Christian Bason > Quotes

“If we wish to embed design approaches more firmly into the fabric of public organisations as an approach to dealing with change, then do we not need to examine our current governance mechanisms as well?”
― Christian Bason, Leading Public Design: Discovering Human-Centred Governance

“It is never the case that you first know and then act, you first act tentatively and then begin to know a bit more before attempting again’ (2007,”
― Christian Bason, Leading Public Design: Discovering Human-Centred Governance

“in a categorically based epistemic mode, managers build increasingly abstract concepts about the world, in which they essentially come to know ‘less and less about more and more’. The categorically based mode is useful for achieving coordination and control under conditions of increasing social complexity, but risks becoming over-specified and focusing overly heavily on decision making; • in a perceptional epistemic mode, the way of knowing is increasingly concrete and tangible – very much like the kinds of experiences public managers are exposed to via the design processes analysed in this book. Here, managers come to know, according to Weick, ‘more and more about less and less’, in that they focus on the micro level and on discrete interactions. However,”
― Christian Bason, Leading Public Design: Discovering Human-Centred Governance

“One might say, with Latour, that what comes into play is a continuous discovery of the state; or, with Dewey, that public managers are prompted to continuously inquire into what is ‘exactly’ the public’s problem. This is a question of the degree to which the managers, through the exposure to design work, have been challenged beyond their ‘stable state’ and are compelled to embrace new ways of working empirically, and thereby also strategically, with their organisation. Part”
― Christian Bason, Leading Public Design: Discovering Human-Centred Governance