“All Tomorrow’s Policies” was published in Global Research in Action, the proceedings of the 34th World Design Congress, held in London in September 2025.  The paper addresses the present-innovation bias in civic design, where government innovation teams disproportionately focus on short-term solutions, driven by political cycles and resource pressures. The author, PPL executive director Chelsea Mauldin, argues that this approach is insufficient for tackling systemic social challenges.

Drawing on over a decade of collaborations by the Public Policy Lab with U.S. federal, state, and local government, the paper proposes an adaptable, dual-timeframe framework. This model leverages participatory, human-centered design to meet immediate political needs while simultaneously advancing large-scale innovations. The framework’s key concept is the ‘next administration timeframe’ (4-12 years), identified as the critical, politically realistic window for deploying transformative systems. By operating on both current and future timeframes, designers can use today’s urgency to lay the foundation for more sustainable and just futures. The model, supported by reference to applied work, is relevant to any complex organization managing short-term pressures against long-term goals.