Systeemingrepen met impact: de nieuwe ouderenzorg ontwerpen
Our elderly care system is under pressure. Due to the double ageing of the population, the demand for care is increasing, while the number of healthcare professionals and informal caregivers is not. To meet this growing demand, one in three people would need to work in healthcare in the near future – an unrealistic and unsustainable situation. That’s why a fundamental shift is necessary: from a care system that is primarily formal and organised, to one that is interwoven with and an integral part of everyday life. This calls for systemic change: a new, cross-domain way of thinking and working together, in which formal care (broadly defined healthcare professionals), informal care (family caregivers), and support (social workers, volunteers, etc.) act in close collaboration.
Although the vision of integrated elderly care is increasingly endorsed, putting it into practice proves difficult. Inspiring initiatives are often fragmented, short-lived and isolated: they are rarely shared, hardly connected, and seldom find their way to broader application or structural embedding in policy and practice. Many interventions fail to move beyond the pilot phase once temporary funding ends. There is little structural learning between healthcare and welfare sectors, and the creative industry still shares its knowledge, methods and insights only to a limited extent. This fragmentation obstructs strategic action and limits the systemic impact of interventions.
Designers, too, often find themselves playing a fragmented or isolated role in this context.
Due to time constraints, a lack of shared understanding, and insufficient cohesion and reflection, the influence of design and creativity on care transitions remains modest. Designers have too little opportunity to learn from their own or each other’s interventions, to strengthen their position, or to work systemically with other parties in the field.
This project aims to change that. We explore how design – with attention to context, enabling conditions, and both individual and collective learning processes – can help counter this fragmentation. Not by developing isolated interventions, but by creating coherent sets of interventions that are meaningful within specific contexts. The focus is not only on what works, but also on where, when and under which conditions it works. Insights from this process will be translated into knowledge products for the creative industry – for designers, studios and educational programmes – so they can shape their role in societal transitions more strategically and effectively.
We are building shared knowledge, a shared language and shared learning experiences – between designers, healthcare professionals, informal caregivers, technology partners and policymakers.
This requires a transformation in how we collaborate, how we assign value, how we develop, learn and act together, and how roles, responsibilities and systems are organised. By actively involving designers in system reflection and in the co-creative development of intervention sets, we strengthen their role as strategic connectors in care transitions. In doing so, not only does the care system become more resilient, but the power of design grows as an organising principle for societal change.
