What should and could the police organization look like in 2025? To inform a new position paper on this topic, the Dutch National Police, the Ministry of Justice & Security, the Public Prosecution Service and the regional mayors wanted to better understand the perspectives and experiences of local businesses with regards to the police.
STBY was asked by the Dutch Design Foundation and the National Police to conduct research into the expectations of companies and entrepreneurs who have (regular) contact with the police following incidents (online and offline) related to undermining. Undermining is a catch-all concept that is used to describe the mixing of the underworld and the upper world. Criminals use legal services to carry out illegal activities, such as money laundering, fraud, or drug trafficking and production.
The entrepreneurs and street managers we spoke to for this research regularly see signs of undermining in their industry, shopping street or business park. They experience indirect consequences of undermining in particular, such as the neighborhood or shopping street deteriorating and becoming monotonous in the range of shops and unfair competition.
The research approach consisted of a series of individual interviews with local businesses, complemented with deskresearch. The participants shared their stories with us, which were documented in Journey Maps and Ecosystem Maps. We also used a set of cards with statements about undermining to trigger conversation, and a speculative scenario cards to brainstorm on future improvements.
This resulted in a report and a ‘visual essay’, two deliverables from this project. The visual essay (see below), aimed to convey the results to a wide audience in an engaging way. We used an important finding during the research as our conceptual starting point: Undermining mixes the underworld and the upper world to a level that the difference is not easy to see for most people. So we created a map of our design research process as well as key insights and quotes from participants about the underworld and the upper world, in two colours. Red for the underworld and blue for the upper world. They are mixed up on the poster, but if you use blue or red coloured glasses, provided at the exhibition where we showed the poster, you clearly see one or the other. Report and visual essay were used by Dutch Design Foundation as input for their What If Labs during Dutch Design Week 2020.
