Over the past decade, a range of efforts have been made to incorporate practices drawn from industrial and participatory design into elements of the public policymaking process. Our interest lies in the field of co-design in policymaking. This emerging field has seen considerable emphasis placed on informing policy development with knowledge and insights from those living with specific problems and existing policy settings. Following the extant literature, we define co-design in policymaking as a participatory and design-oriented process which creatively and actively engages a diverse pool of participants to define and address a public problem. Evidence to date suggests co-design in policymaking can be especially useful in broadening participation in policy development, encouraging creative speculation about how policy choices might shape future outcomes, and prototyping policy approaches to assess their feasibility and desirability. But evidence continues to emerge regarding the barriers in many public sector settings that preclude co-design practice from greater engagement with – and influence upon – long-established, tightly-held processes of policy development. Through critical assessment of existing literature, we summarise the current state of co-design in policymaking. We then suggest promising ways policy practitioners and researchers could contribute to making co-design an embedded practice in policymaking, well-used and well-recognised for the unique contributions it can make to policy development.

在过去十年中，人们做出了一系列努力，将工业和参与式设计的实践纳入公共政策制定过程的要素。我们的兴趣在于政策制定中的协同设计领域。在这个新兴领域，人们非常重视利用那些生活在特定问题和现有政策环境中的人的知识和见解来为政策制定提供信息。根据现有的文献，我们将政策制定中的协同设计定义为一个参与式和以设计为导向的过程，它创造性地、积极地让不同的参与者参与定义和解决公共问题。迄今为止的证据表明，政策制定中的协同设计在扩大对政策制定的参与、鼓励对政策选择如何影响未来结果的创造性猜测以及构建政策方法原型以评估其可行性和可取性方面特别有用。但越来越多的证据表明，许多公共部门环境中存在障碍，这些障碍阻碍了协同设计实践更深入地参与和影响长期建立的、紧密控制的政策制定过程。通过对现有文献的批判性评估，我们总结了政策制定中协同设计的现状。然后，我们提出了政策实践者和研究人员可以做出贡献的有前途的方式，使协同设计成为政策制定的嵌入式实践，并因其对政策制定的独特贡献而得到充分利用和广泛认可。