Enabling Relational Adaptation: Flipping the Script in Public Service Design

Pre-scripting service interactions has traditionally been central to designing, managing, and scaling public services. While scripts help actors coordinate, predefined scripts can lock actors into ways of relating that are inappropriate for their specific situation. In response, there are growing calls to design public service systems in ways that allow actors to adapt their relations based on what is meaningful to them. This research outlines design principles for enabling actors to continuously shape service systems from within through an ongoing, collective, and intentional process of re-scripting their relations. The principles were developed through an 18-month research-by-design study within Norwegian child welfare involving over 900 system actors. Informed by relational theory, we propose that relational adaptation in public service systems can be enabled by: (1) promoting the co-authorship of scripts, (2) facilitating ongoing script revision, (3) supporting the navigation of relational tensions, (4) aiding the unwriting and rewriting of scripts, and (5) stewarding the negotiation of meaning across relations. Combined, these principles suggest an approach to public service design that fosters ongoing, bottom-up transformation based on what affected actors consider meaningful. The design principles contribute to reconceptualizing service scripts, delineating a novel approach to service system transformation, and advancing a relational ontology for public service design.