Policy design in the contemporary era

Policy design studies in the sense set out in the Chapter 1 deal with the vagaries of policy formulation by separating out two dimensions of the design experience: on the one hand the exploration of the procedural aspects of design – the specific types of policy formulation activities which lead to design rather than some other form of policy generation – and the substantive – that is, the substance or content of the design itself. This is the policy-relevant articulation of the well-known distinction in design studies generally between ‘design-as-verb’ (‘policy formulation’) and ‘design-as-noun’ (mix of policy tools and instruments) (Hillier et al. 1972; Hillier and Leaman 1974; Gero 1990).