Caring Neighbourhoods

An ageing population is leading to a growing demand for care, while the number of care professionals is not increasing at the same pace. This calls for new ways of working together between care professionals, informal carers and wider society. ActiZ wanted to explore how elderly care could be organised differently and what role care professionals could play in this transition. Dutch Design Foundation helped the sector association explore the challenge and connected it with design agency morgenmakers, which worked on the project together with three care organisations.

How can care professionals contribute to caring communities in which residents, informal carers and organisations share responsibility for elderly care? And what does this require in terms of their role, day-to-day work and collaboration with others? Design agency morgenmakers explored these questions together with the participating care organisations and translated the insights from the process into practical tools.

Design studio morgenmakers worked with ActiZ, CuraMare, Coloriet and Archipel Zorggroep on the challenge. Together, they explored how care professionals and organisations could collaborate differently and what practical tools could support them in doing so.

The process resulted in two tools designed to help care professionals and organisations explore new ways of working together.

Ruimte pakken
Ruimte pakken helps care teams identify opportunities and organise their day-to-day work differently. Using tools such as an opportunities board and question cards, teams can explore where there is room to approach things differently.

Doe het samen
Doe het samen supports collaboration between organisations. A framework built around six themes helps them discuss interests, expectations and responsibilities, and explore together how they can contribute to caring communities.

The process demonstrated how design can help people think beyond existing solutions and explore new forms of collaboration. At the same time, developing tools that could be used across an entire sector, without continuous guidance from designers, proved challenging.

This was precisely where the value of the Co/Lab lay. By translating the insights into practical tools, care professionals and organisations were able to continue exploring new ways of working together themselves. The process therefore not only created space to view the challenge from a different perspective, but also provided practical ways to put those insights into practice.