Speakers
Richard Pope
Designing the seams: co-production and democracy in digital public services
Too often digital public services are designed to treat the public as consumers, not as part of a democratic society. In a democracy, understanding the way things are is a precondition for changing them. But public sector design optimises for efficiency and utility. Government is designed out of the way, and too much value is placed on Silicon Valley minimalism, in a way that misunderstands the nature of what makes public services public. Rather than stripping away and simplifying, it describes digital services that have a sense of place, that orientate users and that have routes to reach in and understand the underlying rules.
Richard will cover ways to recalibrate design practice, so that public services can contribute to a public image of how democracy works and design in co-production as a feature of services, not an upfront activity. He will also cover how more transparency in digital public services can provide a way in for civil society organisations to co-produce better outcomes, and the need for more institutional safeguards around digital public infrastructure.
Richard Pope is the author of the widely acclaimed "Platformland: An Anatomy of Next Generation Public Services, and director of Richard Pope & Partners, a strategy and design office based London.
Richard has been described as one of the most creative thinkers in public sector digital design and was part of the founding team of the UK Government Digital Service and the first product manager for GOV.UK. He created many of the initial design concepts for both GOV.UK and the digital account for Universal Credit and was a senior fellow at Harvard in 2018/2019, researching and lecturing on digital public infrastructure and digital transformation.