Advancing policy design through creative engagement with lived experience: the Tomorrow Party

Abstract

We consider how lived experience might actively inform policy design. Good policy design calls for analysis of problems, how they might be addressed, and likely outcomes. Policy scholars and practitioners have devised methods that bring rigor to policy design through problem framing, assessment of potential interventions, and prediction of outcomes of those interventions. This pursuit of analytical and predictive rigor has often given short shrift to the insights of people whose lives are affected by current challenges and who will be impacted by policy change. Our theory of change is that creative engagement with citizens can generate insights of high value to the process of policy design. We introduce the Tomorrow Party – a design method for generating novel stakeholder insights regarding desirable future states. We then discuss initial findings from a series of pilots. Those findings suggest the Tomorrow Party is a broadly applicable creative tool for advancing policy design.

Keywords:

• Policy design
• lived experience
• imagined futures

Acknowledgement

We thank the Wellcome Policy Lab for generous funding that allowed us to pilot and refine the Tomorrow Party as a creative method for policy development. We thank our Monash University colleagues and project collaborators: Myf Doughty, Jane Fisher, Stacy Holman Jones, Adriana Keating, Hannah Korsmeyer, and Briony Rogers. We thank Tomorrow Party guests for playing along with the speculative mode and sharing with us their insights about the party.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Our use of the term “pre-figurative” is borrowed from Sheila Rowbotham’s writings on feminism. In using the term, Rowbotham highlighted the transformative potential of social movements and the need to create spaces and practices that challenge existing power dynamics and envision alternative ways of living and organizing society. See, e.g., her contributions in Rowbothan and Mitter (1994).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Wellcome Trust.