The collaboration between designers and government professionals, from civil servants, political leaders, to politicians, is demanding, as it involves fundamentally different working methods: designers are exploratory and iterative, while government institutions prioritise predictability and control, generally speaking. Stby sees this inherent tension not as a barrier, but rather a vital ingredient for effective public design, provided the collaboration is consciously structured and maintained.
Working on complex societal challenges within a political-administrative context requires multiple disciplines and organisations to align. This often means converging diverse professional logics, languages, values, and ideas about a successful trajectory, while maintaining a common goal of achieving the desired impact. Managing the unavoidable tensions—such as the conflict between thriving on uncertainty and mitigating risk, or between top-down governance and iterative learning—is essential for productive practice.
Empowering new perspectives on complex societal challenges
A duo of designers from agencies Afdeling Buitengewone Zaken and Stby joined forces and are involved in the Town Deal Krachtige Kernen (Powerful Town Centres) via Loket Ontwerpkracht. The Town Deal Krachtige Kernen is a collaboration between eleven Dutch municipalities, three Dutch ministries, and two knowledge and network organisations. It focuses on how local government and local communities can improve collaboration on complex issues that may lead to unrest and discontent, such as the placement of windmills or housing for asylum seekers. The goal is to collaborate with local residents to better integrate their ideas and needs into local policies and governance, as a way to strengthen the local community and promote confidence in local government.
Our role as a design team transcends traditional consultancy; we function as process orchestrators, deploying creative methodologies to enable a new perspective on complex societal challenges. We wrote this article about the power of orchestration. Operating within a specific route within the bigger Town Deals program, we support municipalities in strengthening the connection between ‘outside’ (the citizen) and ‘inside’ (their governmental organisation).
Our collaboration and learning process is shaped by four guiding design principles:
- Taking a new perspective: Challenging fixed assumptions by approaching issues from an unexpected angle, opening up new possibilities.
- Experimenting to learn: Maintaining a focus on ‘doing’ by executing small-scale practical experiments to immediately expose what works and what does not.
- Collective sensemaking: Establishing design as a collective process that deliberately connects the varied perspectives of both professionals and citizens.
- ‘Making’ as a way of understanding: Making insights visual or tangible, to render abstract problems discussable and manageable.
Breaking old patterns in local government and building new relations
During the initial phase of the Town Deal, a key insight has emerged: the path to a better relationship with citizens may lie more within the internal walls of the local government organisation than initially anticipated. While the initial focus was strongly on external interventions to manage societal unrest, reality shows that the internal organisation must co-evolve. We are now using design to explore how information flows and how collaboration is structured between departments (such as Public Safety and the Social Domain). How might we streamline these flows and structures to foster shared ownership of signals from society and individual citizens?
Municipalities are currently conducting concrete experiments to prototype this approach. As designers from Afdeling Buitengewone Zaken and Stby, we are guiding this process by helping to break internal patterns of fragmentation and by introducing tools that bridge the gap between policy development and implementation, bringing both closer to citizens.
The added value of this approach is best expressed by the professionals, civil servants, who are involved in the daily practice of local government. During the work sessions, they shared their initial insights:
How do you prevent signals from remaining fragmented across teams and domains? We need a good internal communication strategy to avoid signals getting stuck at the operational level.
We noticed that taking a moment to reflect on what we are proud of provides a good foundation for constructive further development.
It is valuable to start doing, and not just to consult and talk.
A concrete example is the ‘Apothecary’s Cabinet with initiatives,’ which functions as an accessible toolbox of proven methods and practical examples to support, empower and provide a flying start for civil servants who are new to this approach. As fits with prototyping, we make sure to conclude with a session to exchange learning outcomes and define subsequent steps.
Some of the tools we are using within this project are from the handbook Stby developed together with Waag Futurelab for better public civic collaboration. You can download the handbook here.
We continue to provide tailored guidance to two specific municipalities in the Netherlands and will make the knowledge gained from this focused guidance available to the wider group of municipalities, ministeries and other parts of the Town Deal.