http://thomasvanarkel.nl/themes/ Recent content in Themes on Thomas van Arkel Hugo en-gb Mon, 16 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000 http://thomasvanarkel.nl/themes/public-design-practices/ Sun, 31 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000 http://thomasvanarkel.nl/themes/public-design-practices/ Design practices are increasingly recognised as having transformative potential for complex societal challenges in the public sector. Yet what designers distinctively bring is still hard to pin down. The discipline has expanded in many directions—service design, social design, systemic design, transition design—and the work of articulating what unites them, precisely enough to be useful in collaboration with public organisations, is still ongoing. An early discussion in Een ontwerpende aanpak voor maatschappelijke opgavenvan Arkel & Tromp, 2023, the project Defining design practices for societal challenges ↗︎ , and the publication What do designers bring to the table? http://thomasvanarkel.nl/themes/stewarding-change/ Mon, 16 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000 http://thomasvanarkel.nl/themes/stewarding-change/ Design collaborations with public sector organisations frequently produce meaningful prototypes that never embed in practice. What closes that distance—when it closes at all—is the slow, contingent work of carrying an initiative forward through organisational structures and shifting conditions. This theme asks how that work is done, and under what conditions design interventions accumulate into systemic change. Stewarding change is the deliberate, attentive carrying forward of a design initiative through organisational dynamics—reframing, redirecting, sustaining, or letting go of intentions as obstacles and opportunities emerge, while attending to what is being reproduced and what is being transformed. http://thomasvanarkel.nl/themes/caring-organisations-and-services/ Mon, 16 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000 http://thomasvanarkel.nl/themes/caring-organisations-and-services/ This theme is concerned with what it takes for public sector organisations to be capable of care—and what stands in the way. In the Dutch context the answer to the second question is largely structural. Decades of New Public Management have produced governance built on audit, contractual accountability, and the fragmentation of service delivery. These arrangements narrow the categories within which professionals may exercise judgement, and steadily erode the conditions under which care, craft, and attention remain possible.