So, we’re celebrating five awesome years of Design Audit Studio and it’s been a blast! I teamed up with Marjorie Bakker to write a paper that made the cut for the October conference of the IASDR in Milan. Unfortunately, I couldn’t make it to the conference, but I really value the reflection we did when we wrote the paper. And creating that poster with Ruiter Janssen and Jelmer Koedood for the conference was such a fun project. Big shout out to the whole DAS team for making it happen!

Hopefully you will read the paper (download here), but if you don’t – here is the summary:

For Supreme Audit Institutions to live up to the expectations of Parliament and the public and meet the needs of the public sector organisations they audit, they need to break out of their traditional knowledge-driven role of public spending watchdogs. Human-centred design offers an alternative to more knowledge: knowledge-in-action. Yet, the current frame of auditors restrains them from experimenting with alternatives. This study shares our experiences as in-house designers at the Netherlands Court of Audit of enriching the current focus on siloed public administration with citizens’ perspectives and of finding alternative ways to increase audit impact. Moreover, we show the crucial role that in-house designers can play to help auditors break out of their audit profession in a manageable, non-disruptive way, while staying true to their fundamental principles.

And here is the poster to download: