The Public Design Gap: Are we really hiring for transformation?

What the UK’s Digital and Data Capability Framework reveals about government reform

This thinking was presented as part of the UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose’s Rethinking the State Forum, 2025.

There’s a question that doesn’t get asked enough in conversations about government reform: are the people we’re hiring actually set up to do the thing we say we want them to do? Not in terms of talent or commitment – the civil service has plenty of both. But in terms of how we’ve defined the work, what we’ve decided to call success, and whether the systems we’ve built to develop capability actually point people toward the problems that matter most.

In the words of Jen Pahlka, in order for government to get better at doing the things it says it does, we need the right people, working on the right things. And in the UK, I don’t think we have.

Service design as a public panacea

For over a decade, design has been championed as the discipline that would help government think differently — bringing user-centred practice, experimentation, and systems thinking to the knotty, contested work of policymaking in the face of the many wicked and interconnected challenges we’re facing. The UK’s Government Digital Service was built on this promise. Public sector innovation labs like Policy Lab UK sprung up on the same foundations. And yet, despite measurably improved digital services, better citizen journeys, genuine, documented savings, and a professional community that simply didn’t exist twenty years ago, there is very little evidence that design has meaningfully scratched the surface of high-level policy development. Why?

The problem isn’t that government lacks talented people, or even the right instincts. It’s that it has spent the last decade hiring, training, and organising itself around a skills framework focused on delivery – and then acting surprised when those same institutions struggle with transformation. Nowhere is this clearer than in the rise, and limitations, of service design in government.

As a profession, service design was adopted through the creation and professionalisation of the digital, data, and technology (DDaT) career paths in the civil service by GDS in 2011. A huge moment. One that was genuinely transformative for digital public services. But – and this is integral to the argument – it inherently (perhaps inadvertently) embedded a commercial logic into the DNA of the practice that has never fully been interrogated. GDS mixed ideas and ways of working from commercial tech and agile software development to reshape how government procured, developed, and delivered digital services. The key phrase there is commercial practices – because service design is, at its roots, a discipline based on the role of design in organising production and consumption in industry. That origin matters more than we’ve admitted.

Since then, service design has been used as a “panacea” within the public sector – for both improving public services and, more ambitiously, as an approach to policymaking itself. The latter of which I’ve been practicing for the past three years. There are now hundreds of service designers across UK central and local government. Which makes the gap between what the profession is thought to do and what it’s actually doing all the more important to examine.

The public design gap

Despite a relatively large degree of success in improving digital public services, there is very little evidence that service design has had a significant impact on high-level policy development. Instead, a public design gap has emerged – where service design is deployed downstream, focused on improving citizen experiences of services without necessarily involving citizens in the significant policy decisions that shape those services in the first place.

What this means in practice is that service design – a capability explicitly built to reduce risk through iterative learning – is not being used to test assumptions before decisions are made. It arrives after the policy is set, after the commitments are made, after the assumptions have hardened. As Public Digital document in The Radical How, waterfall-style programmes start with many risky assumptions. By the time design enters, the window for real influence has often already closed, sometimes at significant public cost.

Illustration adapted from The Radical How by Public Digital, 2024

This downstream focus reflects broader institutional constraints – ones I’ve explored in previous articles. But here I want to focus on something more specific: service design as a practice. Because I think the discipline itself, as it has been institutionalised in UK government, lacks the political literacy and systemic capabilities needed to work upstream – and that this isn’t an accident. It’s a consequence of how we have professionalised a discipline without interrogating it’s commercial bias.

The key difference between commercial and public design is often framed as a question of outcomes. Businesses direct design toward shareholder value, market share, brand. Public design, by contrast, is oriented toward the creation of public value – “as both an outcome and a process”. This involves designing in unavoidably political contexts, across systems, with citizens, within longer-term socio-technical goals that no single organisation controls. And, fundamentally, these different purposes mean the practices themselves – the inputs, outputs, skills, and mindsets required – are fundamentally different. Yet, the framework that governs how service designers in government are hired, trained, and evaluated doesn’t reflect that difference.

Wrong framework, wrong place

This commercial orientation is visible in black and white in the Government Digital and Data Profession (DDaT) Capability Framework, which defines the service design role as “a method of designing end-to-end journeys of a service to help users complete their goals and deliver policy intent.”

Deliver. Not shape. Not challenge. Not co-produce. Deliver.

To understand why this matters, it helps to set it against what the UK’s own public design review – a landmark piece of evidence synthesis published by the Cabinet Office last year – identifies as the actual practices of public design. The review defines seven core practices that characterise how design creates public value across the full policy cycle: from understanding people’s lived experiences and generating ideas, to visualising possibilities, synthesising perspectives, enabling citizen co-creation, facilitating cross-organisational collaboration, and practically experimenting with potential options. Taken together, these aren’t a list of tools – they are a vision of what design is in a public context: participatory, systemic, experimental, and oriented toward outcomes that no single team or institution can define alone.

When you map the DDaT’s service designer skills against these practices, the gap is stark. What follows is that analysis – and it makes for uncomfortable reading.

A gap analysis between Public Design Practices and the Service Design Digital and Data Profession Capability Framework

What this reveals is a lack of publicness in how service design has been institutionalised – and consequently how it is practiced, funded, and staffed. The framework aligns closely with specific phases of delivery rather than the full scope of practices needed to achieve genuine policy outcomes. In particular, three critical gaps emerge that the framework either under develops or ignores entirely.

1. Sustained citizen participation. The framework asks for user research to generate insights. It does not ask for structured, long-term approaches to genuine co-production – the kind that gives communities real power over decisions that shape their lives. The result is a reinforced top-down model of policymaking, with citizens consulted rather than involved.

2. Place-based and ethnographic research. The framework prioritises usability analytics and user insight. It doesn’t ask for the kind of deep contextual research that connects individual lived experience with the wider social, ecological, and systemic structures those lives are embedded in. Policy made without this is policy made partially blind.

3. Policy prototyping beyond the digital. The framework has a strong focus on digital iteration – prototyping products, adapting interfaces. It doesn’t ask for prototyping in physical spaces, policy sandboxes, or regulatory experiments that test assumptions before they calcify into legislation. This is precisely where design could reduce risk earliest in the policymaking cycle. It’s also precisely where the framework goes silent.

The consequences of these critical gaps (and this analysis in general) should be a much bigger conversation than they currently are – and I don’t think we’re having it honestly enough.

Because this isn’t just a skills gap. When you hire, train, and grade designers against the wrong framework, the effects compound in ways that are easy to miss but hard to reverse. The quality of the work narrows toward what the framework asks for. The perception of what design is – among policymakers, among senior leaders, across the civil service – gets shaped by what designers are seen to actually do. The culture around the profession contracts. Work that might have been ambitious becomes cautious, because the incentive structures reward delivery over inquiry. And perhaps most troubling of all, the people who are genuinely motivated by transformation, by the harder and messier work of shaping policy rather than implementing it, look at what the role actually asks of them and decide it isn’t for them.

We end up with service designers doing a great job – at the wrong jobs. This is the current reality in the civil service.

Towards public design

To close the public design gap, there is a clear need to distinguish public design from other approaches – moving beyond improving the delivery of public services to a full suite of practices that generate public value through desirable policy outcomes. After all, design is about making things better. Where its strength in opening up possibilities has typically been perceived as a weakness within the constraints of policymaking, realising that potential requires a different mindset: a belief that government should be humble about its ability to know how policy will work in practice when working in complex systems.

This starts with differentiating public design from “just good policymaking” – where design practices often appear in isolation, disconnected from each other and from the policy cycle – toward understanding how a full suite of public design practices can be applied end-to-end, driving equitable, participatory, and genuinely creative policymaking.

Some argue that service design itself is ready for this shift – that the profession is being primed to embrace the full ambition of public design, that its existing foundations are sufficient to evolve toward it. I’m not convinced. Not because the people aren’t capable, but because the structures that shape the profession – how it’s defined, graded, hired for, and resourced – are not. You can’t iterate your way to transformation using a framework optimised for delivery. And continuing to ask service designers to do the work of public design without giving them the scope, the mandate, or the capabilities to do it isn’t evolution. It’s wishful thinking.

The more honest starting point is that we likely need to expand the range of design professions in government altogether – and to do so in a way that is explicit about scale and purpose. This is where Dan Hill and Anja Melander’s conceptualisation of strategic design becomes genuinely useful – as a practice that takes the core principles of contemporary design (user research, ethnography, iterative prototyping, participation, co-design) and directs that toolkit toward ethical concerns, systemic change, and broader societal outcomes. It is, in their framing, concerned with “design doing” rather than design thinking: working across networks, scales, and timeframes to help redefine how problems are approached before solutions are reached.

Illustration adapted from Strategic Design for Public Purpose by Hill & Melander, 2025

What makes this compelling for government isn’t the label, it’s the logic. Strategic design, in this conceptualisation, operates at precisely the scales where the public design gap lives: across systems, upstream in the policy cycle, in the “dark matter” of policy, regulation, and organisational culture that shapes what services are even trying to deliver. It connects the practices the DDaT framework currently ignores – not as additions to a delivery role, but as the foundation of a distinct professional practice with a different remit entirely. It also helps you imagine what the other professions that work in between these gaps could be.

None of this is straightforward. Defining new design professions within government means changes to capability frameworks, grading structures, and how roles are scoped and resourced across departments. It requires political will to give designers a legitimate seat upstream, not just downstream. And it requires senior leaders willing to accept that design’s value in policymaking isn’t despite its openness to uncertainty, it’s because of it.

Fundamentally, the right people, working on the right things. That’s it. The question is whether we’re willing to be honest about the gap between that aspiration and the framework we’ve actually built to pursue it – and whether we have the appetite to do something about it.

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