Why JUNCTIONS Now?
The 20th century was marked by government agencies worldwide adopting modern management approaches to help leaders foresee the nature of labor, transportation, education, the environment, food production and consumption, learning, and many other aspects of people’s daily lives.
This effort led to the creation of governance structures, including departments and their divisions, to increase efficiency in resource allocation during the planning and implementation of massive development schemes. Each with specific agendas and budgets, these structures evolved to become silos with their internal management practices architecture to minimize operational costs and maximize the public value of their services and offerings.
While these siloed structures helped enrich societies during the 20th century, they are now insufficient to overcome the intertwined challenges of the 21st century. It has become clear that no single office can confront today’s complexity alone. Most government agencies have experienced barriers in delivering their schemes caused by schemes created in other departments.
Moreover, people’s lives are becoming more varied, autonomous, and sophisticated, demanding public leaders to search for more holistic yet pliant approaches that can help them better understand what the public values and create new offerings that add value to ever-diversifying patterns of everyday life. But how do we move forward?
In recent years, the number of public organizations adopting design to create more holistic programs has significantly increased because the resulting conventions about framing, making, and implementing standardized policies and related schemes are being replaced by more responsive, multi-level and multi-intelligence participatory engagement models capable of producing tailored offerings to diverse populations. Whether running a federal, state, or city government agency, public leaders need greater flexibility, responsiveness, and speed that design provides to public innovation.
Design can help the world deal with some of its most vexing challenges, but this potential will be limited if the field does not shift from a base of case histories to evidence and logic.
What Can Design Do?
For design to meet an ever-growing demand to create public value, it needs to move from a perceived reliance on informal knowledge to build reliable theories and methods usable at scale, with evidence they are effective, easily understood by other disciplines, and expandable through further research.
JUNCTIONS aims to further this understanding by:
Advancing debates about challenges and opportunities concerning the strategic use of design knowledge to create public value;
Exploring how a greater adoption of design capabilities to promote public innovation will influence the evolution of the field’s knowledge;
Igniting the formation of a learning network/ community of practice interested in working at the intersection of design and public innovation.
In addition to the public event on March 14, this convening will host three topic-specific closed sessions. If you are interested in being involved please contact Deaa Bataineh at dbataineh@id.iit.edu.
