Prototyping systems design-informed behavioral public policy: Learning-by-doing for methodology development
Abstract
The practice of public policy is increasingly recognized as benefitting from expertise from other diverse applied fields, including behavioral science’s insight into cognitive barriers to action, and human-centered systems design’s contributions to gaining user insight and engagement in the form of participatory design and co-creation, as well as newer experiments to increase the use of prototyping in public policy to surface and address critical issues before interventions are formally enacted, or even fully formulated. However, individual methodologies and practices taught within the disciplines of public policy, behavioral science, and human-centered systems design are not necessarily well integrated; not only do each reflect different disciplinary traditions of thought leadership and notions of what “good” looks like, but their very modes of inquiry—a combination of analytic induction and synthetic abduction that result in starkly different notions of evidence, data, and proof of efficacy—may cause tensions that are difficult for practitioners to fully recognize and articulate, let alone manage. At best, this can result in misaligned expectations on the part of individual collaborators; at worst, unhealthy skepticism or a sense of hierarchical one-upmanship can diminish or outright negate the vast, and genuinely exciting, potential of this collaborative work.
Given that public policy, behavioral science, and human-centered systems design are equally oriented toward practice, rather than only theory generation, solving this tension promises to contribute significant value to both the future development of successful policy and the education of aspiring policymakers. However, this will continue to be a challenge if, as is often the case, these specializations are taught separately, in which a lack of cross-pollination affords students (and, for that matter, their respective faculty) limited insight into how other fields may conceive of and approach policy challenges.
As a means to generatively develop a hybrid disciplinary approach, leaders from the behavioral public policy firm ideas42 along with systems and behavioral design faculty from the Institute of ID (ID) at the Illinois Institute of Technology are collaborating to simultaneously develop systems-level behavioral design solutions within the public policy arena of charitable giving, while also prototyping a hybrid process that leverages and evolves methodologies from these individual disciplines to inform a new methodological and pedagogical approach. Lessons from the research project are positioned to go beyond bringing new awareness and exposure to practitioners from adjacent disciplines, instead aspiring to systematize new boundary objects such as frameworks and other structures that can contribute to the increased ease of exchange of knowledge, skills, and approaches across and within multi-disciplinary teams and students. Fed by insights gleaned through an intentionally reflexive process over the course of the project, this paper will present findings and reflections to further the exploration and codification of this hybrid methodological approach.
Keywords: Behavioral public policy, systems design, behavioral design, prototyping, transdisciplinarity
Citation: Schmidt, Ruth (2021) Prototyping systems design-informed behavioral public policy: Learning-by-doing for methodology development, SSRN. http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3814442