Better by Design

A Shared Island event between the Department of Public Expenditure, Infrastructure, Public Service Reform and Digitalisation in partnership with Creative Ireland, and hosted by the Institute of Designers Ireland, the event will highlight how human-centred, strategic, and evidence-led design approaches are improving outcomes for citizens and public bodies alike.

Key themes include:

Designing Digital: How is design shaping Ireland's digital transformation - and what does it actually take to build services around people rather than organisational structures? Drawing on experience from the Life Events programme and wider digital delivery, these discussions explore the practical realities of cross-departmental service design, moving from pilot to national scale, and navigating the tension between digital targets and genuine inclusion.

Designing Workforces: Public services are only as good as the people and teams delivering them. These discussions ask what it takes to build organisations capable of designing for complexity - exploring how the public service is developing design capability through specialist roles, structured learning, and partnerships with higher education institutions. The conversation will consider what genuine diversity of background, experience and thinking brings to the workforce, and what kinds of spaces - physical, organisational and cultural - enable that thinking to flourish.

Designing with Evidence: Good policy depends on good evidence - but what kinds of evidence, and how do we gather it? Design for policy is still nascent in Ireland, and these discussions explore the opportunity that presents: bringing the texture and lived reality of people's experience into the policy process, and using creative methods not just to understand public needs but to reimagine how policy is shaped and how citizens interact with it.

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Host or Publisher IDI