Unlocking the democratic potential of design capabilities in public management

Public management needs to keep pace with contemporary problems and harvest capabilities to meet future scenarios. Consequently, practitioners in the public field must advocate for critical discussions and engage with people who are going to benefit from their guidance. The purpose of the current research is to investigate strategies to
strengthen public management by exploring the potential of Design Thinking as a policy competency. A participatory design approach has been selected to co-create a learning environment for building design capabilities. In other words, a safe space that allows for sharing and nurturing knowledge, skills and attitudes. The setup of the participatory process entails a thorough exploration, in which a team of seven public managers of a regional association of municipalities participated. In four participatory sessions, a learning space has been iteratively prototyped, and finally evaluated in the context. Advantages and challenges to the selected approach are discussed to provide guidelines for a practical
application and replication of the process within the target domain. It can be concluded that design interventions developed with the current integrated design approach have demonstrated viable opportunities for capacity-building inpublic management.