Public Affairs and Governance

Public policies are a set of policies including laws, plans, actions, behaviours of a government. They are plans and methods of action that govern the society in the given legal and constitutional framework of the nation. Policies are reflection of the intent of the government towards its social commitments and priorities and considered as the fundamental principles underpinning the set of rules and regulations. Through distributive, redistributive and regulatory policies, government eventually seeks human development. The problems policies addressed could be as basic as food, shelter, housing, literacy, health and as complex as environment, urbanisation to host of economic policies. Looking at the complexities of society, policies must also reinvent itself through application of different approaches. It is in this context that one can think of the intervention of design – a problem solving method, in the policy domain.

This paper presents a qualitative analysis of public policy and design interaction and argues that design thinking can be used to deal with the complex problems of policy design, execution and analysis. Creative thinking, critical thinking and systems thinking are the three pillars of design. Creativity is essentially a cognitive attribute of problem solving which helps to produce options. Critical thinking helps in identifing the best solution out of the given options. Systems thinking refers to the method of analysing the relationships among a system's parts, rather than the parts themselves. These design attributes can also be used to solve the problems related to public policy. Since policies are meant to solve the complex and emerging societal problems, they cannot ignore the systematic method of problem identification, applying creative thinking to create multiple options and use critical thinking to find the best option. Today design thinking is being applied to enhance the service delivery of public policy in many countries. This paper discusses how the application of the same may improve the policy performance in India.