So this is what I’m doing on Friday night. Loser - I know.
But I feel ready to go back to graduate school and am interested in somehow combining design, entrepreneurship, and public policy to inform social innovation. As you can see, policy-making should be collaborative, sustainable, and hands-on/biased towards action.
Long time ago, I told myself I would never work in the government. My disdain for it and policy-making includes slow, ineffective, and much too theoretical planning. Innovation? Far from it. Government is all about mitigating risk (to make sure those precious funds aren’t wasted/misused). The concept of big risk, big reward is a foreign concept.
But then I looked where things could be made more interesting and could be turned on its head and government came up again and again. I mean, we pay taxes and try to contribute to the well-beings of our civil life and what do we get? Ineffective services (most of the time). I would look at bureaucracy and turn the other way in split second. Inertia sickens me.
But I realized with advances in social and digital technology, there’s hope for a more collaborative and transparent government. (Think NYC.gov and Code for America.) We all need to work with the government if we are to innovate out of our current mess.
What I want to bring is the concept of rapid prototyping to policy-making as well as design thinking and ethnographic research. And for personal preferences, I need a more hands-on, grassroots, get-your-hands-dirty public policy/urban planning program. I don’t want to study at a school that are trapped in theory because that’s too far removed from people it’s trying to serve. No policy should ever be trapped in ivory towers or behind thick walls of bureaucratic agencies.
