File under obsessions

Many of you will know that I'm fairly obessive on the subject of voting design.

I've just had a piece on voting design published by the Design Council, in Touching The State, launched this week at the Houses of Parliament.

The invitation to contribute was I felt a great opportunity to address the issue of voting design in a reasonably non-specialised forum - rather than preaching to the converted - and the article, entitled The X Factor, focuses squarely on the issue of user- or human-centred design in the context of voting. I could have said a whole lot more, about this and other matters regarding design and the state, but there were a whole lot of other people involved in this project ranging over this terrain, from a range of disciplines, so a clear focus on UCD and voting seemed to me the best option for getting UCD onto this particular agenda.

Other contributors to this volume included:
Hilary Cottam - Design Council
Ben Rogers - Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR)
Clive Grinyer - Orange World Customer Experience (and previously Design Council)
Henrietta Moore - Professor of Social Anthropology, LSE
Deyan Sudjic - writer (The Observer etc.)
Stephen Coleman - Oxford Internet Institute
Jane Roberts - Camden Council
Colin Burns - Design Council (formerly IDEO)
Ralph Ardill - Imagination

There's been much talk recently about the next political big idea. In my view, the idea that public services and state-citizen encounters could - and should - be considered cohesive systems that can be designed based on user research, rather than cobbled together on the whim of government lawyers - just think of all those acts of parliament - and Ed Straw's generalist du jour, is about as big an idea as you can get.

A Design Council piece issued the day before the launch states:

"In public services, the Design Council is urging Government to dedicate 0.5% of public procurement spending to designing services around the end user. The public services debate currently centres on the scale, not the target of investment. But, if design thinking - which puts end-users' needs first - is missing then there is a high risk that services will fail the people that use them, be they teachers, nurses or members of the public."