US Presidential Innovation Fellow shares on participatory futures and design in government

Satellites, GPS, and the Internet – what do all these have in common?

They are all the result of world-changing technologies first developed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), a research and development agency in the United States tasked with developing frontier emerging technologies.

The success of DARPA led to similar offshoots within the federal government, including the recently set-up Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H), an agency that seeks to fund breakthrough scientific technologies for health. These ambitious projects include a universal vaccine that can target the ten most common flu strains in one shot.

But groundbreaking teams need entrepreneurial leaders who can bring in external perspectives, fresh ideas, and long-term thinking.

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Bringing in private sector expertise

This is where Nina Maturu, who is currently a Presidential Innovation Fellow at ARPA-H, comes in. She is helping ARPA-H, which is housed within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, build its strategic foresight and design capabilities, with participatory principles at its core.

Given that the agency nurtures technologies which may not see fruition for decades, foresight work is critical.

“While there is no way to “predict” the future, there are strategic ways in which we can see movements in society and culture to understand how health may be impacted. The role of futuring is to take present day signals and customer needs, and map, and articulate future scenarios, so we can plan accordingly in the present day,” says Maturu to GovInsider.

She joined the public service through the White House Presidential Innovation Fellows (PIF) programme, which has long served as an incubation lab for digital government leaders in North America.

Founded in 2012, the programme brings in top innovators from the private sector, such as strategists, designers, and technologists, to work on high-impact public sector projects in the US.

Today, it boasts alumni such as Hillary Hartley, who co-founded Ontario Digital Service and currently serves as Chief Executive Officer of the U.S. Digital Response team. Other alumni have gone on to found key digital agencies within the federal government, including 18F, a digital service agency.

Tapping on design and futures to drive systemic change

As an innovation consultant, Maturu worked for more than 18 years to embed “human-centered and future-forward strategies and cultures” in large organizations, such as the United Nations and American Express.

Today, she is working with ARPA-H to embed design-thinking and user-centricity into every part of the agency, from ground-level to systems-level.

“I think there is a huge opportunity to bring design – in essence, centering the end user – to higher levels of decision making in government,” she says.

Design goes beyond “making something look pretty”, she says. Instead, design can be embedded in the organization to shape overall strategy and culture.

And the public sector has the potential to tap on design and take it one step further to create “systematic change”, in a way that private sector bodies do not, she shares.

“What would it look like to systematically include the public in our work on a consistent basis at scale?”

“How can we redesign our systems of government to make them more participatory, so that we are actually solving problems that the public has defined, rather than problems government officials have defined? For futures, how do we move from a model of expert-driven to community-driven, where we value lived experience as expertise?”

“Change happens one step at a time. We are getting there with more design-minded voices and professions entering the government.”

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Joining the public service

Maturu was running her own design consultancy, Constellation Design Strategy, when she came across the fellowship.

“When I applied, I was running my own business and loved it, but there was something inside of me that was still curious about government – I had worked in non-profits (big and small) and companies (big and small), but hadn’t touched government even though I had a Masters in Public Policy,” she shares.

“Could I thrive there? Could I be creative? Would it be a place where people were following the status quo? Would they know how to utilize my skills?” These were some of the questions she asked herself, she recalls.

“I decided to apply and to be completely myself during the interview process, so I could
compare apples to apples with my current job. There were multiple times during the interview process where I thought – I probably was too honest in my response.

“But lo and behold, I actually received one of the first offers for the fellowship my year. It made me think, “Hmmm, maybe this is the right place for me.””

The fellowship has offered her a chance to tap into all her experiences in policy, design, and business since joining ARPA-H.

Likewise, she advises young innovators considering the public service to consider roles that invest in their growth and view their career as a portfolio that can represent the spectrum of their abilities and interests.

“I believe 21st century change-makers will be creative, broad-thinkers who are well-versed across multiple sectors and can apply their skills whenever they need to innovate or improve the end-user experience.”

“The world is constantly changing and having roles that allow you to learn generalisable skills
across disciplines will put you at an advantage,” she says.