Designing Public Services Around People: How Design Thinking Can Promote Innovation in Major Projects

Dr Carla Groom is Deputy Director and Head of Human-Centred Design Science (formerly Behavioural Science) at the Department for Work & Pensions.

After studying psychology at Cambridge University, she completed a PhD in social psychology at Northwestern University and held a post-doctoral position at the University of Texas at Austin.

During this time she published more than a dozen papers.  Using her experience in Government, industry and academia, particularly her experience of working on automatic enrolment into workplace pensions, she has pioneered a form of behavioural practice that operates early in the design of policies and processes. Instead of applying and testing academic psychological research, the focus is on understanding better the context and complexity of human behaviours in the real world.

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