After Torino (2008) and Helsinki (2012), Lille Metropole was designated World Design Capital 2020. WDC is a worldwide competition which recognizes every two years a city for its effective use of design to drive economic, social, cultural, and environmental development. In this context, Lille Metropole, in partnership with the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission and ERRIN, is organising an event to highlight local public policies and services design experiments.

Design methods have long been a driver of industrial innovation. Its innovative potential is now being unleashed in public policy making by front-runner local governments. Public policy design and other user-centric methods are the missing link between citizens, policy makers and innovators. They help to go further traditional participatory and consultative processes for collecting and analysing citizens’ and users’ views.

Throughout their local public policy labs and their experiments such as “La Transfo” by Lille Metropole, local authorities are leading the way in this revolution. Experimentation are mushrooming in Europe and must be shared widely among cities and upper levels of governments. European institutions are seeing strong benefits in working closer with local policy labs to bridge the gap with their citizens as well as to help complementing thematic expertise with user-centric methods.

Local, national, and European public servants either experts in design and public innovation or in quest for innovating policy making processes and projects, as well as professional designers open to public innovation will gather to showcase most innovative design-led policy making and discuss their transferability to other cities, regions, countries and institutions.