Day 2-Civic Design at Scale: Introducing the Public Policy Layer Cake

— Hello to everyone out there. Its nice to virtually see everyone, and were are here to talk about civic design at scale

 

— Public Policy Lab is a nonprofit innovation lab for government that has worked with dozens of agencies and communities to improve public services
  • From veterans to homeless populations

 

— When you design in complex government systems, civic designers must take a systematic approach
  • We noticed service design focuses on public facing interventions, but doesn’t know how to deal with policies and structure that support the changes we want to see happen
— We will talk about a framework to address the issue, a case study of this framework in action , and what’s next

 

 

 

— Family Pathways to Care is a department within NYC Children and NYC Health, which helps families and children with mental health challenges
  • Team worked to create solutions and develop sustainable feedback

 

 

 

— We also developed the Public Policy Layer Cake, a framework and set of tools to name power in projects
  • Most foundational is the concept of the layer cake, as it helps acknowledge that whether you are working in public service or using a service, you are working with a multi-layered framework of people and products
    • This informs interventions we can use to disrupt the power of the existing arrangement

 

 

— At the highest level, we have a government block delivering services, but this delivery is not a byproduct of a singular entity

 

 

 

— Service delivery comes from operations, systems and rules in place (legal/data protocols), and policies that are implemented

 

 

 

— The systems and rules layer is made of people who control different things
  • This layer is many humans with levels of power making the underlying process work
So who are the people in the layer cake?
  • Service delivery is the front-line staff that have least power within the block
  • Service Managers run operations, and keep things running on the ground
  • Program leaders administers programs and services
  • Public officials create policies that flow through the other layers

 

 

 

— For our case study, FPC is family health/mental support programs provided to NYC families

 

— The interactions of receiving this care is provided by front line staff at mental health clinics

 

 

 

— These clinics are managed by those who own the provider orgs, and changing service delivery requires changing the operational context, as well as buy-in from senior management

 

— Any successful intervention needs to align with the context of these jobs being done

 

 

— Next, at the systems and rules level, clinics are independently operated, but these programs are funded by city contracts with the Departments of Health and Child Welfare
  • These departments bear responsibility of making sure therapeutic programs are available
  • They are in control of systems and rules to provide service delivery at scale

 

 

 

— Finally, policies mandate types of service delivery, and laws dictate how policies must behave
  • While our work hasn’t flowed down to legislative level yet, we need to be aware of this legislative context

 

 

 

— This framework is not just about designing for system, but also for members of the public

 

 

 

— We documented how the public could interact with those in power, and as designers we hope to support public in exercising agency and disrupting the power of how public services typically work
  • Looking for design interventions that redistribute power equitably
— So how does this drive design?
  • We use design research to find best opportunities for an intervention

 

 

 

— Service use products, are things where you interact with a public-facing product (whether digital, analog or human)
  • For every level of interaction there is staff at same level taking parallel activities to support what people are doing
— The public needs service tools to understand how service works, and delivery tools to monitor the service on the back-end

 

 

 

— Examples of these tools include prototyping the number of service usage products for youth and families to make their experience more legible and equitable

 

— For particular project, we co-designed family facing in-take tools to address common concerns  people had when they began to use services

 

— We developed modular training and presentations for service delivery staff
  • We also worked to test materials to support existing service delivery already carried out, like leveraging existing referral making platforms

 

 

 

— We know pretty well at PPL know that most of the  best designed tools, require support and buy-in
  • Service protocols and data tools drive data operations, and align goals/ways of thinkings around public facing tools
— The public may access agencies through being able to modify service and escalate their arrangement with services

 

 

 

— We designed service protocols and tools for centralizing cross-agency information and provided the tools in a single place to support providers into appropriate programs

 

— We also enabled families to engage with provider leadership, and created a standard framework for responding to family feedback
  • We also developed operational guidance for incorporating family feedback

 

 

 

— To circle back, behaviors at all levels in the layer cake need to be altered from the  public to service providers
  • The public involves providing consensus products

 

 

— Outputs of our work are mental models of policy delivery and an organizing framework that all players in system can operate in, and which people can level up to
  • Examples include collaborative referrals, where can be passed around at all levels of  the service structure
  • Another examples includes consolidating program information into a single page, where inter-agency services can be compared and looked at

 

 

— Finally we created a speculative consensus product of a report card that the community could rate, based on shared set of family criteria

 

 

— As non-partisan nonprofit we don’t tinker with opinion products for specific candidates, outside of redesigning ballots

 

— The final chunk of case is officials delivering policy concepts, where laws are written in the abstract, while implementation happens concretely

 

 

— So here’s the finalized layer cake which we can leverage for more equitable service delivery

 

— To wrap up though…

 

— We have phrase in the lab “What does it all mean?”
  • We throw out a lot of words in civic design that don’t have to do with design, like “power” and “justice”
  • The way our society functions is through structures, and they are not visible
— These structures are collections of people, tools, rules, resources
  • The framework makes the invisible, visible and enables us to make system change
— And as I like to say to my colleagues, system change happens at the human level

 

— Thank you!