The Lab

The Policy Lab was established to address a persistent gap in policy and organizational practice: the disconnect between top-down decision-making and the lived realities of those affected by policy, programs, and institutional action.

Since its founding in 2011, the Lab has brought together cultural research, design theory and practice, and public policy to improve how institutions define problems, generate relevant knowledge, and apply it in conditions of uncertainty. Its early work emerged from research and innovation efforts within the United Nations system, where it contributed to new approaches to evidence-based policy design in peace and security, development, and humanitarian contexts.

The Lab’s work is grounded in three commitments:

Context precedes strategy.
Organizations operating in complex environments must design for impact from the ground up. Local conditions are not implementation details; they are the design constraints.

Cooperation is designed, not assumed.
Stakeholder communities increasingly shape outcomes through participation, resistance, and reinterpretation. Effective action depends on collaborative design processes that recognize plural values and competing logics.

Decision-makers need clarity, not saturation.
In environments of informational overload, progress depends on defining and applying need-to-know knowledge rather than accumulating more data.

The Policy Lab advances these commitments through research, conceptual framework development, and selective advisory collaboration with public, private, and multilateral institutions

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The Lab is directed by Dr. Derek B. Miller.