The current gap between what municipalities do and what citizens expect, is demanding a new approach for creating public services. This is portrayed by the amount of complaints that the Nationale Ombudsman received about municipal actions which have increased with 15% in 2021 in comparison to 2020.

An opportunity to make room for the citizens’ perspective is to apply the design expertise in the policy-making process. Since design has shifted towards Human-Centered Design in combination with co-creative practices, it has become highly suitable in addressing the challenges that municipalities face (Norman, 2013; Camacho, 2016). Consequently, Human-Centered Design has become valuable in the context of policy-making, because of its tools and methods which can carefully consider the human perspective throughout the policy-making proces.

Together with the municipality of The Hague, a project was set up to research how the design team contributes to human-centered policy-making in collaboration with policy and policy execution experts. The research revealed that some challenges arise within the collaboration between designers and experts. Among these challenges are the fact that the working procedures of designers and experts are diametrically opposed to each other, and that the true value that design offers is not entirely seen within the municipality. Therefore, the design vision for this project is that before designers can take on a larger role in policy-making and add human-centered value to policy-making at the municipality of the Hague, policy and policy execution experts need to truly understand and see the added value of applying design.

The insights from the research have led to the design of the Ontwerpwijzer, a conversation tool which aims to build a bridge between the two worlds of design and policy-making and to guide the collaboration in its early stages. The Ontwerpwijzer is used during the intake meeting, in which the details of the project and potential contributions of the designer are discussed. Consequently, this forms an interesting opportunity to show why, what and when design has something valuable to offer to the policy-making process.