Considerations for a Department of Technology and Innovation If Congress establishes a Department of Innovation, the new agency should consider the following: •
Use human-centered design in the creation of the agency. The academic literature and practitioner case studies on executive branch agencies and their organization and design focus primarily on the merits of coordination, centralization, and communication, and less on the user experience of agencies. The literature rarely focuses on what are known as human-centered design principles. Human-Centered Design was originally pioneered by Stanford Professor John E. Arnold in the 1950’s. He encouraged his student engineers to be creative, and orient the engineering toward creative solutions, in part by asking many questions, imagining various scenarios, and other methods.92 If Congress were to establish a new Department of Technology and Innovation it could draw from a variety of existing models, but it should also consider utilizing a human-centered design process in the creation of a new department. This would entail in-depth interviews to understand what the end-users of the agency– the public, other government agencies, and the private sector– might need, or want from the agency. Interviews should incorporate “user journeys”, step-bystep documentation of how a user approaches and engages with an agency. Interviews would differ based on the user—how end-users at multiple hospitals that have been overtaken by ransomware might experience and utilize the agency would likely be very different from how an end-user at the Department of Transportation might utilize the agency. Arnold’s approach to human-centered design centered on four steps: question, observe, associate, and predict. Each step should be used to design an executive branch agency based on how the agency can best solve problems for various stakeholders.
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See the collection of Professor Arnold’s public remarks in, “Creative Engineering: Promoting Innovation by Thinking Differently,” 2016. https://www.inist.org/library/1959.John%20E%20Arnold.Creative%20 Engineering.pdf.
Crisis and Congress: Technology, Information, and the Future of Governance
