In improving public services and social innovation, the design world has vital insights to offer: but designers must go beyond evangelism to show greater rigour about methods and limits

For about ten years now designers have been saying that their professional approach holds vital insights for public services. In the run-up to a lecture by David Willets to an LSE-Design Council event on innovating in public service design, Geoff Mulgan argues that recent research shows that it is not enough to be enthusiastic about this change. Designers do have useful methods to add, but they need to change their way of working for these to have more impact. A debate about how to do this has now started in earnest within the design community, both in the UK and overseas.