Humankind x Ministry of I&W on a mission at Dutch Design Week
On Monday 19 October we’re at Dutch Design Week in Eindhoven as part of the Mission Days. Together with the Ministry of Infrastructure and Water Management we host Brede Welvaart in Beweging: from modal shift to mental shift, within the Mission Day on the Living Environment.
Urban transitions rarely arrive as a clear problem with a clear answer. Mobility, housing and climate adaptation overlap, interests collide, and the people involved experience change in ways no model fully captures. This is where design can help. It gives room to explore before deciding and to test before scaling, while keeping an eye on how people actually live through the change.
We don’t come from the design world in the classic sense. Our roots are in the social domain and in real-life testing: going into the street, learning how people experience their city and trying things out in public space, combined with transition management and urban planning. Still, when we look at what good design asks for, we recognise much of our own way of working. Curiosity about how people really live and move. The creativity to imagine what isn’t there yet. And an iterative approach, where you try something small, learn from it and adjust. For us, design is a way to put values and methods into practice that already come naturally to our work, and to sharpen them for complex change.
What we find most interesting is how design opens up new ways to innovate in policy development itself. Policy usually starts from models, targets and measurable outcomes. Design brings in other questions: how do people experience this, what do they need along the way, and what happens when we test an idea before we fix it in a plan? With the Ministry of Infrastructure and Water Management we’re applying this to the challenge of mobility and broad prosperity, starting from how people actually experience their journeys. In Eindhoven we’ll open up that work and explore it together with policymakers, practitioners and other thinkers.
Join us on 19 October, 09:30 to 12:30, at Natlab (Strijp-S). The session is in Dutch.
