Globally, the COVID-19 pandemic has been an inflection point, bringing heightened awareness around the preparedness and resilience of public health systems in dealing with severe shocks. While the pandemic has...
Tag: public sector
Government Forms as Friction: Identifying Opportunities for Innovation at the Intersection of Staff and Resident Needs
This paper explores a key friction in service delivery that is inherent in forms – the ubiquitous and seemingly...
How a Government Organisation Evolved to Embrace Ethnographic Methods for Service (and Team) Resilience: The Case of the Canadian Digital Service
Government websites and online services are often built with limited input from the people they serve. This approach limits their ability to respond to ever changing needs and contexts. This case study describes...
Anticipating the Unanticipated: Ethnography and Crisis Response in the Public Sector
This case study emphasizes the importance of ethnographic research in the public sector, specifically regarding emergency preparedness and crisis-response. In the summer of 2020, Surrey County Council in England commissioned a mixed-method Community Impact Assessment to better assist and serve...
Can I Get a Witness? The Limits of Evidence in Healthcare Quality Evaluation Systems in American Hospitals
“I got verbals, but verbals don’t hold up in court….I need it in black and white.” After Sheila submits hospital quality data to the Center for Medicaid and Medicare Services (CMS), reports indicate that her data hasn’t been received. She makes countless calls to the CMS Help Desk to get answers....
Collaborative Generation: Making Sense of Today’s Stories to Catalyze a Thriving Tomorrow for All
This article shares an innovative, community-centered method for research, sensemaking, and innovation in social...
Designing for Dynamics of Agency in NYC Homeless Shelters
Public sector innovation (PSI) is an emerging multidisciplinary field that is attracting practitioners from a wide range of sectors and industries, with a correspondingly broad set of skills and experience. PSI aims to significantly improve the services that a government has the responsibility to...
Ethnographies of Future Infrastructures
Article 4 in the series Data, Design and Civics: Ethnographic Perspectives On April 1, Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter announced a $317 million federally funded initiative in textile innovation and manufacturing—a national consortium of public and private organizations to be led by MIT. It’s...
The People Say: How We Built a Groundbreaking Public Research Platform to Catalyze Human-Centered Policymaking
The People Say is a pioneering research repository and a model for making rich qualitative data available for...
Unveiling the Human Experience of Medicaid Renewals: Using a Data-Driven and Human-Centered Design Approach to Improve Public Service Delivery
This case study demonstrates how a transdisciplinary, human-centered approach to research and process...