Lab Public Design for Water is working to transform water management practices

Combining scientific knowledge with design capabilities

With the lab, KWR is committed to bringing together knowledge, design capacity and implementation power by structurally organising collaboration with designers, knowledge partners and practice partners. The lab facilitates design-based activities around a wide range of complex water challenges and works with partners to design social interventions that generate insights into existing and new ”water practices”. In a drinking water or water practice, the central focus is “the way we deal with drinking water or water”, which is embedded in habits, behaviour, principles, norms, values, ideas, laws, regulations and organisational structures. The lab’s activities create space to question existing drinking water and water practices, explore the drinking water and water practices of the future, and develop implementation capacity.

Through the lab’s design activities, KWR contributes to system learning and transformative learning about complex water challenges. The lab team guides design processes itself, but also follows such processes at partner organisations with the aim of facilitating “learning about water practices”. As a knowledge institute, KWR has the infrastructure and capability to gather, analyse and reflect on lessons and insights from various innovative water practices in relation to broader trends and policy developments, for example through the Dutch Water Sector Intelligence platform. In this way, we develop systemic and transformative knowledge and use it to generate responses to complex water challenges that call for fundamental and difficult choices.

Design research for transdisciplinary knowledge development

Design research at KWR is characterised by bringing together specialist knowledge from different scientific knowledge domains relevant to water challenges. The lab is positioned within the knowledge domain of Social Sciences and Humanities, but focuses on transdisciplinary knowledge development. Design capacity at KWR comprises social design, addressing behaviour and norms; system design, addressing governance and the water system; and spatial design, addressing spatial planning and landscape design. We work with ecohydrologists, hydrologists, ecologists, landscape architects and spatial planners on the redesign of the water landscape. With public administration experts, philosophers and transition scientists, we work on the institutions and water practices of the future. The research may concern digitalisation, involving hydroinformatics experts and ethicists; the management of substances and water quality, involving experts in chemical and/or microbiological water quality, together with public administration experts and/or behavioural scientists in the context of behaviour, supervision and enforcement; or the use of innovative technologies in society, involving water and environmental technology, behaviour and governance.

Design research at KWR is characterised by:

• Imagination: activities are characterised by making abstract concepts, futures, invisible obstructive or supportive principles, values and tensions explicit, tangible and imaginable. We do this through objects such as visualisations, material designs or thought experiments. In this way, water practices and relevant concepts acquire renewed meaning for the future.
• Co-creation: activities are collaborative and, where appropriate, inclusive. This means that problem owners and stakeholders, but also unusual suspects, such as different social groups or non-human actors, can be involved in exploring and shaping innovative knowledge, visions, methods, codes of conduct and norms, working methods and solution directions.
• Iteration and reflexivity: activities do not follow a linear process that can be fully determined in advance, because they take place in real-world practices shaped by complex processes and dynamics. Steps are taken iteratively in coordination with those involved. Processes are also reflexive because they critically reflect on the beliefs and assumptions underlying current and future water practices.
• Contextuality: local conditions, both biophysical and contextual, including socio-political, historical, relational and cultural aspects, are the starting point for meaning-making, results, events and/or actions.

Knowledge and impact by realising new water practices

The activities in the lab contribute both to transdisciplinary and disciplinary knowledge development and to the realisation of new water practices. Transdisciplinary researchers, design researchers, impact managers and project managers at KWR work closely with practice professionals and designers or artists in various design-based processes. In these processes, they contribute transdisciplinary and disciplinary knowledge, set up interventions in the daily practice of professionals, and reflect with them on desirable and undesirable water practices and the structures that shape them. Through explorations, co-creation and the facilitation of conversations, space is created, for example, to clarify and/or bridge oppositions, question existing power structures or deepen value coalitions. As a result, they have a direct influence on the water practices of the future and support practice professionals in realising water practices.

The collective of design researchers, designers and artists jointly has the explorative, reflexive, creative and generative thinking and acting capacity needed to achieve renewal in solutions, structures or culture together with other transdisciplinary and disciplinary researchers, professionals and citizens. As a knowledge partner, KWR ensures that existing water wisdom is safeguarded and used, forming an important foundation for renewal. As a result, new water practices are designed with an understanding of, and deep knowledge about, the way water works.

Design processes with KWR

The Lab Public Design for Water acts as a knowledge partner, design partner and intermediary between practice professionals, scientists, designers and artists. Design activities may have knowledge development as their primary goal, but may also have impact as their main objective. The lab team is responsible for setting up, advising on and guiding design processes that are part of a research programme, such as Waterwijs, TKI, NWO, EU, WICE, or that align with the challenge, need or question of the client or clients. Clients may be individual parties, such as departments of drinking water utilities, water authorities, ministries, municipalities or organisations, but also consortia or collectives in which the common interest is central.

The lab team ensures the quality of design processes based on principles of process management and substantive assurance, with attention to knowledge development or impact depending on the type of process. Essential activities in the process and its management are:

a. Positioning the issue together with the issue holders. This is usually done through issue-articulation sessions, so that the context of the issue becomes clear and various stakeholders are involved in the issue and the process.

b. Involving the right expertise and designers and assembling the right research and design teams with the interdisciplinary knowledge and design qualities needed for the issue.

c.Setting up the design-based process together with the clients.Through conversations or introductory and approach-articulation sessions, the research team involved is introduced and the iterations, principles, interventions and transformative learning process are elaborated.

d. Guiding the transdisciplinary research and design team. Through regular check-ins, it is ensured that the open and iterative design-based process continues to meet the needs of the clients or the importance of the issue.

e. Safeguarding the knowledge, insights and designs developed. Developed knowledge does not usually land in traditional scientific reports, but in other knowledge products and expressions such as guidelines, working methods, tools, conversation and dialogue formats, institutional arrangements, digital products, images, language and art. Safeguarding the understanding and use of these expressions in existing and future water practices is made concrete together with the issue holders and clients.

Example projects Public Design for Water

Because of their iterative nature, the importance of contextuality and the client’s need for knowledge products, design-based processes are never the same. Each process contributes in its own way to the exploration and transformation of new and existing water practices. Some examples are:

• In the GRROW projects, young professionals are involved in reconsidering and redesigning the water system through future visions or the development of new language. The water wisdom of senior professionals is acknowledged and recognised. This knowledge is carefully considered for new water practices, with the deeper underlying assumptions being examined. Safeguarding & impact: Knowledge from GRROW has been used for the RLI advisory report ‘Care for Water’, and ‘Water Care’ has found its waya into UMC Utrecht as new language.
• As part of the project ‘Development of the Value Case Process Methodology, an intervention was carried out in the context of the drinking water utility Brabant Water. Using an integral working format that had been developed, the intervention aimed to transform work processes for the development of asset infrastructure. This intervention exposed bottlenecks in the existing organisational structure, and drinking water professionals experienced how they could work together more effectively on integral planning. Safeguarding & impact: In dialogue with departmental directors and drinking water professionals in operations, the insights and lessons from the interventions are discussed with a view to process renewal within the organisation.
• In the Source to effect project, a system analysis was carried out of existing governance in water quality and living environment management, and in the management of industrial substances of concern. Based on design research in two cases, a prototype strategy was developed for an integrated approach to industrial substances of concern by water authorities, the province, environmental services, municipalities and companies. This strategy is being tested and further developed in the project ‘Beyond borders for Water Quality’. Safeguarding & Impact: Knowledge sharing at the WFD National-Regional Day and the Rhine-West River Basin Knowledge Day; embedding of the governance structure in regional agreements in the Bath water cycle; knowledge sharing at OmgevingsdienstNL.
• The serious game Aqua Ludens Knowledge sharing at the WFD National-Regional Day and the Rhine-West River Basin Knowledge Day; embedding of the governance structure in regional agreements in the Bath water cycle; knowledge sharing at OmgevingsdienstNL. Safeguarding & impact: Area parties have been trained as game facilitators to enable accessible use and application of the game.
• As part of the Public Design Coalition Agriculture-Water Transition, or PONT, KWR contributes by articulating the design assignment, providing knowledge and offering reflection in the process. Safeguarding & impact: Because various public authorities are connected to the Coalition and a transformative attitude is a condition of the process, the experiences and insights are safeguarded among civil-service professionals.

Water practices and collaboration partners

KWR believes in the power of practical knowledge, imagination and collaboration. Together with various partners and the wider “PD4W” community, new water practices are explored, designed and realised. The lab team sets up design research and processes itself, but also follows processes run by other organisations in order to facilitate meta-learning between water practices.

Water practices we are currently following are:

• The Water Workshop, by Play With Nature Lab and WUR (KIN Subsidy)
• Drinkable Nature, PWN and the Dutch Design foundation

Current partners are:

• The Dutch drinking water utilities through the Waterwijs programme
• The Public Design Practice, PONT, Dr Nienke Tromp
• Twynstra Gudde, André Schaminee
• Studio Sociaal Centraal, Joes Janmaat
• University of Amsterdam, Prof. Dr John Grin

Would you also like to be involved in the lab?

Would you like to become a partner of the Lab Public Design for Water? There are various opportunities to become involved in the lab’s activities as a knowledge partner, design partner or practice partner.

• Please contact Fabi van Berkel.
• Register for the Public design for Water Partner Meeting op 17 september bij KWR van 13:00 tot 17:00.