Designing with institutions

Public organisations in the Netherlands are under mounting strain, and these strains are symptoms of a particular way of organising—shaped by decades of market-oriented public sector reform and neoliberalisation—one that treats inherently complex social systems as though they were simple and controllable. Design practices are widely held to bring a valuable repertoire to transforming such systems, and so to the complex societal challenges facing the public sector, yet their impact in the public domain remains contested. Design outcomes often stay small, conceptual, and local, detached from organisational reality and rarely carried through into lasting change. Part of the difficulty is that designers brought in from outside tend to approach public organisations as monolithic, inertial entities that mostly resist change, with limited grasp of the political-administrative dynamics that both enable and constrain transformation.

The project explores how design can engage more effectively with institutions: the rules, norms, shared meanings, and relational patterns that guide behaviour in public organisations. It adopts a “designing with institutions” perspective, recognising that institutions are constituted through everyday organisational practice. Public design initiatives thereby intervene in the ongoing reproduction, and potential transformation, of institutional arrangements. The structures through which organisations work, sedimented in regulations, IT systems, routines, professional dispositions, and worldviews, become the object of design, rather than a background to design around.

Working with these structures depends on first making them legible enough to render them ‘designable’, and on stewarding change: carrying a design initiative forward through organisational contingencies, deciding when to reframe, redirect, sustain, or let go as obstacles and opportunities emerge. Through longitudinal engagement with four public design initiatives—Kopkrakers, Fair Practice Lab, Rijksmakerstaat, and a project with UWV—the project examines the trajectory from initiation through implementation to institutionalisation, including how localised experiments might travel across contexts. It traces how initiatives choose which structures to take on, recognising that confronting a structure directly is not always the productive route—some, such as IT systems, are better worked around than taken on at disproportionate cost. The aim is to generate knowledge, frameworks, tools, and methods that support designers in engaging these structural factors, contributing to more effective design practice for transforming organisational practices in the public sector.