The wow factor

Drawing on his background in Whitehall and local government, the chair of the Design Council, Sir Michael Bichard, tells Jane Dudman that well-designed public services can tackle some of society's most intractable problems
Sir Michael Bichard
Bichard wants the public sector to use the power of design to drive innovation

Good design probably isn't the first thing you associate with public services. A beautifully designed way to renew your resident's parking permit? That feels like an unlikely yoking of two very different concepts. But it is exactly what Sir Michael Bichard, who chairs the Design Council, wants to happen. And he has a passionate belief that designers can make a real difference by bringing the principles of sustainability and wider social value to bear on everything they design - including public services.

Bichard, one of the stars of the public sector, is probably best-known by the public for telling the police they should share more information, following his inquiry into the Soham murders. In public sector circles, he is hugely admired: there are few managers who don't mention Bichard as a role model. One of the reasons for this is his range of experience.

A former local authority chief executive and Whitehall mandarin, Bichard is a long-standing proponent of innovation within the public sector, and set up an innovation unit when he was permanent secretary at the then Department for Employment. In 2001, he left the civil service to "do something different" and became rector of the London Institute, now the University of Arts. It was a career twist that provided him with new interests and new friends - including shoe designer Jimmy Choo. It also, he has said, made him a better listener, less quick to anger than in his government days.

Since August, Bichard has been director at the newly created Institute of Government, a charity dedicated to supporting the development of leadership skills in government. Alongside this he has retained his position at the Design Council, where he makes bold claims for design, which he says can help society tackle some of its biggest challenges, including crime and climate change. It can be hard, though, to grasp how "design" makes that difference.

School building

There are many areas of public life where the impact of design is obvious, for good or bad. Of the 25 schools in the government's secondary school building programme, the designs for 22 were recently criticised for being mediocre or not good enough. Bad design can result in noisy, open-plan areas that make teaching difficult.

But it was striking that, when people at a Design Council seminar last week were asked for examples of good public services, the list was almost entirely based on great customer service - frontline public sector staff doing not just what people expect, but that bit more. The examples included constructive advice from the police after a burglary about preventing a recurrence; excellent service at London's Moorfields eye hospital; street cleaners who stop to ask if they need to improve the service; and a ward sister who gave a family her own number, so they could ring and inquire about their relative.

Only a couple of the examples were manifestly a result of a newly designed government system - one being the much-derided electronic booking service in the NHS, Choose and Book. This got a rave review, and was described as providing someone with the best experience of the NHS she had ever had. But even then, what had impressed wasn't just the system, but the fact that the receptionist had smiled as she used it.

Ah, but that's precisely the point, Bichard says. "It's about energising the users, so that frontline staff feel engaged and can produce new solutions." In other words, it's about designing systems and processes to get the right information to that frontline member of staff so they smile, because they find the system easy to use. Do that, and the public will love it too.

So what is the "design" element in this, and in what way is it different and distinctive from other elements of attempting to improve public services?

We go back to that resident's parking permit for Bichard's own example. "In some places," he says, "that's a difficult process, but in other places, the process has been thought through. The queues are well managed and the IT produces the right information for staff. That looks like a happy accident, but someone has sat down and designed that process."

He wants the public sector to use the power of design to drive innovation. Designers bring value through their ability to visualise and to produce new answers to difficult questions, he says. He cites the British designer Jonathan Ive, who designed the Apple iPod. "He didn't set out to design a beautiful thing, although he would have wanted to. He spent most of his time thinking about complex technical problems, and that is where design has a role in public services, in tackling the most complex problems."

One way to do this is to look at how people actually use services. For instance, one hospital experiencing high levels of violent attacks on staff in its A&E department brought in a design team to look at what was actually happening. It transpired that patients, already in pain and distress, were coming in the "wrong" entrance and weren't being seen quickly enough. Improvements to the physical layout ensured that patients were able to make eye contact with reception staff within 20 seconds. The result? An 80% fall in violent attacks.


In the private sector, the Design Council has a programme to help smaller and medium-sized companies to be more innovative, and Bichard says he sees no reason why that programme, Designing Demand, shouldn't be translated into the public sector. He says: "The emphasis is on delivering more responsive and efficient services, but that ought to start with whether those services are well-designed, before people start pumping money into changing things."

He acknowledges that there are obstacles, particularly the way in which most government bodies are structured, which he says is still "deeply unhelpful". He also knows that with public sector budgets under pressure, innovation and design aren't always valued. In those circumstances, he believes, innovators tend to be seen as out of touch or off the wall.

That will have to change, he points out, if the government is going to tackle some of the hardest, most challenging problems facing society today, such as climate change, obesity, security and skills. Only a joined-up approach will work, he argues. That may mean changes to how the government procures goods and services, to make tenders more flexible, so that innovative ideas can be included.

But there is still a conundrum at the heart of Bichard's approach. His view of sustainable design as something that does good in the wider world is hard to square with our desire for stylish, new products. When people look at an iPod, they don't think of a designer solving complex problems. They think: "Wow!"

Bringing the wow factor into public services is going to keep Bichard and his colleagues busy for some time to come.

Curriculum Vitae

Age 61.

Status Partner.

Lives London.

Education Manchester University (law, LLB); Birmingham University (social science, MSc).

Career 2008: director, Institute of Government, and chair, Design Council; 2005-08: chair, Legal Services Commission; 2004: chair, Soham murders inquiry; 2001-08: rector, London Institute/University of the Arts; 2003-08: non-executive chair, RSE Consulting; 1995-2001: permanent secretary, Department for Employment/Department for Education and Employment; 1990-95: chief executive, Benefits Agency; 1986-90: chief executive, Gloucestershire county council; 1979-86: chief executive, London borough of Brent (previous local authority posts in Reading, Berkshire and Lambeth).

Interests Public service reform; food; art and design; Manchester United

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