Public services

Teenagers and children are a vulnerable part of the population, so it's extra important that public services for them are well-coordinated and high-quality. This requires effective communication, collaboration, consistency, and flexibility.

One of the biggest challenges the project faced was designing the coordination and cooperation across the municipalities, as well as the different service sectors of health, employment, and education. Effective cross-collaboration and communication are essential in public services, especially for vulnerable children and teenagers, who require high-quality and coordinated services to avoid the pain of bureaucracy.

Designing better collaboration

, we contributed with service design, gathering user insights, and conducting 

 to find the best solution for the new municipality’s citizens. What was needed was a model that offers consistent and equal quality services that are still flexible enough to meet citizens' needs when they arise. By creating design experiments for the municipality, we tested different hypotheses and gathered insights to find new ways of collaboration.

Experimentation

Insights through experiments

During the process, we performed design experiments, where the goal was to get new insights and answers to specific questions by testing different hypotheses.  The experiments were done in a laboratory setting, where we created fictive service flows, gathered the services, and together played different roles in this new service flow. We added new tools and new meeting points in this new flow to test them out. If they didn't work as expected, we adjusted and tried again.

After testing ideas and experiments with a diverse group of experts, public servants, and citizens, we created the service concept 

. The idea is to catch families who need several different services from the municipality and who risk falling between the cracks due to a lack of cooperation between different departments.

Familielos - a holistic concept

Joining three municipalities requires a large amount of coordination and cooperation to succeed between the municipalities and across sectors and areas of responsibility. By using service design methodologies, such as user insight work and experimentation, we gathered insights to create a new service concept.

Familelos is a public service for families who need cross-disciplinary services. 'Familielosen' aims to coordinate services for the whole family, and the goal is that the families receive better, more holistic services.

Nye Øygarden – The merger of three municipalities