Design is often understood by lay people as an end result: as the forms, visuals and expressions that we see as products and graphics, and that we call things and signs. Design approaches are perhaps most powerful when used to finally give form, to create the tangible artefacts that humans can engage with physically and emotionally. The ability to deliberately create user experiences and to make services and products desirable and attractive is, in this sense, at the heart of design. One might call this enacting new practices.

However, when it comes to design for service, for the creation of new experiences for users, the end result is highly contingent on changes in organisational processes and behaviours within public institutions. This turns our attention, again, to the experience of the public managers, and their staff and stakeholders, as they are involved in the design processes. How are they able to turn alternative scenarios into tangible changes that can ultimately be felt and experienced by someone outside the organisation?

This chapter first explores the role of prototyping as a key process whereby design proposals are developed, refined, described, given form, shape and expression. How are prototypes significant in the processes of organisational engagement and of asserting what might work best in terms of achieving intended outcomes? Second, I explore and characterise the leadership engagement with design I call ‘Making the future concrete’: how do managers work with designers and their methods to enact change? How do they relate to the power of prototyping and experimentation? Third, I discuss the final of the six management engagements with design, the tendency to insist on public value. Fourth, I reflect on the particular nature of design approaches to bring tangibility and ‘life’ into public change efforts. The chapter concludes with a number of suggestions on how to get started using design for enacting new practices.

Methods: tools for creating tangible futures

The professional role of designers is, ultimately, to make things concrete. As Michlewski (2015, p 112) suggests, ‘Creating models (of absolutely anything) is absolutely essential in a successful design process.’ In his view, as mentioned earlier, such models are what enables playfulness and exploration.