What the policymaking process can learn from the making of products

I launched my work for this opinion piece, as published on Apolitical, during my time at Stanford Mechanical Engineering, Center for Design Research. Together with my supervisor and PhD mentor Neeraj Sonalkar, I discovered the striking similarity between historically disintegrated models of product design and manufacturing, and the same dissociation that continues to exist today between designing and implementing policy in practice.

Learning from product engineering, I develop a perspective on policy design that is based on moving from an ‘over the wall’ to a ‘concurrent’ model, where designers are part of the policymaking process from the outset. Such process would require the restructuring of well-established policy formulation practices.

Whereas this claim does not aim to depoliticise the policymaking process, it is based on the idea that, as a process, it can be restructured in a more socially accommodating manner, to achieve better, more human-centred (and thus highly socio-political) outcomes.

Photo by Peter Nguyen on Unsplash