Hi there, my name is Mathan Ratinam, I'm Lead Service Designer in the Digital, Design and
Innovation Branch in the Department of Premier and Cabinet.
It's a really great pleasure to be here with you to talk about innovation and the public sector,
particularly given this climate that we're in, of undertaking our work
within the midst of a global pandemic.
Let me first begin by acknowledging the traditional custodians of the lands on which we meet,
and from where I'm making my presentation to you.
I pay my respects to their elders, past, present and emerging, and to elders of other
Aboriginal communities who might be joining us today.
Now, one elder in particular that I'm deeply fond of is David Unaipon.
He was a great designer and inventor, and is seen as Australia's Leonardo da Vinci.
Now if you're wondering who he is, he's the gentleman on the fifty dollar note.
And just to the right of his face, you can see a number of the drawings that he created
of mechanical devices that he invented.
He also came up with the basic design of a helicopter and he got the idea from observing
how boomerangs flew through the air and he realised that if you could take two of those,
overlap them, that they could create the rotor blades.
Now he came up with that idea in 1914.
That was 22 years before the first operational helicopter existed in 1936.
So I feel like we only have to look back at great elders like David Unaipon to realise
that really creative, inventive ideas have always been part of the Australian story and history.
And I think he presents for us a really wonderful example of how we can transfer ideas
from one domain, say, boomerangs and tools to another, like helicopters and transport
in the same way that we're thinking about design and innovation and the public sector today.
Now, public sector innovation is a big subject, and in the limited time we have, I'd like
to focus on one of our core principles for how we undertake our innovation work in our branch,
and that is our human-centred design approach, which underpins all the things we build.
Now I can talk about human-centred design all day long, but I felt that what would
be most beneficial for you would be to share two key things, which are firstly,
why is human-centred design important for all of our work in the public sector?
And secondly, how do we customise and execute that approach in a unique way
within the context of government?
Now I'm aware that I'm speaking to a sophisticated audience, so I'm going to explain some
high level concepts along the way as well.
Now, if you look around, everything around us is designed from the clothes that we're wearing
to the buildings that we're occupying.
And in government, we're designing things too, everyday, from policies to services to new tools,
but not always through the lens of design.
So if we're designing things every day, what does a good design practice look like?
In our branch, we take a citizen-centred approach to our work,
and this has led to our working definition of human-centred design.
So human-centred design is an approach to problem solving that puts the people we are
designing for at the heart of the process.
And in this current period of operating in a pandemic, we consider human-centred design to
be even more important as we've been forced to rethink a number of our own practices
across the Victoria Public Sector and how we'll meet the newly emerging and unpredictable
needs of citizens as they come under stress from multiple directions.
And to add a little colour to this, I'm going to start with a couple of thoughts about
the current period we're living within to help set the scene.
And the first is that crises don't hit governments, they hit communities.
So how do we go about making our communities more resilient?
And as far as area-wide crises go, Covid-19 has been impactful to a level that most of us
just haven't seen before in our lifetime.
As a result, this has led to multiple challenges that we are having to deal with in
parallel, many of which are new and unique.
And the interplay of these challenges can often conflict with each other.
So one which we're all aware of is this tension between the need to flatten the curve in
terms of the spread of the virus, which has led to a deepening of another curve in terms
of the negative impacts economically.
And this entanglement or what otherwise could be described as a 'wicked problem' is one
that will be ongoing for the foreseeable future and only complicated further by the
compounding effects of rising mental illness and, as we've witnessed in other countries,
social unrest.
So given that complexity, how do we go about discovering the needs of citizens so that we
can articulate a problem before responding with the services and products that will
increase the resiliency of our households and our communities?
The second thought I want to share is that crises accelerate change.
This is something we've all experienced first hand with the sudden need to increase
digital literacy. One simple example is the need for digitally signing documents as we're
all working remotely.
And this, of course, means learning new tools and processes.
And this is the kind of change that is here to stay.
I won't say that it's always been easy, but it has at least had the benefit of forcing us
to take a fresh perspective on why we're doing the task we are and to what ends.
And this, of course, is also playing out in the private sector.
From schooling to yoga instructors, anything that involved the gathering of people has had
to be rethought and delivered differently.
So we're seeing an enormous uptake of online tools with businesses and individuals
retooling themselves to function in new ways.
So in our mind, human-centred design is timely and more important than ever in the public
sector as we're forced to reconsider not only how we continue producing our outputs,
in terms of business continuity, but more importantly, redesigning our larger processes for
delivering the outcomes that we've been working to achieve all along.
Now, design is an explorative and iterative process and that can be a little bit in conflict
with the way that we do things in government, because I don't think it's any great secret
that government is a risk-averse environment.
But that's the beauty of design that's often misunderstood, is that it's a process for
de-risking initiatives, not for adding more risk, because it undertakes a project through a
very structured and staged approach to basically eradicate some of the unknowns.
And so it's actually quite well suited to the context of government.
Let me show you what I mean by that.
So this is our design process that we use to develop and deliver projects.
We use avariation of what's commonly known as the Double Diamond.
The main difference for us is this additional Align stage on the front end to the left.
This is for establishing the scope and ideal future state that we'll be working towards.
In government, standing up a new project requires some lead time to get all the
stakeholders, resources and the enabling environment together.
And that's what warranted this additional step at the beginning.
Then we move into the first time and which is the Problem Space.
This is where we do the diagnostic work to drill down to the root causes and discover the
underlying factors that keep a problem in its place until we have properly defined the challenge.
Looking back, the problem spaces where we spend the greatest amount of time
because a well-defined and validated problem allows you to confidently and tightly
outline the scope of the solution because it's supported by an evidence base.
Doing this explorative work upstream really pays off downstream when you're developing a
solution because it will be more targeted having removed a lot of the guesswork.
The second diamond is the Solution Space.
This is where we prototype a number of options and further understand the problem until
we land on the most optimal solution, given the various interests and resources that we have.
Too often in government, we skip past these early stages of the Problem Space
and start in the Solutions Space.
Why that's concerning is that we end up solving the wrong problem, and that's often
because the problem has only been understood in the context of our past experiences.
This not only leads to a loss of time and resources having developed an ineffective
solution, but poses reputational risks with stakeholders and beneficiaries who can be
pretty hard to win back.
Now, working through this staged approach is what I meant by design as a de-risking process.
But I'm going to be honest with you.
This process looks pretty linear and straightforward, but quite often the journey goes like this.
Now, that's not necessarily a bad thing because it's the nature of any
discovery-led or explorative work.
Additionally, in government, we operate in a pretty dynamic environment with projects
that have a long shelf life.
So stakeholder's, team members, even some of the outcomes can change along the way.
So when it's executed well, a human-centred design approach leads to the creation of
government services that are much more aligned with people's needs and desires,
and involving end users in the overall design process leads to much greater buy-in and impact.
So I want to spend a couple of minutes just laying out some of the benefits.
So for Victorians, we have improved policy, services and products that help address the
needs of Victorians.
Reduced transactional friction when using government products and services, and the
reduction of thought overload when determining how to use government services.
Now, reduced friction is definitely a term used to describe well developed digital
products, but it can just as well be applied to physical services, such as the experience
of renewing your driver's license.
And to do that requires a citizen-centred point of view, because on the back-end of
government, we have departments and agencies with sector specialists.
But citizens don't encounter or think of their problems according to the same structures
and the way we categorise our activities.
For citizens, what they see is government as government and they just want to have their
problems resolved.
Now, the human-centred design approach also delivers benefits for the Government of
Victoria as well.
It provides a citizen perspective of the problem at hand, it reduces the risk of a failed
policy, product or service through validation and experimentation, and paints a clearer
picture of the wider context in which the problem lies.
The process also reduces costs by building more targeted systems and services that meet
the needs of people. It creates a more positive reputation and increased trust in government.
It can increase the productivity and improve operational efficiency.
And it builds organisational resilience through an agile and iterative process.
And it helps the VPS understand the Victorians affected by their decisions.
In government we're often taking a departmental view on the problems we're trying to solve.
But what the human-centred design process allows us to do is to leave the
department in building, go out into the field and to walk in the shoes of an affected
community member or citizen to fully appreciate what it must be like from their side.
And with that appreciation, work backwards from where they are back into the department to
develop the most targeted and impactful resources that we can provide that will address
those unmet needs and pain-points of citizens.
So I'd like to shift gears and talk much more specifically about execution,
not just how we do the work at DDI, but how you can too.
We've produced a resource called the Human-Centred Design Playbook.
And this is written with you, the public servant, in mind as the reader, to help you
design, procure and manage human-centred design projects.
It's designed to get you up and running as quickly as possible, and it's structured in a
very practical way.
So it begins with an introduction into human-centred design.
This is like a quick-start guide and then it starts to step you through these other stages.
So when we undertook our research across the Victorian Public Sector, we realised
there were three categories that captured the majority of the projects that were being undertaken.
The first was to leave the building and to learn about a community.
The other was to work internally within the department to make strategic recommendations
or develop policy.
And the third was to prototype and test a new product or service or policy that's being designed.
Now, the other part that we realised was that budgets and timeframes can vary
quite considerably. So we developed this matrix that you're seeing here where across
those three streams you can have different options depending on what your resource envelope is.
And by resource envelope, I mean the amount of time and money that you have
to work on that project.
And once you're on our site, on the right are all the sections of the playbook.
You can even download your own copy or you can launch straight into one of the design plans.
So clicking this will provide you with some options in terms of the resource
envelope that you're working with.
And then selecting one of those will provide the most appropriate plan to begin with.
And you can select any of these methods or outputs to drill down even further to
understand how to execute them and it provides some external resources as well.
Or you can go through all the methods and outputs that we've compiled here on the
right-hand side. So there you have it.
We hope that this work is of value to you as you undertake your work, and thank you for
allowing me to share some of these ideas with you.