DPER: Losing a Job

The Permanent Preparation is a service design concept developed on a live five-week brief from the Strategic Design Office of the Department of Public Expenditure, NDP Delivery and Reform (DPER), under the theme Designing Trust Through Life Events. Our team was assigned the experience of losing a job: what it is like to move through Irish public services at one of the most destabilising points in a working life.

The project asks: what would the welfare system look like if it were designed around the certainty that job loss will happen again, rather than responding to each claim as though it were an isolated event?

The answer is a lifelong welfare relationship, modelled on GP registration rather than the GP appointment. The relationship is designed, ongoing and low-intensity: dormant when it is not needed, active when it is. When crisis arrives, the system already knows the person. The form is pre-filled, the context is held, and the first appointment begins with a question rather than a blank page. The hero artefact is the Welfare Wallet, a personal record held by the person, not just the institution, carrying context, history, entitlements and what to do first, available in physical, digital and supported formats from the outset, because the people who most need it are often least well served by a digital-first assumption.

The concept was revised through written feedback from DPER and a stakeholder meeting with Intreo management, and the relationship continues in my ongoing major project.

CollaboratorCara Campos
Emily Mason

RoleResearch
Synthesis
Service Design
Concept Development
Stakeholder Engagement

DeliverablesResearch Plan
Interview Guide
Ecosystem & Journey Maps
Service Blueprint
Service Propositions
Designed Artefacts
Design Report Presentation Video

Research

The brief was deliberately open, scoped by DPER to the experience of job loss itself rather than the job-seeking process that follows. I wrote the team's research plan and led the secondary research, comparing how other systems handle the same life event: Denmark's trust-based activation model, Estonia's digital-first approach and the exclusions it creates, and Dutch work on psychological support during unemployment. Against these, the Irish picture is defined by a payment that has not kept pace with the cost of living, a means test that penalises couples, and an activation system built on the assumption that the person in front of you is trying to avoid work.

I mapped the twenty-one public services a person can encounter when they lose a job in Ireland. The ecosystem map made the scale of that experience visible in a single view and became a reference point for the rest of the project, validated by DPER's feedback. For the interviews, I restructured the guide into a walkthrough format, asking people to tell us the story of what happened rather than answer abstract questions about their experience, and recruited five participants across a deliberate range of circumstances: voluntary and involuntary exits, redundancy with savings and job loss with none, and cross-border complexity the system has no designed response to.

Ecosystem Map

Firefighting Loop

Insights

Reading across the interviews, the pattern was consistent. The system has no designed moment of acknowledgement. Nobody is told what to do first. The registration deadline is not communicated proactively. People who navigate successfully almost always do so with informal help, a partner, a parent, a friend who has been through it, and when that support is missing the system has nothing underneath it. The people who struggle most are not struggling because they are less capable. They are struggling because the system was not designed for their circumstances.

I led the synthesis: coded interview breakdowns, a journey map across the full experience, a service blueprint, and four archetypes. Sarah, the Eroded, became the anchor of everything that followed. She arrives at the system functional and worried, and the process itself produces her deterioration. The journey map exposed the gap between the path the system assumes, a straight line from job loss through registration and activation to re-employment, and the reality: a period of shock and inaction, an unclear starting point, touchpoints that do not talk to each other, and a financial timeline that does not match the emotional one.

The theoretical framing is load-bearing rather than decorative. Dan Hill's dark matter gave us language for the invisible organisational structures that prevent change from taking hold. Puig de la Bellacasa's Matters of Care underpins the central claim that a system permanently at capacity cannot care, regardless of the intentions of the people inside it. Boland and Griffin's purgatorial ethic named the logic of suspicion built into the Irish welfare system.

Concept Development

We developed five service propositions and carried the strongest forward: Designed for Crisis, Not Against It. A welfare system with enough slack to respond to who is actually in front of it, rather than a system permanently at capacity, manufacturing the very crisis it was built to resolve.

The argument runs at three scales at once. Sarah did not arrive in crisis; the system produced her deterioration. The advisor is not indifferent; they are overwhelmed. And the institution has no surge capacity for the recessions it will inevitably face again. The intervention that helps Sarah is the same one that frees the advisor, and the system that stops manufacturing friction is the same one that builds resilience for the next downturn. The Firefighting Loop diagram makes the structure visible: a system at capacity has no slack for care, interactions become transactional, claimants feel processed, friction generates disputes and re-work, and the overload deepens.

From that proposition came The Permanent Preparation and the Welfare Wallet, with a set of supporting interventions: a Transition Package triggered at the point of job loss, a Care Protocol that makes distress response a shared procedure rather than an individual burden, and designed permission for staff to acknowledge what is in the room. Empathy fatigue was treated as a design condition rather than a wellness problem: exhausted staff are a structural output of a system with no slack, and the interventions that reduce friction for claimants are the same ones that reduce the accumulating burden on advisors.

Current Joueney Map

New Journey Map

Updated Pacing

Evaluation & Responses

The concept was pressure-tested at every stage, and each round changed something. DPER's written feedback raised four substantive challenges: the evidence for the capacity claim, how the model handles surge in a recession, whether staff turnover undermines long-term relationships, and whether people would engage during dormant periods. I addressed each directly, bringing in Little's Law from queuing theory to give the capacity argument a structural and mathematical basis, proposing a trained reserve pool activated by threshold for surge, locating the relationship in a designed role and a portable record rather than an individual advisor, and documenting dormant-period engagement as an honest open design problem.

I led a stakeholder meeting with an Intreo Office Manager and the Public Service Transformation Delivery Unit. It was a challenging conversation, and the distinction I kept returning to is that the existence of a protocol is not the same as its consistent, designed delivery: our research showed the gap between what the system intends and what people experience. The meeting also strengthened the work. Intreo staff validated the Transition Package unprompted as addressing a gap they had wanted to close, named the entitlements communication problem the Wallet is designed to solve, and corrected the operational trigger, which I revised so that Revenue notifies DSP and DSP sends the package.

Outcome

The final concept was presented to DPER as a full service proposition with designed artefacts: the DSP letter, a First Steps Guide as a roll-fold accordion, the text notification, the Care Protocol poster, the Welfare Navigator lanyard, the re-entry pass, and a timing comparison showing where the concept shortens the journey and where it deliberately lengthens it. The proposal carries the Wallet's consent model, proxy nomination system, advisor access logic and cost case. I wrote and structured the final presentation and the design report, developing the two in conversation so the strongest framing from the spoken version fed back into the written one. Emily led the illustration and animation of the accompanying film, told from Sarah's perspective.

Reflection

The Welfare Wallet interests me most as a designed object. Making the record person-held is a political act dressed as a service design decision: the person is not being given access to the institution's record, they are being given their own, and the difference matters for how power moves through the system. That distinction had to be argued for directly, because institutional anxiety about accountability kept conflating the two, and the concept needed to address that anxiety rather than sidestep it.

Every significant design decision in this project was made in response to something: a research finding, a stakeholder challenge, a piece of written feedback, a theoretical argument. The concept did not arrive fully formed. It was built and rebuilt in response to what came back at it, and it left each round stronger. That is how I want all of my work to be tested.

(Close)