Note: This is cross-posted from Insidejob.fi since it's relevant to readers of the HDL blog too.

Our Design Exchange Programme is growing again. In August we placed Jaana Hyvärinen to work with the City of Helsinki Department of Social Services, where she will focus on integrating service design into the organization’s strategy. While the public sector is improving its service design capability, we also need to build organizations capable of framing relevant questions in the first place. No one wants a fantastically delivered service for something useless, or even harmful. How about the best surgery for those who don’t need it? So this is a wordy way of saying that we see service design as one part of a compliment of approaches to bring coherence to what we say, what we do, and how we do it.

Bryan standing below the Finnish saying “Fear of God is the beginning of wisdom”. DEP is as much about entrepreneurship as it is about culture. Can we build a culture that stems from trust instead of from fear?

Our societies have built great innovation traditions in the private sector, but that entrepreneurship can still be dormant in the public sector. While Helsinki Design Lab is about knowledge creation, capture, and dissemination, DEP was conceived to build capability within the public sector in Finland. Sitra's design-related work balance two sides of the same effort. We reflect on the knowledge and craft of strategic design through HDL, and build practical capabilities through programs like DEP. Public sector entrepreneurship requires both.

We're excited to announce that we now have two more openings for public sector designers, this time working within two Finnish Ministries. One position is open within the Ministry of Employment and the Economy (TEM) and the other within the Ministry of the Environment (YM). Applications for these these one-year positions are closing soon, so take a look at our job posting if you are interested. Please also help us spread the word!

This round of hires will bring our DEP total to four placements. Our gamble was that DEP would be a great learning experience for our embedded designers, for the hosting Public Sector organizations who gain a new capability, and us who get to learn first hand from this experiment. Early indications are positive and we will undoubtedly be examining the questions of whether to build DEP into something beyond this first pilot year.

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Posted by Marco Steinberg
September 12th, 2012