User needs and the building blocks of regulation: Using participatory design to prototype social enterprise legal structures in Australia
| Date | 01 April 2022 |
| Published date | 01 April 2022 |
| Author | Krystian Seibert,Michael Moran,Carolyn Barnes,Fiona Martin |
| DOI | 10.1177/0952076720911692 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
2022, Vol. 37(2) 154 –178
Article
User needs and the
building blocks of
regulation: Using
participatory design
to prototype social
enterprise legal
structures in Australia
Michael Moran , Krystian Seibert and
Carolyn Barnes
Swinburne University of Technology, Victoria, Australia
Fiona Martin
University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia
Abstract
Although co-design is acknowledged as an emerging tool in public administration for
use in program or service system design, it has not been widely applied to complex
policy spheres, such as law and regulation. In the context of policy development for the
field of social enterprise, we explored the use of co-design as a facilitation method
to elicit end-users’ experience of regulation and to generate options for reform.
Specifically, this involved the use of LEGOV
RSerious PlayV
Rto understand end-user
views on legal structures following a push by policy advocates in Australia for a struc-
ture to serve the needs of social enterprise, similar to that available in the United
Kingdom. The article makes two contributions to research on co-design in
public policy. The first contribution is methodological. We offer insights into the
application of co-design to a new area, law and regulation, finding that co-design is
useful for generating bottom-up insights into the regulatory preferences of end-users
Corresponding author:
Michael Moran, Swinburne University of Technology, Cnr Wakefield and William Streets, Hawthorn, Victoria
3122, Australia.
Email: mjmoran@swin.edu.au
Public Policy and Administration
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DOI: 10.1177/0952076720911692
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Moran et al. 155
but has certain limitations as a tool for research and policy development, notably in
relation to the feasibility of the insights it may provide. The second contribution is
uncovering empirical insights into end-user preferences regarding how regulatory
reform might improve the policy environment for social enterprise development in
Australia and beyond.
Keywords
Social enterprise, not-for-profits, co-design, legal structures, public policy, regulation
Introduction
Co-design is increasingly acknowledged as an emerging tool in the development of
public policy and services in both academic (Bason, 2014; Blomkamp, 2018;
Butcher, 2015; Junginger, 2013; Kimbell and Bailey, 2017) and government circles
(e.g. Department of Human Services, 2012; Design Commission, 2013; Design
Council, 2013; European Commission, 2013). Its perceived benefits include scope
to provide an understanding of end-user needs (Evans and Terrey, 2016), to gen-
erate new, user-centred ideas (Mulgan, 2014) and to garner support for program
implementation and legislative and policy change (Blomkamp, 2018). Scholarly
research focuses on co-design as facilitating other participatory governance
approaches such as co-production, although primarily for use in programs or ser-
vice systems design, with limited research where public policy is the unit of analysis
(Blomkamp, 2018). At a practice-level, co-design has not been widely applied to
complex policy spheres such as law and regulation, with Kimbell and Bailey (2017)
identifying, in their conceptual article on the use of co-design approaches in the
development of public policy, the need for case study research of the possibilities
offered by design-driven prototyping.
Writing in respect of policy development for the field of social enterprise, we
examine the use of co-design as a model of participatory action research in eliciting
end-users’ experience of regulation and in generating concepts for regulatory
reform. Co-design shares features with participatory precepts associated with
New Public Governance (Osborne, 2006), being linked to or seen to be nested
within cognate approaches such as co-production (Nabatchi et al., 2017;
Osborne et al., 2016). While co-design is heavily influenced by broader trends in
public policy, its distinct approaches reflect its roots in Scandinavian research of
the late 1970s which used low-fidelity prototyping methods to involved end-users
in decision-making in the development of information and communication tech-
nology as a democratic ideal, given its impact on workplaces (Kensing and
Blomberg, 1998). We explore whether the focus on prototyping in co-design
allows participants from a range of social enterprises to collaboratively model
key features of legal structures to inform critical decisions about which legal
form best serves their needs.
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