Systeemingrepen met impact: de nieuwe ouderenzorg ontwerpen
Pressure on elderly care in the Netherlands is rising rapidly. Due to population ageing, demand for care is increasing while the number of care professionals and informal caregivers is not keeping pace. If this trend continues, one in three people would need to work in healthcare — an unfeasible scenario. A structural shift is needed: from a formal, centralised system to a care practice that is interwoven with daily life.
This requires a cross-sectoral approach to thinking and collaboration, where formal care (care professionals) and informal care (such as family caregivers, social workers and volunteers) operate as equal partners. While this vision is increasingly supported, its implementation remains fragmented. Initiatives are often temporary and isolated. Knowledge is rarely shared, connections are limited, and few interventions find their way into long-term policy or practice. As a result, the impact of design-led interventions remains limited.
Designers themselves often operate in fragmented or isolated roles. A lack of time, shared understanding and structural collaboration makes it difficult for design to contribute consistently to care transitions. Opportunities for collective learning, strengthening of roles and system-level collaboration are still scarce.
This project addresses that fragmentation — not by developing individual interventions, but by designing coherent sets of interventions that respond to specific contexts. It focuses not only on what works, but also where, when and under what conditions it works. Design is applied as a connective force between context, preconditions and collective learning.
Insights from the project will be translated into practical knowledge resources for designers, design agencies and design education. This creates a stronger foundation for the creative industries to contribute strategically to social transitions in care and wellbeing.
The project fosters shared language, shared learning and shared ownership among designers, care professionals, informal caregivers, technology partners and policymakers. This collaboration requires transformation on three levels:
- culture – how we collaborate and assign value;
- practice – how we develop, learn and act together;
- structure – how roles, responsibilities and systems are organised.
By actively involving designers in system reflection and the co-creation of intervention sets, the project strengthens their role as strategic actors in care transitions. This contributes to a more resilient care system and reinforces design power as a structuring principle for societal change.
