Five Principles for Creating Adaptable Public Services

Text: Audun Farbrot, Senior Communications Advisor, Oslo School of Architecture and Design (AHO)

Imagine needing answers about a building permit, finding yourself in a therapy session, or attending a hospital appointment. In such public service settings, detailed procedures and role descriptions are frequently established to ensure safety, fairness, and accessibility.

As a result, interactions in the services often follow a predetermined script. These scripts define the roles of participants—such as a client in need of help or a professional therapist—and the expectations associated with these roles.

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While procedures and guidelines can create predictability, they can also prevent services from adapting to the challenges they encounter. This is a challenge, as people turn to public services with diverse needs and backgrounds, and these needs are constantly evolving.

For example, different patient groups may feel that the healthcare they receive does not accommodate their background, while professionals may find that system requirements override their professional judgment.

"Public services need to be predictable and fair, but at the same time, we must allow users and service providers to work together to find the best solutions for each situation," says Audun Formo Hay, who conducted an extensive study on public service development.

"Although many recognize the need for greater flexibility and co-creation in public services, the question of how to achieve this in practice remains open. Developing more flexible services is crucial—not only to meet today's diverse needs and interests but also so these systems can address future challenges," Hay continues. He is a community psychologist and service design researcher at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design (AHO).

Together with Associate Professor Josina Vink from AHO and Professor Daniela Sangiorgi from Politecnico di Milano, Hay studied how to create more adaptive public services. Over 18 months, they collaborated with more than 900 participants in Norway’s child welfare system—including social workers, children, parents, and policymakers—across three interconnected development projects.

Alongside the researchers, participants experimented with how meetings, dialogue, and collaboration—such as how a social worker interacts with a young person in crisis—could be adapted to specific situations rather than being dictated by standardized guidelines and routines.

Based on these experiments, the researchers developed five principles to help individuals refine their interactions within public services, ensuring they remain valuable in diverse and evolving situations. These principles were recently published in the scientific journal International Journal of Design.

The principles are based on the "scripts" that define roles and expectations in public services. The researchers argue that these unwritten scripts are crucial in shaping interactions and, ultimately, the nature and experience of public services.

Understanding roles and expectations as scripts is useful because it clarifies how interactions in different situations are structured.

"When visiting a doctor, we don’t usually sit in their chair, and the doctor doesn’t typically serve coffee and cake. We follow a more or less fixed script, which has many benefits," Hay explains. "But if those involved are allowed to help shape these scripts, service encounters can be better tailored to individual situations."

The five principles identified by the researchers are:

In child welfare, children often felt that conversations were dominated by adults and their complex questions. Through experimenting with how children could have more influence, social workers and young people developed simple drawing books where children could color and write. By using these books as a starting point of follow-up sessions, instead of adult-led questioning, children had more influence over how they were engaged and what the support focused on.

2. Facilitate regular script revisions

In child welfare, children’s and families’ needs, as well as social workers' situations, evolved over time. Participants experimented with scheduled checkpoints where social workers and others could discuss what was working and adjust their approach accordingly. Through these checkpoints, they could revise their way of collaborating to ensure these collaborations remained relevant over time.

3. Help people navigate conflicting demands and expectations

Participants in child welfare often felt pressured by conflicting demands and expectations. In one experiment, they developed a tool that made these tensions visible. Using this tool in dialogue, they could more explicitly understand, discuss, and find ways to manage them collaboratively.

4. Create tools that help people erase and update outdated scripts

In therapy, families found that current expectations were not always relevant to their situation. TO address this, participants designed a tool using a board, markers, and strings to erase outdated scripts and write new ones together. This made conversations more flexible and relevant to what truly mattered to them.

5. Enable actors at different levels to discuss what is meaningful

In child welfare, there were differing views on what was meaningful—for example, what was considered professional or normal. To explore this, social workers, policymakers, and families participated in a simulated public meeting where they discussed the values, norms, and assumptions influencing their interactions. This deepened their understanding of each other’s perspectives.

"Together, the aim with these principles is to provide actionable directions for fostering more flexible interactions in public services. At the same time, they challenge the traditional emphasis on standardization as the primary strategy for developing these systems," Hay summarizes.

The researchers argue that their findings offer a practical approach to involving those closest to the challenges in shaping public services.

"When those affected by services are given the opportunity to shape their own relationships and roles, the result can be more relevant and meaningful services that are tailored to real needs and practical experience," emphasize Hay, Vink, and Sangiorgi.

The research encourages decision-makers, managers, and others involved in public service development to embrace greater flexibility and co-creation as core principles.

"By promoting small-scale adaptations based on local conditions, challenges can become a breeding ground for innovation—allowing public services to continuously evolve in ways that remain meaningful for those they serve," the researchers conclude.