Advancing policy design through creative engagement with lived experience: the Tomorrow Party

We consider how lived experience might actively inform policy design. Good policy design calls for analysis of problems, how they might be addressed, and likely outcomes. Policy scholars and practitioners have devised methods that bring rigor to policy design through problem framing, assessment of potential interventions, and prediction of outcomes of those interventions. This pursuit of analytical and predictive rigor has often given short shrift to the insights of people whose lives are affected by current challenges and who will be impacted by policy change. Our theory of change is that creative engagement with citizens can generate insights of high value to the process of policy design. We introduce the Tomorrow Party–a design method for generating novel stakeholder insights regarding desirable future states. We then discuss initial findings from a series of pilots. Those findings suggest the Tomorrow Party is a broadly applicable creative tool for advancing policy design.