively understand and use patients’ health information
4. Help family members and friends care for their loved ones

The design community took up the challenge and produced an extraordinary body of smart human-centered design, putting more power in patients’ hands.

Awards for the Best Overall Design went to gravitytank from Chicago, IL. Calling their entry Nightingale [pdf], they focused on creating a dynamic, holistic, understandable and personalized experience. It’s clear, friendly and intuitive. Second place went the entry [pdf] from Studio TACK of Brooklyn, NY (shown above), who organized the patient’s medical information into a personal health strategy. Third place went to Blue Button by Method [pdf], from Method of San Francisco, CA. Their entry provides a clever printable pocket guide in addition to the online component.

So, how will the competition translate into reality? First, the contest website is hosting the winning designs, along with a bunch of other submissions that either won specific categories (e.g. Best Medication Design) or that the judges found otherwise inspiring. Next, a selection of the winning designs are being built and published, as open-source resources, on Github. When the build-out is complete, developers of Electronic Medical Records (EMRs) will be invited to both integrate the designs into their products and further contribute to their ongoing development. We’re generally skeptical of crowd-sourced competitions, but this seems like one to emulate!

In the past, the agency has sought professional design assistance to imagine better paths forward. Design researchers at Maya partnered with the USPS to explore customer segmentation to assess the value of customized services. They concluded in 2008 that the agency’s needs should be addressed programmatically, as a full system, instead of tackling one small challenge at a time.

A piecemeal approach seems to be ongoing, however: The USPS blog, managed by its inspector general, and its INNOVATIONS@USPS site list a host of open-sourced redesign ideas. Examples include paid ad space at offices and on boxes and trucks, providing package tracking like FedEx and UPS, and hybrid mail (both email and paper). Meanwhile, the USPS five-year plan released last May calls for cutting costs through workforce reduction, consolidation of facilities, and elimination of Saturday delivery (full PDF here).

On the revenue-generation side, Congress is considering letting the agency sell ads and expand its services to include shipping wine and beer. All 27 EU countries are commercializing their mail services, says Real Clear Markets. If the USPS also eliminates its monopoly, certainly there’s an opportunity: a private post office means a private service for self-selecting customers. People who love snail mail would be the target customer, instead of those who don’t see value in physical mail.

However, what happens in communities when the mailbox and the post office become obsolete? A national postal service has value in connecting lower income, rural, and un-networked citizens — those least likely to have access to a purely commercial system — to vote, communicate, and participate in civic society. Maybe those holistic design recommendations deserve another look.

Thumbnail image via Maya.

Last year’s winners in the Service Design category included Basecamp, a product and online community in partnership with Zipcar that makes access to camping experiences easier for urbanites; the Service Design Programme to support Wales’ manufacturing industry; and an open-source platform where LEGO fans can submit product ideas to be voted into production.

Applicants must answer questions about the problem they seek to solve, design process and stakeholder research, values and social impact, and project scope. Images must also be uploaded to the application site (a video testimonial is optional). We look forward to the results in June. Winners will receive this trophy and digital ribbon, and be published in the online awards gallery. You can follow the Core 77 Design Awards on Twitter for updates.