This case study shows you how bringing artists into your policymaking process can have beneficial effects on your policy and policymakers.

Policy Lab is a team in the UK Civil Service which aims to improve policymaking using people-centred design techniques.

They ran a pilot initiative called MANIFEST, which invited 3 UK artists to contribute to policymaking.

Impacts

They found that the artists’ work affected policymaking in a number of ways:

• Promoting policy innovation
• Exposing unnoticed aspects of policymaking
• Uncovering human elements in the policy system
• Allowing for and prompting reflection
• Visualising policy issues, which helped engagement
• Improving the wellbeing of policy professionals and stakeholders

What they learned

Policy professionals were:

• enthusiastic about the chance to see how the artists worked
• inspired to be more creative in their own work
• Interested in using artworks to help make decisions (in consultations, workshops and across government)

The pilot took place in 2023, and they began a second round of 

Source

MANIFEST: Artists, policy and the process of making change – a blog post by Policy Lab looking at initial outputs and outcomes of MANIFEST