Placing “Human-Centered Design” within a Design-Oriented Professional Discipline of Public Management

EasyChair Preprint 1168

Abstract

What does human-centered design signify, when it is presented as an approach to public management? How would public management benefit from theorizing and researching human-centered design?  These two questions provide a useful point of entry into a critical examination of human-centered design in public management.  An energetic critical examination of human-centered design would consider some challenging questions about public management as a field of study. Should public management be identified as a design-science?  If so, what significance should be accorded to Herbert Simon’s idea that solving problems requires both designing and decision-making, within an organizational context?  How should public management researchers and scholars make up for Simon’s having formulated his ideas about designing and design-science after he left the fields of management and public administration?  Human-centered design will be interpreted as a conceptual design for projects to achieve organizational change and public value creation and as a framework for research projects that aim to provide insight into the challenges of embodying that design in actual projects, under varying field conditions. The paper pursues this line of discussion by way of a critical examination of Dr. Sabine Junginger’s recent book, Transforming Public Services by Design: Reorienting Policies, Organizations, and Services around People.

Keyphrases: Designing, Public Management, Purposive Theorizing, design projects

@booklet{EasyChair:1168,
  author    = {Michael Barzelay},
  title     = {Placing “Human-Centered Design” within a Design-Oriented Professional Discipline of Public Management},
  howpublished = {EasyChair Preprint 1168},
  year      = {EasyChair, 2019}}