AHRC Design Fellows Challenges of the Future: Public Services

This report addresses the state of UK university-led design research in the context of public services. It identifies centres of excellence and their supporting infrastructure and maps the research landscape through a review of projects and research centres. It presents salient themes, questions and approaches within practice and details the role that design research may play in the future of public service research and innovation. Reviewing the innovative capacity of design research undertaken in the public service context, it looks at the methods, strategies and skills that afford this capacity. It identifies developmental opportunities to support further work in this context and provides insight into future collaborations, partnerships and consortia to support activity and drive co-investment between academia, government and industry.

The report aims to:
•Increase awareness of how design creates high-level societal and economic benefit in the public service context.
•Understand how academic design research functions strategically and how it is operationalised within this context.
•Understand how university collaborations are critically important in supporting innovation within this context.
•Understand how collaborations are initiated and sustained to add social and economic value.

The research was conducted from March to June 2020 and complements five other AHRC fellowships focused on design research for place, future mobility,artificial intelligence, clean growth and policy.

Reflecting its long-standing support of design research, AHRC appointed 5 Design Research Fellows. These short-term, intensive Fellowships were aimed at assessing the value of UK university-led design research to the UK’s industrial strategy.