Trying It on for Size: Design and International Public Policy

Abstract

Before we begin, we should note that we are not here speaking on behalf of either the United Nations (UN) generally or the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research (UNIDIR) specifically. As researchers at UNIDIR, we are afforded both a valuable space to generate ideas for the improvement of UN operations or practices, and a chance to look and comment upon its performance with an interest in doing so. If at any point we seem less than fully impressed by UN conduct, you should think of our comments less as criticism and more as ... tough love. This event is quite exciting for us. It is the first time that we have had the opportunity to talk about design to a room full of actual designers and people concerned with design questions. Normally, the people that we talk to about program design are diplomats, practitioners in security, development, or humanitarian action, academic researchers, or field staff of the United Nations. The response we often get, when speaking of design, is akin to the look one makes when handed unfamiliar food: alternatively respectful, skeptical, or suspicious, and sometimes a bit put off. Yet, we speak about it often, and we think about it even more. The reason is that we think design looks promising for addressing some of the challenges faced in the international public policy domains of security, development, and humanitarian action. And we now believe that a new agenda needs to be formed around the investigation of the capabilities and limitations of design as a tool for public policy. This event is also a bit intimidating for us precisely because it is the first time we have had a chance to talk to a room full of designers. In many of our lectures, we argue for the benefits of design processes and techniques. We advocate for the conceptual and procedural value of design space at the nexus between defining problems and taking programmatic action. But ultimately, we need to learn from designers, from you, whether our suspicions about the power of collaboration here may prove as fruitful as we suspect. In international public policy, design is the dark space between knowledge and action. It is where the murky terms, metaphors, and conventional wisdom lurk that are often antagonistic to design as a professional activity. Design, after all, requires a