Relational Service Design and New Public Management: Navigating a Paradox?¹

Relational public services require a relational service design approach, yet the complexity of this approach is rarely acknowledged, and examples of its application in public administration literature are few and far between. This issue challenges the design of relational public services: designing with the status quo leads to designs for and of the status quo. To bridge the gap, this book chapter develops a new typology and practice of relational public service design. The typology distinguishes between designing for relational services and service designing as relating. The former emphasizes the role of relationships in the service outcome of public service design processes while the latter focuses on the role of relating in the role and practices of designers who are service designing. An auto-ethnographic case study from British Columbia (Canada – Turtle Island) illustrates this typology and depicts the challenge of designing relationally in a complex, non-relational public administration context, in this case a dominant New Public Management (NPM) paradigm. We demonstrate that public relational service design practice cannot take hold as long as designers and public managers are not aware of NPM’s dominance, precisely because NPM promotes and requires ‘unrelationality’, creating a paradox. To transcend this paradox, we propose expanding the concept of relationality in public service design in multiple dimensions: within the mindset of the public service designer and their practice. This involves integrating systemic design to address contextual complexity and reflexive relational design to counteract non-relational tendencies in their work environment. We conclude by suggesting future research directions.