Het nieuwe thuiswerken

What if we could reimagine the relationship between citizens and their local government—what could be different? This project explored ways to change the (future) relationship between citizens and their local government.

Using the Vision in product design method I started out exploring the domain people’s relationship with their local government by collecting context factors. Those were clustered—and gave interesting insights such as that people do not choose their local government, and that the local government has a role at every important moment in life.

This led to the worldview where I see that the local government has continuously become more distant and complex, resulting in a one-way dependent relationship from citizen to government.

Based on this context I wanted to make people feel closer connected to their local government by lowering the threshold for informal sharing. The new interaction should be like being on a camping—where all of the sudden people start to talk with complete strangers in an informal way.

This led to the design of het nieuwe thuiswerken, where public servants would be actively encouraged to work remotely a few days a week—yet not at a random cafe but at a citizen’s home. This camping could result in more active informal sharing—and giving a face to the people living in the municipality. The inverse could also work, where citizens can work one day a week at the municipalities offices.