For years, public sector design practitioners have said, informally, that culture eats method (or strategy) for breakfast. Human-centred design government initiatives look great in a workshop and then stall once they meet the real machinery of a department. Now there is a rigorous, multi-year study behind this. It confirms something a lot of practitioners have felt for a long time but didn’t have the evidence to prove.
A 2026 longitudinal study followed human-centred design work across eight national agencies over two and a half years, tracking what actually happens when public institutions try to move design thinking from isolated innovation labs into everyday operations. The research, conducted by Maike Klip and Jasper van Kuijk and presented at the DRS2026 conference in Edinburgh, was built around an action research program in which multiple national agencies worked together over an extended period. That structure gave the researchers a close-up view of what actually helps design work take root, and what quietly kills it, rather than relying on a single case study or a short-term pilot evaluation.
Titled “From lab to line,” the study frames its central question: human-centred design is increasingly proposed as a way to align government policies and services with citizens’ needs and capabilities, yet embedding it in everyday government practice remains to be difficult. Rather than treating that difficulty as a footnote, the researchers set out to identify exactly what mechanisms determine whether design work survives past the pilot stage.
The Four Mechanisms Behind Lasting Change
The study identified a set of recurring mechanisms that separate government organisations where human-centred design becomes normal practice from those where it stays confined to an innovation lab down the hall.
The first is normalising user involvement, meaning talking to citizens and testing ideas with them becomes a routine part of how work gets done, not a special activity reserved for a select project or a funded pilot. When user involvement is treated as exceptional, it never becomes muscle memory.
The second is creating organisational mandate. Design work needs real authority behind it, not just enthusiastic buy-in from a few managers who happen to like the idea. Without a clear mandate, human-centred design remains optional, and optional things are the first to be dropped when budgets tighten or priorities shift.
The third is building multidisciplinary collaboration. Designers working in isolation from policy teams, delivery teams, and legal or compliance functions tend to produce ideas that never survive contact with the rest of the organisation. When collaboration across disciplines becomes standard practice, insights move more easily from research into actual decisions.
The fourth is re-aligning the system around the citizen experience, which means budgets, reporting lines, and approval processes need to bend toward the actual experience of the person using a service, rather than around internal departmental logic that was never designed with that person in mind.
Together, these four mechanisms describe what stimulates the anchoring of human-centred design in government organisations, and what prevents it, giving public sector leaders a much clearer picture of where their own transformation efforts are likely to break down.
None of these findings will surprise anyone who has spent time trying to embed design thinking into a public institution. Practitioners have long pointed to the same barriers to design thinking government teams encounter again and again: mandates that shift quickly with a change in leadership, siloed teams that never talk to each other, and structures that weren’t built to change around the people they serve.
What this research adds is rigor and gives public sector leaders and design practitioners a shared, evidence-based vocabulary for describing exactly where their transformation efforts are likely to slow down. It is much easier to secure budget, mandate, and executive attention for a problem that has been documented across eight national agencies over two and a half years than for a problem that has only ever been described informally in hallway conversations.
The Missing Piece: Methods Are Not Enough on Their Own
Even with a strong evidence base pointing to the right mechanisms, mandate, collaboration, systems realignment, none of it takes root if the organisation itself has not shifted how it thinks. A team can be handed every tool in the human-centred design toolkit and still produce the same rigid, policy-first outcomes, because the underlying assumptions about how work gets approved, who gets listened to, and what counts as evidence have not moved at all.
The mechanisms identified in the 2026 study describes what an organisation needs to build. They do not tell a team how to actually think differently on a Tuesday morning when a budget approval is due and a citizen’s confusing experience with a benefits portal is sitting in a research report nobody has read yet. That gap between structural mechanism and daily mindset is exactly where *Future Proofing By Design* by Nilufer Erdebil becomes useful, because it treats design thinking less as a toolkit and more as a set of habits a team and an organisation practice together, every day, not just during a formal project.
Surfacing and challenging assumptions is treated as a leadership skill, not just a designer’s task, because most government stalling points are really unexamined beliefs about what is possible within existing rules. Reframing problems, rather than accepting them exactly as originally defined by policy or legislation, is what allows teams to find room to manoeuvre inside otherwise rigid systems. Experimentation is a low-risk way to test ideas before committing public funds, which speaks directly to the resistance to change that so many public servants describe when innovation is seen as too risky. And collaboration and iteration are framed as continuous, ongoing habits, not phases that end once a prototype ships or a pilot wraps up.
None of these ideas replace the mechanisms identified in the 2026 study. These give teams and leaders a practical way to actually live them out day to day, which is precisely the missing link between good research and lasting government innovation capability.
Turning Research into Practice
For public sector leaders reading this study, the takeaway is not that human-centred design has failed. It is that the mechanisms required to make it stick are now documented clearly enough to plan around, rather than something to figure out through trial and error inside every new agency. Building organisational mandate, multidisciplinary collaboration, and systems realigned around citizen experience are structural changes that take real time and political will. And they become far more achievable when paired with the everyday habits, staying close to the people affected, questioning assumptions honestly, reframing rigid problems, testing small before scaling, and treating collaboration as continuous, that turn a good research finding into an actual way of working.
For public servants and leaders trying to build this kind of lasting public sector design thinking capability, *Future Proofing By Design* by Nilufer Erdebil offers a practical roadmap grounded in real government examples rather than borrowed corporate theory.
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*Research reference: Klip, M., and van Kuijk, J. (2026). From lab to line: mechanisms for anchoring human-centred design in public policy and service development. DRS2026, Edinburgh.*