In early June 2025, we ran a morning workshop titled ‘Design for policy’. People from about a dozen nations participated. Most of them were in town for the Creative Bureaucracy Festival. We successfully piggybacked on that event and directed people interested in the topic to Digital Service’s on the morning after.
We ran a 3-hour session, starting with an hour of input from various levels of government, followed by questions for the presenters, then breaking out into smaller groups for deeper exchange.
The invite we shared openly said the following:
A Creative Bureaucracy Festival-adjacent gathering of policy designers from around the world co-organised by the EU Policy Lab, German government’s DigitalService, and the UK’s Cabinet Office.
What’s the role of design in shaping policy? What’s the role of trained designers in informing laws, regulations, and procedures? More and more designers are working further ‘upstream’ than before.
Declining trust in government and low levels of satisfaction with public services indicate that we need a system-wide transformation of public service delivery. How can we embed agile, iterative and user-centred ways of working into policymaking? What does bottom-up policymaking look like?
While most designers work on services and design interactions between users and governments, the role of dedicated policy designers is now firmly established. But what they do day to day varies a lot. In this international morning gathering, we bring policy designers of different kinds together – to share work, approaches and questions.”
David Martens, policy designer at the European Commission’s Policy Lab, was our first speaker. He spoke about the dynamic effects of design on policymaking culture and its impact on policymaking.
He shared new frameworks they commissioned to capture the divergent nature of their work. He presented it more openly for the first time.
I asked my colleagues to talk about our work. So, senior product manager Sarah Strozynski and senior service designer Nina Birri shared Germany’s approach to digital-ready legislation.
They gave an overview of their work and shared a recent example of their hands-on policy design task force.
Lastly, Alejandra Diaz, Head of Policy & Service Design at Camden London Borough Council, talked about how she and her team are ‘Designing policy with communities’.
Alejandra shared how she is responsible for policy for 400,000 residents in the London Borough of Camden. It offered a contrasting perspective on David’s work affecting 450 million people and Nina and Sarah’s work touching the lives of 84 million people.
We already referenced the activities in our most recent international community blog post. I am glad we were finally able to make the recordings from last June available as well.