VONK
In youth care, we are seeing rising costs, waiting lists that remain the same or are even growing, and far from always the desired structural improvement in young people’s mental wellbeing. These problems are intractable and seem virtually unsolvable. The way in which the youth care system is organised does not help to resolve them in a sustainable manner. There is a need for a transition to a system based on a vision that prioritises sustainable and equal collaboration between all stakeholders and the resilience of young people. A system in which those involved are constantly learning and there is scope for continuous adaptation.
Design thinking is increasingly being used to reorganise youth care in new and better ways. Designers are contributing to new forms of collaboration and organisation. These interventions – such as new working methods, tools or forms of collaboration – show great promise, but at the same time we see that they struggle to take root in practice. This is often because they clash with the dominant logic of the youth care system, which is characterised, for example, by the fragmentation of responsibility and the prevalence of medical/ reductionist thinking, which means that, in the case of complex issues, joint responsibility cannot be taken and problems are usually framed as individual issues rather than recognising that they are largely relational and contextual in nature. There is a need to understand how interventions can not only bring about better service provision, but also enable system actors to change system boundaries, technological infrastructure or system logic, so that interventions have a lasting impact. This project investigates why such design interventions are not implemented sustainably and how design processes can better contribute to the desired transition in youth care.
As experienced designers in the field of youth care (Shoshin, Studio van Betekenis and Buro Becking), research institutions at the intersection of design and public administration (EUR and TU Delft), an expert in complexity and SED (Meerkat Consultancy) and consultants within public administration (Berenschot BV), we are joining forces to make the transition from design interventions to system transition. In doing so, we are building on insights from Service Ecosystem Design (SED). We are investigating how concrete interventions can be designed in collaboration with system actors in such a way that they remain ‘malleable’ (including through ‘relational adaptation’ (Hay et al., 2024)) during use, and can be adapted and deployed to bring about changes at the system level. In this way, interventions continue to take shape during the implementation phase, enabling a much more conscious focus on sustainable change.
We are developing this new approach iteratively across various practices in three youth care regions where we are already active. We organise transformative design practices, with the three youth care regions providing the context, in which we experiment, challenge the status quo and integrate insights. The project team comprises design agencies, design practices, knowledge institutions, a SED expert, a consultancy firm and regional youth care partners. They are working together in the youth care regions to develop, on the one hand, substantive knowledge on ‘design for system transformation’, and, on the other, methods through which this can be realised and which make this knowledge transferable in the form of a new Key Enabling Methodology.
