| 4. In which ways is the initiative creative and innovative?
|
|
‘Design Thinking’, which is the core idea of the Citizen Design Group, refers to a method that employs divergent thinking to seek many possible options different from commonly perceived notions and then convergent thinking to get to the bottom of existing challenges and narrow down to a final solution.
The Citizen Design Group distinguishes itself from other traditional and bureaucratic models of opinion gathering by adopting this new way of innovative thinking and methodologies to engage citizens in policymaking process to draw the best solution at first hand.
Specifically, this new initiative prefers in-depth interviews with customers and actual service-experience as the customer while completely abandoning the traditional methods of customer research survey or expert opinion gathering which tend to fail in figuring out the “hidden” needs of the customers. With these new methods, the Group finds out latent needs of people that cannot be easily discovered by traditional methods.
|
|
| 5. Who implemented the initiative and what is the size of the population affected by this initiative?
|
|
The Ministry of the Interior (MOI) establishes a master plan to operate Citizen Design Groups at the beginning of each year and notifies each central and local government. Based on this plan, each institution autonomously selects tasks to form each Group and establish detailed operational plan. In the process, MOI undertakes the supervision of overall project management by providing financial support to outstanding projects, offering education and consultation as well as introducing suitable service designer for each project.
Depending on the type of tasks performed by the Group, all 50 million Koreans can be the beneficiaries of the initiative. Some initiatives can benefit not only Korean nationals but also foreigners living in Korea.
For example, the Korea Customs Service has revised the way of providing overseas travel information such as exchange rate, weather, and customs information through the Design Group to provide better service to over 18 million international travelers annually.
In Ulsan Metropolitan City, where many factories are located, workers and citizens participate in the Group to create a design application system to reduce safety accidents in the industrial complex which benefits more than one million Ulsan city residents including foreigners.
As of 2016, 33 out of 46 central government agencies and all 243 local governments operated the Design Group, which implies that virtually all citizens of the Republic of Korea have enjoyed the benefits of the initiative.
|
| 6. How was the strategy implemented and what resources were mobilized?
|
|
One of the main strategies of the Citizen Design Group initiative was to run a pilot project at the beginning. When the pilot project was proved to be effective, the Citizen Design group succeeded in gaining support from both providers and beneficiaries. As a result, it was gradually expanded across the nation from the second year of 2015.
First launched as a pilot project in 2014, the Citizen Design Group was significantly expanded especially to the municipalities where citizens frequently use public services. From the second year of implementation in 2015, it became one of the official programs of the Government 3.0 Initiative, a government innovation initiative presented by the Korean Government. Since then, the number of Design Groups has dramatically grown.
* The number of Citizen Design Groups: 31 in 2014 → 248 in 2015 → 382 in 2016
The operation of the Citizen Design Group consists of a chain of process: discovering problems, defining the issues, developing the solutions and delivering them based on a design thinking that repeats divergent and convergent thinking
◇ Discover: Identifying problems of public services and policies through extensive investigation for stakeholders and discover hidden needs of the public.
◇ Define: Narrowing key issues from the results of discover activity and setting policy objectives to determine strategic direction of policies and services.
◇ Develop: Suggesting various solutions to achieve the goal through brainstorming, etc.
◇ Deliver: Suggesting various solutions to achieve the goal through brainstorming, etc. objectives to Group to create a design application
The Citizen Design Group management structure consists of two levels: The overall project management such as establishment of strategies, consulting, education, and provision of operation manual is planned and operated by the Ministry of the Interior in collaboration with the Korea Institute of Design Promotion (KIDP), a specialized agency in the field of design and an affiliated organization of the Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy. KIDP is in charge of implementing and managing detailed programs.
At the operation level, each central or municipal government is responsible for organizing and managing its own Citizen Design Group by allocating its own budget to implement solutions suggested by the Group.
With an aim to spread best practices across the nation and support relatively under-funded local governments, the Ministry of the Interior provided support of operation fees for fifteen projects and special subsidies to ten outstanding projects in 2016. The special subsidy for each project was KRW 50 million (USD 45,000) which helped materializing the solution the Group suggested.
While the Citizen Design Group usually spent only a small budget of operation fee, ministries and municipalities needed to mobilize extra resources such as budget and human resources to implement solutions suggested by the Citizen Design Group. Therefore, the budget and human resources mobilized for the Citizen Design Group as a whole is much larger than what was revealed during the design process.
|
|
| 7. Who were the stakeholders involved in the design of the initiative and in its implementation?
|
|
The Ministry of the Interior (MOI) kicked off the project in 2014 in collaboration with Korea Institute of Design Promotion (KIDP), an affiliated organization of the Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy. Since then, overall implementation of the project including management and operation was carried out by both MOI and KIDP.
At the execution level, each central and local government organizes and operates respective Citizen Design Group, composed of experts, citizens, service designers and public officials, for carrying out an individual program. Citizens and experts were selected through human resources pools or voluntary applications.
As of 2016, about 3,000 people participated in 382 Groups. The role of each participant is as follows:
1. Government Officials: High level officials took the role of general managers who manage the status of overall projects and supervise follow-up measures. Meanwhile, a task manager who is at a relatively lower rank took the role of encouraging cooperation among stakeholders, organizing budgets, and implementing the result of program. Both of them have the common roles of providing support for expenses and managing the timeline and goals of the project.
2. Service Designer: Service designer is the key man of the project who takes the role of planning and supervising task operation with the service design method. The service designer should have a full knowledge on how the service design process works and how the method can draw about the ideas from the participants.
3. Experts: The group of experts is composed of professors and managers who had long working experience related to the task. They provide expertise in relevant fields.
4. Citizens: Citizens serve as the customers or end-users of services that the Citizen Design Group wants to improve. They offer customer’s perspectives and suggest ideas and solutions.
|
|
| 8. What were the most successful outputs and why was the initiative effective?
|
|
The activities of the Citizen Design Group helped to renovate administrative services in a more people-centered way with the viewpoint of the public. As a result, the transparency, efficiency, and reliability of the administrative services have been greatly improved.
As one example, the 2015 Citizen Design Group of the Korea Customs Service designed and launched the user-centered and integrated overseas travel information service which provides useful information as exchange rates, weather, and customs to citizens who travel abroad. Such information used to be provided in a fragmented way by each agency, while the new service provides them in one mobile page step-by-step with the stage of tourist’s journey. Accordingly, it perfectly satisfies the customer’s needs, by dramatically shortening the time for searching same information from 5 minutes and 37 seconds to 27 seconds.
Another example is the 2016 Citizen Design Group of Incheon Metropolitan City. The Group conducted a complete research on small-and medium-sized factories located within the city and identified the needs of local workers. For instance, they needed a more friendly working environment and continuous child care support while they were working in the factory. Through the group activities, innovative solutions such as the “child care bus“ which takes care of child for working mothers and changing dilapidated corridors between factories into pleasant resting places were suggested and implemented. With such initiatives, local governments are turning into more capable and competent municipalities.
We believe that the initiative is more efficient and cost-effective compared to other traditional participating tools as it only requires a dozen of people while other participating tools such as a survey need to receive answers from thousands of people, which takes a lot of time and cost. In addition, many surveys fail to capture the real intention of people while the Citizen Design Group can easily figure out the latent needs of citizens.
|
|
| 9. What were the main obstacles encountered and how were they overcome?
|
|
Several municipalities which have insufficient budgets due to the decline in population were more reluctant to introduce the Citizen Design Group. To encourage their participation, the Ministry of the Interior has provided active support such as operation fee support and special subsidies for excellent projects.
Second obstacle that MOI confronted was the low level of understanding of public officials and the Citizen Design Group members on the service design. Due to the lack of understanding, it was difficult to induce active participation of municipalities and ministries at the beginning. To overcome this challenge at the initial stage, MOI drove various strategies such as distributing the field manual for better understanding and smooth operation, providing education by design professionals and local design centers, offering consultation to participants, and strengthening incentives such as granting awards by the MOI. As a result, the number of participating ministries and municipalities has constantly grown since the second year of the implementation in 2015.
|