Design in Programme Cultures: Idealism, Capture, and What It Costs

This post synthesises the literature on what happens when Design enters programme-management-led organisations - a common scenario, or situation in public sector and healthcare contexts. It draws together work I've been developing across several series: the epistemological tension between design and programme management, the performance-and-substance gap, the metaphorical fragmentation of design roles, and the psychodynamic costs of design practice in contested institutional contexts.

The argument builds through seven layers of critique, from Hill's (2012) widely-cited observation that designers are naive about organisational power, through to a psychodynamic account of what that naivety costs the designer personally. The implication isn't that design in programme cultures is hopeless - it's that entering such cultures with design intentions requires an honest reckoning with the dynamics at play before you start drawing journey maps.

The problem stated plainly

Design enters programme cultures in many forms, but the organisational terrain is recognisable. A large NHS trust restructuring its data infrastructure through a vendor-led delivery programme. A government department running a transformation portfolio managed by consultants from one of the big four firms, with workstreams governed through stage-gate reviews and benefits realisation frameworks. A regional health authority coordinating digital change across multiple trusts, each with its own governance, its own legacy systems, its own political sensitivities - the whole thing held together by a programme board, a senior responsible owner, and a delivery manager whose primary currency is risk and schedule. In each case, the organisation has chosen to treat a complex, cross-cutting challenge as a programme: something to be decomposed into workstreams, sequenced into phases, tracked against milestones, and governed through highlight reports and gateway reviews.

The designer arrives into these cultures and finds that the problems they are asked to address - fragmented user journeys, poor adoption, services that technically function but don't actually work for the people using them - are produced by the very governance structures within which they must now operate. This is not a communication problem or a matter of learning the right vocabulary; it is a structural condition. The literature gives it several names, but they converge on the same diagnosis: when organisations are organised around products, projects, or programmes, design work - which is inherently cross-cutting, relational, and systemic - meets institutional resistance not because anyone opposes it, but because the governance structures select against it.

The question isn't whether this is a problem. It's what the evidence says about how to work within it productively, and where honest limits lie.

The diagnostic: why programme cultures resist design

Naive about power

Hill (2012) gives the most memorable framing: the "dark matter" of organisational culture, policy environments, market mechanisms, legislation, and finance models shapes what services actually do, but sits beneath the surface of what design processes typically engage with. Designers, Hill argues, too often appear naive about how organisations actually make decisions. The user is rarely aware of the organisational context that produced a service, yet the outcome is directly affected by it. Hill's argument is that designers need to engage with this substrate - and that too few do.

But Hill's diagnosis - that designers are naive about organisational reality - is the mild version. A more uncomfortable body of work asks why design is systematically naive, and whether the naivety is a feature rather than a bug.

Design's idealist blindness

Von Busch and Palmås (2023) mount the most sustained critique. In The Corruption of Co-Design, they argue that design operates through "idealist-tainted glasses" - a worldview in which the social world is treated as raw material waiting to be shaped by empathetic designers, and where the best argument wins on its merits. Their central charge is that design discourse lacks a language for competing interests and power dynamics. In a vivid passage describing a design school critique in Gothenburg, they observe that students present transport design proposals as if the car industry, the fossil fuel lobby, and the political interests that sustain car-centric planning simply don't exist. The entire room has "tacitly agreed on sidelining, or at least ignoring, the most vested and dollar-rich interests in the region".

This isn't a peripheral observation about student work. Von Busch and Palmås argue it reflects a structural feature of how design conceives of change: designers suffer from the conviction that the best idea wins, treating design as a game of persuasion rather than a contest of power. Their remedy - which they call "Realdesign" - asks designers to replace the idealist's "what if?" with the realist's "who whom?" - who benefits, who pays the price, who holds the power to make this real or block it? Their six propositions are worth reading in full, but the core insight is this: visions that are not backed by a realistic perspective on power remain toothless, however well-researched and beautifully presented.

Their first proposition - "Design must get real" - cuts particularly close to the programme management context: design proposals get activated not through the quality of their argument but through tensions between networks of power, incentives, and influences. A journey map will not change a procurement framework. A service blueprint will not shift a governance model. What makes things happen is power, not persuasion.

The tools carry it

Tonkinwise (2010, 2023), cited by von Busch and Palmås, sharpens this into a specific methodological critique. In his 2010 Core77 essay, Tonkinwise argued that "being ethical, in order to avoid politics, is a political position" - designers doing social innovation unwittingly align with neoliberal governance by designing community replacements for state services. His 2023 SVA lecture, "All Care, No Responsibility", extends this into a full critique of service design's tools. The service blueprint, he argues, is fundamentally a management tool - "a script by which a manager will discipline workers" unless you design it differently. The theatrical metaphor of front-stage and back-stage, the "line of visibility" conceals the labour that makes the service work, and in so doing makes it look magical by black-boxing the work. "The service worker is merely a box within the overall blueprint". This is, in Rancière's (2013) terms, a distribution of the sensible built into the tool itself: the blueprint determines what is visible and what is noise, whose experience counts as designable and whose is rendered invisible by the representational form.

Tonkinwise traces this to service design's origins in early-1980s neoliberalism: "Services become designable as the state stops caring, as the state is stopped from caring". The tools of service design - blueprints, personas, journey maps - systematically conceal what Hochschild (2012) identifies as the emotional labour of care work - controlling your own emotions, performing prescribed emotions, reading and managing customers' emotions. And design's focus on the user experience misses what he calls "contexts of aggregation" - the systemic conditions, the historic struggles, the political settlements that produced the current arrangement. Empathy sees the individual interaction but not the system. It cannot see the silenced voices, the structural conditions, or the power relations that determine outcomes.

His most provocative argument: the way to address this isn't better empathy but designing the customer - using anthropological insights about gift-giving, commons governance, and graduated reciprocity to create genuine relationships rather than transactional encounters. And his closing line captures the honest limit: "Design is not the answer. Design can contribute to the creation of sociality, the restoring of sociality".

This is a direct challenge to how design is typically positioned in programme-management contexts. The standard pitch - "we bring the user perspective" - assumes that the user perspective is what's missing, and that surfacing it will cause change. Tonkinwise's point is that the user perspective may be perfectly well understood by the programme and simply overridden by other priorities. The bottleneck isn't informational; it's political.

The institutional logics produce it

Kimbell (2021) approaches the same problem from a different angle. In Logics of Social Design, she identifies three institutional logics through which design operates in social and public sector contexts: innovation-austerity, deliberation-pluralism, and anticipation-utopia. Each logic shapes what designers are permitted to do, how their legitimacy is established, and what they're structurally prevented from seeing.

The innovation-austerity logic is the most relevant to programme-led contexts. Under this logic, designers are positioned as enablers of innovation - responsive to social needs, facilitating co-production, amplifying local resources. But, Kimbell argues, this logic "downplays the political conditions in which social design is organised and carried out". Critical voices are tolerated but marginalised. Designers are advised to think of themselves as responsive rather than responsible for outcomes - which, Kimbell notes, "might be seen as being reactive and tactical, rather than active and strategic in the face of complex, and political issues".

The anticipation-utopia logic (design as visionary practice, proposing futures beyond current frames) has a different but related blind spot: it mutes "acknowledgement of the political and economic conditions that sustain such institutional forms". This is the logic that underpins Dorst's frame creation, Dunne and Raby's speculative futures, and Folkmann's ontology of the actual and the possible - all of which position design as reaching toward desirable futures that the present has not yet imagined. The designer as visionary positions themselves outside the system they're trying to change, which means they never have to reckon with the structural constraints that make the system the way it is.

Kimbell's framework reveals something important: the naivety Hill describes isn't accidental. It is produced by the institutional logics within which design operates - logics that, as Rancière (2013) would frame it, distribute what is sensible within the practice, determining which political dimensions of design work can be perceived and which are structurally invisible. Designers working within programme-led organisations are channelled toward the innovation-austerity logic - asked to be helpful, responsive, and user-focused, while the governance structures, funding models, and power relations that actually determine outcomes remain off-limits.

Design as already co-opted

Bailey (2021), as I discussed in Owning the Problem Space, takes this furthest: design in government contexts has been discursively and practically remodelled to align with existing institutional preoccupations. What is called "design" may already have been shaped to avoid the confrontations that genuine problem-space ownership would require. A journey map will not change a procurement framework; a service blueprint will not shift a governance model; and if the design practice has already been co-opted to fit the governance logic it ought to challenge, the question of what design can actually reach becomes considerably more difficult.

How co-option works in practice

Each of the authors above describes a different mechanism through which design gets captured. Bailey (2021) argues that "design for government" has been discursively remodelled - reconstituted to align with a dominant political dogma about fixing the public sector through innovation. The apparatus is, as she puts it, "seductive rather than effective": it produces performances of change that enrol participants into believing they are engaged in innovation, while structural decisions have already been taken. The field grows not through evidence of results but through "continual recruitment of new enthusiasts", offering participants an identity upgrade - creative, experimental, innovative - that makes the apparatus self-sustaining. Kimbell (2021) identifies a complementary dynamic through her institutional logics framework: the innovation-austerity logic positions designers as "responsive, rather than responsible for outcomes" - muting their engagement with the political conditions that shape those outcomes. Julier and Kimbell (2019) originally discussed this in relation to the concept of virtualism: design tools impose an image of expert knowledge that bargains for professional legitimacy, while the actual interventions remain "virtual, not actual" - performing innovation without delivering it.

Von Busch and Palmås (2023) approach the problem from a different angle entirely, tracing how the material protocols of co-design - Post-it notes, presentation formats, PowerPoint, planning templates - act as agents of betrayal, systematically filtering proposals into what can be visualised and processed within existing institutional formats. "The radicalism of the original visions was disarmed by design", they write of a Gothenburg co-design process; the betrayal wasn't deliberate but was built into the inscriptions through which ideas had to pass. Tonkinwise (2023), in his lecture on service design and care, argues that the tools themselves carry their origins: the blueprint as management script, the line of visibility as labour concealment, empathy as the substitution of individual attention for systemic analysis. Using these tools uncritically reproduces the neoliberal logic they were designed under.

The work in Bisset and Kuštrak Korper (2023) offers one additional lens on how this operates at the level of everyday practice. Studying service design roles in Swedish public sector contexts, we identified ten generative metaphors through which "the service designer" is understood: healer, plumber, teacher, mechanic, entertainer, political actor, bureaucrat, visualiser, humaniser, sensemaker. These aren't just different descriptions of the same role - they generate different expectations, different success criteria, and different practices. When a project manager expects a mechanic and gets an evangelist, or expects a bureaucrat and gets a political actor, frustration follows.

Most of these metaphors have little to do with actually designing services. A holist - the idea of the service designer as someone who can transcend organisational silos, or integrate disparate touchpoints through a unifying service journey - integrates existing fragments but doesn't design new wholes and usually lacks the political mandate to act on such insights. A teacher metaphor for the role of service designer - see service designers building "user-centred" capability but doesn't necessarily produce designed or tangible material outcomes. A visualiser makes things visible - but as I've argued elsewhere, visibility alone doesn't produce change. The question we posed in the paper was blunt: "If something called Service Design happened here, what purpose did it serve, and what in fact (if anything) did we design?"

Metaphorical fragmentation is one way design gets captured without anyone deciding to capture it: each metaphor serves institutional functions beyond understanding, and the performance of design (workshops, maps, canvases) substitutes for the substance of designed change. Perhaps just allowing the decision-makers to cite a journey map or blueprint of the status-quo as evidence of now being user-centred. But this operates alongside the other mechanisms described above - Bailey's discursive remodelling, Kimbell's institutional logics, Julier and Kimbell's virtualism, von Busch and Palmås's protocol betrayal - and together they produce something more than the sum of their parts. If the metaphor for design itself is contested - if ten different stakeholders project ten different meanings onto "service design" - then the practice that's supposed to clarify meaning and 'integration' is itself mired in confusion. Design can't bootstrap shared understanding of other domains or contexts if there's no shared understanding of what design is. This is the practical, operational version of what Kimbell describes at the level of institutional logics: the role isn't just constrained by the institution - it's constituted differently by every stakeholder who encounters it.

The critiques converge on the same unsettling point: the question isn't just whether programme cultures resist design - it's whether the version of design that survives within those cultures has already been defanged. Von Busch and Palmås would say this is predictable: design's idealist self-image means it doesn't recognise when it has been captured, because it doesn't have a vocabulary for capture. It sees collaboration where a realist would see co-option.

Fayard, Stigliani and Bechky (2016) provide the occupational sociology that explains why this vulnerability is structural. Their study of how service designers construct their professional mandate found that the occupation differentiates itself primarily through ethos - holism, empathy, co-creation enacted through material practice - rather than through protected technical expertise. The tools can be learned by anyone; management consultants and marketers can adopt journey mapping, prototyping, and visualisation without difficulty. What makes these practices distinctively "design" is the values behind them. This is precisely what makes design so susceptible to institutional capture: when organisations adopt journey mapping without holism, persona work without genuine empathy, or workshops without real co-creation, they have acquired the form while discarding the substance that gave it meaning. The mandate that rests on ethos rather than jurisdictional closure is a mandate that can be hollowed out from within.

The connection to the Bisset and Kuštrak Korper metaphors gestures at how: Each metaphor captures at most one of Fayard et al's three values - the holist offers integration without empathy, the humaniser offers empathy without systemic framing, the entertainer performs co-creation as workshop theatre - but none carries the integrated ethos. Fragment the role into separate metaphors and you fragment the ethos; what remains is the performative shell, each piece serving institutional functions while the integrated practice that might challenge the programme logic has been quietly disassembled.

What happens to the designer: social defences and emotional labour

In my other NORDES paper (Bisset, 2023b), I asked the question: what happens to the designer caught inside these dynamics? Drawing on psychodynamic theory (Fotaki and Hyde's organisational blind spots, work from the Tavistock tradition, Wastell's social defences in information systems development), the paper identifies a specific pattern: designers in public sector contexts are simultaneously idealised - expected to work miracles, to be "Service Design Jesus" - and expected to absorb the negative emotions their inquiries provoke. Organisations project both their hopes and their anxieties and fragmented understanding and representations of what design is and what it can do onto the designer, then blame the designer when the structural constraints the organisation refuses to confront, or as Tonkinwise, Bailey and Kimbell suggest design is incapable of confronting remain unchanged.

This is the emotional labour argument that Tonkinwise (2023) makes about service workers, applied to the designer themselves. The splitting is precise: the ideals of the project (transformation, participation, collaboration) are separated from what it takes to realise those ideals (confronting power, surfacing uncomfortable truths, managing resistance). The designer is expected to carry both sides - to be the visionary and the lightning rod - while the organisation avoids doing the difficult work of implementing change. When the project doesn't deliver miracles, it's easier to project blame onto the designer, or as Kimbell and others suggest marginalise them, or carry on the empty performance, than to reflect on or transform the structural conditions that made the miracles impossible, or led to such desperate idealism in the first place.

The paper identifies a blank space in the design literature: despite all the talk of design as socially transformative practice, there are almost no tools or frameworks for helping designers handle the psychodynamic impacts of this work - the idealisation, projection, splitting, and blame that are predictable features of design practice in contested institutional contexts. The Systems Engagements series develops this psychodynamic apparatus in more detail - from Bion's basic assumptions in co-creation workshops to the BART framework and countertransference as the designer's primary instrument for reading what the system is projecting. Design research needs, as the paper argues, to help practitioners "depersonalise the impact of our design work upon ourselves as careworkers".

All of this enables us to connect the entire diagnostic argument to a practical, personal concern - Von Busch's Realdesign propositions are about developing power literacy. Tonkinwise's critique is about recognising the political inheritance of design tools. Kimbell's institutional logics are about understanding the structural channels. But without the psychodynamic layer, these all remain intellectual exercises. The "Service Design Jesus" pattern is what makes the critique felt - it's the lived experience of what happens when a designer enters a programme-led culture with even humble materialist or envisionary intentions and meets all the dynamics the literature describes.

NPM governance selects against design

Boztepe (2023) provides the most empirically grounded analysis of what this looks like in practice. Studying design capability building in Swedish municipalities, she identifies "tissue incompatibility" - design's ways of working meeting institutional logics they cannot easily integrate with. Crucially, the incompatibility goes both ways: the public sector mindset doesn't readily embrace design, but designers also struggle to adapt their methods to institutional constraints. The three tensions she documents - between insider/outsider positioning, incremental vs transformative ambitions, and the difficulty of demonstrating impact - are recognisable to anyone who has worked as a designer embedded in a public sector programme.

The structural argument, which I've developed more fully in Beyond Technomagic, draws on amongst other perspectives the military design literature and New Public Management (NPM) critique: NPM governance structures don't merely fail to support design - they actively select against it. Business cases require quantified benefits before the design work that would identify real benefits has been done. Stage gates demand deliverables at fixed intervals, but design produces understanding rather than deliverables. The planning/design confusion means design work gets governed with planning's expectations, timelines, and success criteria applied to an activity they don't fit. And as I argued in Performance and Substance, design itself can function as a "rationalised myth" - adopted for legitimacy rather than effectiveness. A project can have all the trappings of design (workshops, post-it notes, journey maps, prototypes) while producing little genuine change. The design performance substitutes for substantive transformation.

What the composite diagnosis means

These critiques layer up into something, I hope, more than the sum of their parts. Hill (2012) identifies the surface phenomenon - designers naive about organisational power - but Von Busch and Palmås (2023) argue that the naivety is structural: design's idealist worldview lacks a vocabulary for power, conflict, and competing interests. Tonkinwise (2023) sharpens this into a methodological critique, showing that the specific tools designers rely on (blueprints, personas, empathy) systematically conceal labour, miss systemic context, and treat care work as an efficiency problem; service design emerged under neoliberalism and its tools carry that inheritance.

Kimbell (2021) explains how the institutional logics within which design operates actively produce this blindness - channelling designers into roles that mute their engagement with political and economic conditions - while Bailey (2021) argues that the version of design which survives within institutions has already been reshaped to avoid confrontation. Fayard, Stigliani and Bechky (2016) provide the occupational sociology: service design's mandate rests on ethos rather than protected expertise, making it uniquely susceptible to being adopted in form while having its substance hollowed out. The Bisset and Kuštrak Korper (2023) metaphors show one way this plays out in everyday practice - "service design" becomes an abstract signifier onto which every stakeholder projects a different meaning, allowing activity to substitute for outcome without anyone deciding to capture design. The psychodynamic layer (Bisset, 2023b) adds what the other critiques leave out: designers are idealised, used as lightning rods for organisational anxiety, then blamed when structural constraints remain unchanged; the emotional labour of practice in contested contexts goes unacknowledged and unsupported. And NPM governance provides the structural mechanism through which all of this operates: business cases, stage gates, and programme accountability select against design's ways of working, while design performances risk becoming rationalised myths - adopted for legitimacy rather than effectiveness.

The implication isn't despair. It's that entering a programme-led culture with design intentions requires an honest reckoning with these dynamics before you start drawing journey maps. The question isn't "how do I introduce design thinking?" - it's "what version of design can survive and be productive in this institutional logic, and where does it need to push beyond what the institution is comfortable with?"

In a programme-led public sector organisation - products with their own funding lines, their own teams, their own delivery cadences - the people aren't hostile to design. They've simply never had reason to think in service terms. But programme cultures are not monolithic; as I explored through the lens of promise theory and accountability, programmes oriented toward risk, efficiency, provider management, or demand sensing create different conditions for design - different blind spots, different failure modes, and different versions of co-option. The governance structures (multi-year funding cycles, programme-level accountability, product-organised teams) actively reproduce the fragmentation that a service lens would challenge. You're not walking into opposition - you're walking into a structure that doesn't have the connective tissue design needs in order to work.

But the von Busch/Kimbell/Bailey critique adds a more critical edge: you need to be alert to the risk that design gets absorbed into the programme logic rather than challenging it. If "service design" becomes another programme workstream - producing maps and blueprints that get acknowledged and filed - it has been captured. Metaphorical fragmentation is one way this can happen without anyone deciding it: each stakeholder projects a different metaphor onto the designer role, creating the appearance of shared purpose where none exists. A hiring manager may see cross-cutting sense-making; a head of design may see practice maturity; programme managers may see another workstream producing deliverables; external partners may see someone who makes onboarding easier. Being explicit about which of these you are - and which you're not and which of these issues you have the agency to actually address from the start is a way of resisting the metaphorical fragmentation that allows design to be absorbed.

The test isn't whether you produce design artefacts; it's whether those artefacts change decisions. Von Busch's "who whom?" question applies directly: who holds the power to act on what your maps reveal, and what would it take to mobilise that power? If the answer is "nobody in this governance structure", then the design work needs to be directed at the governance structure itself - which is Hill's dark matter, and Kimbell's point about engaging with the political conditions rather than just being responsive within them.

How design takes root: the capability-building literature

Malmberg (2017) provides the most thorough theoretical model, drawing on absorptive capacity theory from knowledge management. Her core insight: design capability doesn't develop through awareness alone - it requires three sequential phases: acquisition (individuals encounter design and form initial understanding), assimilation (the organisation shares design knowledge and tries to fit it into existing structures, revealing where current routines fit and where they don't), and exploitation (design is actually used to generate value, building through sustained practice within communities). The critical finding: knowledge acquisition without the organisational capacity for assimilation leaves the organisation functionally unchanged. Designers are hired, methods are demonstrated, but the enabling structures for assimilation are never built.

The SDN Service Design Impact Report identifies the practical pattern: start with small wins, smaller-scale projects that can convey the impact more easily. But it also notes the limitation of labs and innovation units - they can demonstrate value but frequently fail to diffuse it, because diffusion requires the socialisation and coordination capabilities that Malmberg describes.

Holliday (2022) offers the most practitioner-oriented version: his eight lenses framework argues for focusing change in specific areas rather than conceptualising total change. The practical move is identifying where you have actual leverage, not where you'd ideally intervene.

For any designer entering a programme-led organisation, the diagnostic question is: where is this organisation on Malmberg's sequence? If design is known and valued in principle but not yet embedded in operational practice, you're somewhere between acquisition and early assimilation. The enabling structures - shared language, coordinated processes, design-informed governance - don't exist yet. Your job is building them, not assuming them.

What actually works: practical strategies

The literature converges on a surprisingly consistent set of practical approaches, though with honest caveats about their limits.

Demonstrate value through sense-making, not assertion

The Touchpoint (2025) collection on product management and service design identifies the first practical shift: moving "from features to journeys". One practitioner describes presenting a holistic workflow ecosystem map that aligned multiple product managers and revealed redundant development across teams - saving weeks of engineering time. The design contribution wasn't a new feature; it was making the existing system legible to the people working within it.

In practice, this means: nobody has mapped the variation across cross-cutting processes. The first, highest-value design contribution is almost certainly making the existing landscape visible - not redesigning it, but creating a shared representation that lets the team see what they have, where the seams are, and which variation is necessary versus accidental.

Learn the domain language before introducing design language

Boztepe (2023) notes that designers in her study "often found themselves moving between insider and outsider roles as required by the context". The Touchpoint collection identifies "communication breakdowns" as a primary friction point: "jargon, methodologies and frameworks differ, making collaboration more difficult".

In programme-led organisations, the team think in terms of data pipelines, ethics approvals, partnership agreements, research protocols, or clinical pathways. Design vocabulary needs to be translated into their operational language before it can be useful. "Journey mapping" may mean nothing; "mapping the process from submission through to access, identifying where each partnership's process diverges" might.

Small wins that compound

De Mozota (2003) describes the principle: "An excellent way to bring the entire company to an understanding of the benefits of design is to integrate design into the organization gradually". The SDN report echoes this. The Design Council (2013) makes the practical argument: "trial of these methods need not be a blind - or wild-eyed - leap of faith. One of design's great capabilities is allowing one to start small".

Holliday (2022) operationalises this through the "start small and scale slowly" principle. Pick one cross-cutting process. Map it end-to-end. Surface the pain points and the workarounds. Show the team something they didn't know about their own process. Then pick another. The pattern - not the individual map - becomes the argument for service thinking.

Co-create the governance, don't just work within it

The Touchpoint collection's most mature recommendation: "co-create, don't just consult - service designers and product managers should work in parallel, not sequentially". The SDN report goes further: "if we are talking about how public problems are dealt with and how decisions are being made, we should not only be focusing on new methods but also on embedding design within existing governance structures".

Lee (2024) introduces the concept of "institutioning" - the deliberate work of reshaping institutional structures from the inside, as opposed to either accepting them or opposing them. This is distinct from both compliance and resistance; it's the patient work of adjusting how decisions get made.

In a product-by-product governance structure, you won't change that structure quickly. But you can demonstrate, through the cross-cutting maps you produce, that certain decisions - about data formats, about onboarding processes, about documentation standards - would benefit from being made at the service level rather than the product level.

Be honest about where design runs out

As I argued in The Limits of Making Visible, making problems visible does not, in itself, cause change. Organisations are accomplished at absorbing information without acting on it. Malmberg demonstrates that knowledge acquisition without assimilation capacity leaves things functionally unchanged. Bailey's critique is that design in government has already been shaped to avoid the confrontations genuine change would require.

There will be things you can see and map but cannot change - governance structures, funding models, partnerships set up years ago on terms that no longer make sense but can't be renegotiated. The mature designer's skill is distinguishing between variation you can reduce (process inefficiency, duplicated work, unclear handoffs) and variation that's structurally embedded (different regulatory requirements, different institutional data policies, different organisational cultures). The former is your territory. The latter is context you work within.

Synthesis

The literature doesn't offer a neat playbook. But it does converge on a diagnostic sequence:

1. Start by understanding the existing logic on its own terms. Don't arrive with a service lens and immediately diagnose fragmentation. Understand why things are structured as products or programmes - funding lines, accountability structures, team identities. The fragmentation isn't arbitrary; it reflects real organisational constraints.

2. Make the cross-cutting problems visible through artefacts, not arguments. Journey maps, data flow diagrams, comparison matrices - the artefacts that reveal what no individual product team can see. The value isn't the artefact; it's the conversation it enables.

3. Translate design value into operational outcomes the team already cares about. Reduced rework. Faster onboarding. Fewer "we asked for this information twice" moments. Fewer surprises when inputs arrive in unexpected formats. These are outcomes the programme culture already values; design is the method, not the message.

4. Build enabling structures incrementally. Shared documentation standards. A common vocabulary for process stages. Templates that capture variation without imposing false standardisation. These are the "enabling structures" Malmberg describes - the infrastructure that allows design thinking to assimilate into organisational practice.

5. Be honest about limits, and use that honesty as credibility. "This variation is necessary and we should design for it" is as valuable as "this variation is accidental and we should reduce it" - and more credible than promising to fix everything.

And underneath all five: maintain awareness of the seven-layer diagnostic. You're not just doing design work - you're doing design work inside dynamics that the literature says are predictable, structural, and personally costly. Power literacy, tool awareness, institutional logic recognition, metaphor management, and psychodynamic self-care aren't luxuries bolted onto design practice. They are the practice, in contexts like these.

How the concepts connect in practice

The diagnostic framework connects to practice at several levels. Hill's "dark matter" explains why programme logic shapes outcomes more than user needs do; the practical response is engaging with governance, funding, and accountability structures rather than confining design attention to user journeys. Von Busch and Palmås's "who whom?" explains why good design arguments do not automatically win; the practical question is always who holds the power to act on what maps reveal, and what would mobilise that power. Tonkinwise's aggregation critique explains why user research on individuals does not change cross-cutting processes - a systemic lens is needed, not individual empathy - while his analysis of the blueprint as management tool reveals that the same artefact can do different political work: process maps could discipline staff into standardisation, or surface invisible care work and make a case for resourcing it.

The metaphor fragmentation from Bisset and Kuštrak Korper (2023) explains why "service design" means different things to every stakeholder; being explicit from the start about which role one is playing - and which one is not - is one way of resisting the fragmentation that allows design to be absorbed. The "Service Design Jesus" pattern (Bisset, 2023b) explains why designers get idealised then blamed; naming the dynamic early and resisting the temptation to carry organisational anxiety personally is the practical countermeasure. Tonkinwise's emotional labour analysis reveals that coordination roles are more costly than they appear - the people piecing products together are doing care work, and making that visible rather than optimising it away matters.

At the institutional level, Kimbell's innovation-austerity logic explains why design gets positioned as responsive rather than strategic, and the practical warning is to watch for design becoming a programme workstream producing maps on request. Bailey's co-option thesis asks whether "design" in an organisation may already be defanged - whether "service design" has become another deliverable rather than a different way of thinking. Fayard, Stigliani and Bechky's (2016) ethos-over-expertise analysis explains why design is structurally vulnerable to capture: the tools can be adopted without the values. The performance-and-substance distinction asks whether artefacts change decisions or merely exist. Malmberg's (2017) absorptive capacity framework explains why visibility alone does not produce change - knowledge acquisition without assimilation infrastructure leaves things functionally unchanged. And Boztepe's (2023) tissue incompatibility reminds us that the resistance is mutual: design struggles to adapt to institutional constraints just as institutions struggle to embrace design.

References

• Bailey, J.A. (2021). Governmentality and power in 'design for government' in the UK, 2008-2017: An ethnography of an emerging field [Doctoral dissertation, University of Brighton].
• Bisset, F. (2023b). Crucifying 'Service Design Jesus': Exploring social defences encountered in the design process [Conference paper]. Nordes 2023.
• Bisset, F., & Kuštrak Korper, A. (2023). What did we actually design here and what purpose did it serve? Some generative metaphors for understanding service design in the Swedish public sector [Conference paper]. Nordes 2023.
• Boztepe, S., Linde, P., & Smedberg, A. (2023). Design making its way to the city hall: Tensions in design capacity building in the public sector [Conference paper]. IASDR 2023. https://doi.org/10.21606/iasdr.2023.458
• de Mozota, B. (2003). Design management.
• Design Council. (2013). Design for public good.
• Fayard, A-L., Stigliani, I., & Bechky, B.A. (2016). How nascent occupations construct a mandate: The case of service designers' ethos. Administrative Science Quarterly, 62(2), 270-303.
• Fotaki, M., & Hyde, P. (2014). Organizational blind spots: Splitting, blame and idealization in the National Health Service. Human Relations, 68(3), 441-462.
• Hill, D. (2012). Dark matter and Trojan horses: A strategic design vocabulary.
• Hochschild, A.R. (2012). The managed heart: Commercialization of human feeling.
• Holliday, B. (2022). Multiplied.
• Julier, G., & Kimbell, L. (2019). Keeping the system going: Social design and the reproduction of inequalities in neoliberal times. Design Issues, 35(4).
• Kimbell, L. (2021). Logics of social design [Conference paper]. Design as Common Good Online Conference.
• Lee, K. (2024). Institutions as objects in fourth order design. She Ji: The Journal of Design, Economics, and Innovation, 10(2).
• Malmberg, L. (2017). Building design capability in the public sector: Expanding the horizons of development [Doctoral dissertation, Linköpings University].
• Rancière, J. (2013). The Politics of Aesthetics. Bloomsbury Publishing.
• Service Design Network. (n.d.). Service design impact report: Public sector.
• Tonkinwise, C. (2010, September 1). Politics please, we're social designers. Core77. https://www.core77.com/posts/17284/
• Tonkinwise, C. (2023). All care, no responsibility: Everything service designers need to know about politics but were afraid to ask [Guest lecture]. MFA Products of Design, School of Visual Arts.
• Touchpoint, 16(1). (2025). Product management and service design.
• von Busch, O., & Palmås, K. (2023). The corruption of co-design.
• Wastell, D.G. (1999). Learning dysfunctions in information systems development: Overcoming the social defenses with transitional objects. MIS Quarterly, 23(4).