Designing With and Within Public Organizations: Building Bridges between Public Sector Innovators and Designers

Design practices increasingly appeal to public organizations as a new and promising approach, but how can we make collaboration between designers and public sector innovators successful?

Worldwide, design thinking is being used to come up with meaningful solutions for wicked social problems. However, the way in which public organizations operate in practice is not always in sync with the ways of working, techniques and mentality of design thinking. This book offers advice on how to ensure that a carefully executed design-thinking process actually leads to the desired change.

With the help of a methodological approach and a number of insightful examples, this book illustrates how the practice of designers and public organizations, both on the work floor and in the boardroom, can be connected. This process is not about erasing the differences between designers and public organizations, but about turning these differences into something productive. This book will help to create the right context for an impactful design-thinking process with and within public organizations.

André Schaminée trained as a planner, earning his stripes as an entrepreneur in the cultural sector and as a project manager on large spatial planning projects. He has worked at Dutch consultancy firm Twynstra Gudde as an organizational consultant since 2007. He co-founded a design network there that combines organizational science and design into an innovative proposition. He's used design thinking to deliver some surprising and meaningful solutions for a number of social issues concerning matters such as spatial development, food and healthcare. André frequently appears as a guest lecturer at such academic institutions as the Design Academy Eindhoven and Business School Nyenrode.