Obscuring Austerity: The Politics and Practice of 'Citizen-Centred' Design

Design has increasingly become the face of public sector innovation in Canada. Concepts such as design thinking, co-creation, product management, and user testing are quickly displacing more traditional public administration practices, values, and approaches to work.

Despite this intensification of design activity and the new demands placed upon public servants, there are few scholarly texts within the fields of design studies, political economy, political theory that examine the potential political effects that may be associated with introducing design a discipline born out of industry to lend eye appeal to products to public sector contexts in Canada. This thesis addresses this gap in the literature by examining the accounts of 23 public servants and consultants who specialize in public sector design and innovation and who described their work in the form of case examples, reviewing policy and project documentation, and analyzing two case studies.

The analysis concludes that design, when carried out in service of public sector innovation, acquires it legitimacy as a valid public service practice by promoting an ethos of citizen-centredness: a set of values and practices that conflates the desires of individual citizens (e.g., more efficient service delivery), who are construed as consumers with market-oriented needs, with large-scale sociopolitical public issues (e.g., ending youth homelessness). Applying a critical theory lens, this study concludes that design performs the work of neoliberal governance subtle techniques employed to imbricate the values of neoliberal rationality within public sector institutions by neutralizing the politics of austerity. In so doing, this variant of neoliberal encroachment erodes the collective-ness that is demanded of democratic life, resulting in a diminished political subjectivity.