A Missing Lens in the Service Designer's Toolkit

The tools on this site are mostly concerned with making things visible. Service blueprints surface what happens backstage. Ecosystem maps reveal hidden actors. System maps trace feedback loops that no individual can see.

But there is a category of influence that none of these tools are designed to reach: the things people actively cannot see in themselves.

Carl Jung called this the Shadow. And I’ve become increasingly convinced it’s the missing lens in how we design government services that depend on citizen compliance.

A Tool for a Different Kind of Invisible

The Shadow isn’t merely hidden; it is actively repressed. It holds the motivations and beliefs a person has pushed out of conscious awareness because they conflict with how they see themselves. For service designers working in a compliance-dependent government service, this distinction matters enormously.

Our current toolkit gives us excellent instruments for understanding conscious user needs. It maps what someone says they want and traces their journey. It locates the friction, and lets us ask why they made the choices they made.

But when a citizen doesn’t comply, doesn’t update their circumstances, abandons a journey halfway through, or makes errors they can’t fully explain, we tend to interpret this as cognitive load, poor UX, or deliberate deception. We rarely ask whether something below the surface of conscious thought might be shaping the behaviour.

The Shadow framework suggests we should.

Jung in Brief

Carl Jung developed the concept of the Shadow as part of his broader theory of individuation, the psychological process of becoming a whole, integrated person.

The Shadow contains everything the ego rejects. It isn’t simply “the dark side.” It holds repressed anger, shame, desire, fear, and impulse. But it also holds, sometimes, suppressed strengths and capacities. Crucially, the Shadow doesn’t disappear when we push it away. It operates. It influences behaviour. It emerges in projection, in compulsion, in the gap between what we intend and what we actually do.

Jung’s insight was that the Shadow isn’t pathological; it’s universal. Every person has one. The question is whether it operates unconsciously (and therefore uncontrollably) or whether it has been, at least partially, seen and integrated.

For service design purposes, we don’t need the full Jungian framework. What we need is the core observation: people behave in ways that are not fully accessible to their own conscious reflection, and those behaviours are often protective responses to threat.

That single insight has significant implications for how we design and how we interpret non-compliance.

The Fraud and Error Taxonomy Through a Shadow Lens

In Universal Credit, non-compliance takes broadly four forms: fraudulent claims, deliberate errors made to the claimant’s advantage, inaction when circumstances change, and genuine errors. Standard policy frameworks treat these as points on a spectrum of intent, from deliberate to accidental. The Shadow framework adds a different dimension: each of these behaviours can be read as a psychologically coherent response, not just a compliance failure.

Fraudulent Claims: The Shadow of Survival

The conventional reading of fraud is rational: someone calculates that the benefit of deception outweighs the risk of detection. This is probably sometimes true.

But fraud also emerges when someone’s Shadow contains an internalised belief that the system is fundamentally adversarial: that the rules exist for other people, that the institution doesn’t care about them, and therefore the rules don’t apply to them either.

This isn’t just calculation. It’s a Shadow projection. And it often traces back to real institutional experience: having a claim wrongly refused, being spoken to with contempt at a Job Centre, experiencing the system as a source of humiliation rather than support. The Shadow learns from what the institution does, not just what it says.

Jung would frame fraud in this context as psychological compensation: a restoration of agency and dignity through deception, after both have been denied through legitimate channels. The conscious self may rationalise this as “taking what I’m owed.” The Shadow is doing something older and more fundamental.

Deliberate Errors: The Shadow of Entitlement and Shame

Deliberate errors are the most psychologically revealing category. The person hasn’t committed to fraud. They haven’t been fully honest either. They are in a kind of negotiated middle ground.

Jungian thinking reads this as the Shadow in negotiation with the Persona, the public-facing self that needs to maintain the identity of “an honest person.” The claimant engineers a better outcome while preserving the story they tell themselves: “I gave them what they asked for.” “They just didn’t ask the right question.”

For claimants who come from established working lives (who have always seen themselves as self-sufficient, contributing members of society), the shame of needing benefits is not a minor inconvenience. It can be a genuine threat to identity. The Shadow may contain deep, unacknowledged shame about dependency. The deliberate error becomes a way of maintaining the Persona while letting the Shadow achieve what shame prevents the conscious self from pursuing directly.

This is why punitive responses to this category so often fail. You are not dealing with calculation that a bigger penalty can recalibrate; you are dealing with identity protection, and a heavier sanction only confirms the defensive posture.

Choosing Inaction: The Shadow of Helplessness and Protest

Inaction is the most counterintuitive behaviour in the fraud and error space. The claimant knows they should report a change. They don’t. This seems irrational.

The Shadow framework offers a more precise explanation: inaction is the Shadow’s form of self-protection, and sometimes of protest.

When someone’s previous attempts to engage with the system correctly resulted in confusion, payment delays, errors not of their making, or feeling judged and rushed at a Job Centre appointment, the Shadow learns. It learns that engagement equals pain. The conscious self experiences this as procrastination, or forgetting, or just not getting round to it. The unconscious self has made a calculated protective decision: I will not expose myself to this again.

There is also a protest dimension. When people feel genuinely powerless, when the system is done to them rather than with them, the Shadow finds the only form of agency available: withdrawal. Non-engagement is, paradoxically, a form of response.

This has direct design implications. If we respond to inaction purely with compliance pressure (reminders, threats, sanctions), we confirm the adversarial framing and deepen the Shadow’s protective posture. The behaviour doesn’t change; it goes further underground.

Genuine Errors: The Shadow of Cognitive Overwhelm

Even genuine errors aren’t entirely random. Jung observed that the Shadow influences what we pay attention to and what we screen out. A claimant who is financially stressed and carrying anxiety about their relationship with the institution, while managing several pressures at once, isn’t making random mistakes. Their psyche is allocating attention based on what feels survivable.

Administrative accuracy requires a kind of trust: trust that the effort of getting it right will be recognised, that the system will handle the information fairly, that the consequences of minor imprecision won’t be catastrophic. For many UC claimants, that trust has never been established, or has been actively eroded. In that environment, the Shadow prioritises emotional survival over administrative precision. The error isn’t careless. It reflects where attention is safe to go.

What This Means for Design

Here is the implication that matters most for practitioners. If the Shadow is operating across all four categories, a purely compliance-based response doesn’t just fail to address the root cause; it deepens the very posture that produces the behaviour.

A Shadow-informed approach suggests a different set of design questions:

What might this person be protecting themselves from in this interaction? Not as a hypothetical, but as a specific design constraint. At each touchpoint where compliance is required, ask: what earlier experience might be activated here? What is the person being asked to make themselves vulnerable to?

What does the service signal about the institution’s beliefs about the claimant? The Shadow reads environment as well as words. A tone that assumes dishonesty will activate defensive projection regardless of the literal content of the message. A service that feels like a trap will be treated as one.

Where is the shame concentrated in this journey? Shame is perhaps the most powerful Shadow activator in the benefits context. It is also the most avoidable, if we design explicitly to reduce it. Framing and language shape whether a person feels seen or scrutinised, and so does the sequencing of disclosure.

How do we restore agency rather than remove it? The Shadow’s most common response to powerlessness is either compliance theatre (appearing to comply while actually protecting the self) or withdrawal. Design that gives claimants genuine control, over pacing, over what they share and when, over what support is available, changes the psychological stakes of the interaction.

The Shadow as a Tool for Thinking

I want to propose the Shadow as a genuine addition to the service designer’s cognitive toolkit. Not as psychotherapy, and not as an excuse for non-compliance, but as a lens that makes certain kinds of behaviour more legible: it reveals what’s hidden not by complexity or distance, but by the psyche itself.

The practical application is not to diagnose claimants. It is to ask, at every design decision: what Shadow response might this activate? And to design, wherever possible, in ways that reduce the threat level, so that the conscious self, which does want to comply, doesn’t need the Shadow’s protection.

A Different Kind of User Need

The standard user needs framework asks what a person is trying to achieve. The Shadow framework asks what they are trying to protect. Both shape behaviour, and in a compliance-dependent service the second question is often the more important of the two.

Working this way doesn’t make design more complicated; it makes it more honest. It means treating claimants as whole people who carry their history and live with shame, rather than the rational actors our journey maps tend to assume. That is not a harder design problem so much as a more complete one, and completeness is what earns the trust these services depend on.

Tom Eldridge is a Lead Service Designer at DWP working on Universal Credit. He is the founder of Strategy x Design, a consultancy that helps organisations build better relationships with the people they serve.