Context

Public design in Latin America is far from an emerging practice. Today there is an active ecosystem across ministries, local governments, universities, and civil society organizations. Yet until now the field has been known in a fragmented way, through isolated cases and experiences that rarely speak to one another.

The Map of Public Design in Latin America is the first effort to look at the field as a whole. It grows out of a collaboration between UNIT, rooted in the territory and close to the community of practitioners, and the Public Design Collective (Northeastern University), which brings the analytical distance needed to make sense of the data at scale.

The field has reached a significant degree of maturity and is moving beyond isolated projects to define how to document, evaluate, and embed its practices within institutions over the long term. More than an endpoint, this report is an invitation: for those who practice public design in Latin America to recognize themselves as part of a shared field, and for all of us to keep building, together, the infrastructure that field needs to sustain itself over time.

Who it is for

This report is written for four kinds of readers:

• People who practice public design, inside or alongside the state, and want to see their work in the context of the region.
• Public leaders and authorities seeking to understand how these capabilities are built and sustained within their institutions.
• Researchers and universities interested in a field that still has few spaces for shared reflection and evaluation.
• Funders, multilateral organizations, and NGOs looking for regional evidence on how public design operates and what it needs.

The people who sustain this field

Public design professionals come from different disciplines and work in very different organizations, but they share a way of approaching public problems.

• Professionals with accumulated experience. 81% of professionals have eight or more years of experience, and 46% have spent more than eight years working specifically in public design and innovation. This is knowledge that is not found in manuals: it is built by navigating the complexities of institutions.
• Deep territorial roots. 91% live and work in their country of origin. That continuity gives them a deep understanding of how institutions work from the inside, and keeps them connected to the impact of what they design.
• Many paths, one shared purpose. 64% identify design as their main field, but they combine their training with a range of disciplines such as public administration, urban planning, social sciences, law, and engineering. We identified four routes into the field that converge on a common motivation: social justice and a commitment to the public good.

The projects they drive

What identifies a public design project is not the name of the unit behind it, but the way it approaches problems, frames challenges, engages different actors, experiments with alternatives, and supports implementation processes.

• They happen from within and alongside the state. 56.9% of the detailed projects are led by government institutions, and 80.5% have a direct connection to a ministry or executive office. The innovation lab is only one of the forms this practice takes, not the one that defines it.
• A practice defined by action. Most projects set out to pilot solutions, implement services, or drive organizational change. 82.6% report some form of monitoring after implementation, and 64.2% measure success using their own institutional metrics.

“

Creating a new relationship between the state and its citizens… building a space to experiment, understand, and co-design new solutions

The challenges that emerge

The consolidation of the field does not remove the tensions of everyday work: it makes them more visible. Projects usually begin in order to improve a specific service, but there is a need to build new capabilities so the work can continue once the intervention or project ends. The challenge lies in supporting organizational change, enabling new forms of collaboration between actors, strengthening participatory processes, and building capabilities designed to outlast the one-off intervention.

Another challenge arises from the low circulation of knowledge. 69.9% share their work mainly through internal networks or institutional reports, and only 5.7% have systematized it in academic publications. Combined with the strong territorial rootedness described above, this can come at a high cost: without the international circulation that in other fields makes ideas, methods, and contacts travel almost by default, exchange among practitioners in the region does not happen spontaneously.

Despite working in different contexts and institutional realities, the challenges repeat themselves almost without exception from one country to the next. Political cycles, turnover among authorities, the reorganization of teams, and budget constraints are part of the everyday context in which public design operates in Latin America. This raises a broader question about the sustainability of the field and about how learning is stored and shared.

Keep exploring this project

This map is less a destination than a starting point: an invitation to deliberately build a regional space for exchange and memory.

• Explore the interactive map, with the full dataset: people, projects, topics, and methodologies by country.
• Two academic publications, forthcoming, for those who want to go beyond the overview.
• Stay up to date with CBF LATAM, the Latin American edition of the Creative Bureaucracy Festival that UNIT is preparing for 2027 in Santiago, a space to keep building this regional conversation.