Policy Lab

A team in the UK Cabinet Office that brings design, data and ethnography into policy making, and writes openly about how.

Visit websiteopenpolicy.blog.gov.uk

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Systems thinking for civil servants
The Government Office for Science's introduction to systems thinking for complex public sector problems, bringing together guidance, tools and case studies.
All's well that ends (and peaks) well? A meta-analysis of the peak-end rule and duration neglect
A meta-analysis in Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes of how peaks, endings and duration relate to the way people evaluate experiences in retrospect.
An introductory systems thinking toolkit for civil servants
Step-by-step guidance for eleven systems thinking tools, including systems mapping, feedback loops and leverage points.
Beyond Good Intentions: Towards a Power Literacy Framework for Service Designers
A 2021 paper proposing a power literacy framework for service designers, covering privilege, access, goals, roles and rules. Open access copy from TU Delft.
Cross-government design community
The community for service, interaction and content designers working in and around the UK government, coordinated through the GOV.UK Service Manual.
Cultural context and service design: developing critical and meaning-making capacity
A Design Management Academy 2017 paper exploring cultural analysis and semiotics as ways to understand expectations, identity and symbolic meaning in services.