Success Factor 2: The municipality as a designer
To successfully tender the delivery of a new product, you already want to have a design. If the ambition is to achieve substantial innovation, an independent design agency is ideally suited to support a municipality in a co-development process. The design agency has no stake in the final tender and can therefore focus entirely on the interests of the municipality and its citizens to develop the most suitable product. An important competence here is the ability to early assess the consequences of requirements and choices on the final design. Will it be difficult to manufacture and vulnerable, or affordable and robust?
In collaboration with the municipality of Rotterdam, Spark has designed a casing for the organic waste container. With this container, people living in stacked buildings without their own container can dispose of their organic waste for recycling. In addition to product design, we also provided prototypes, product validations, and documentation for the tender. Our support extended to the tendering process, where we supported both the municipality and the manufacturer to achieve a production-ready design that meets the design intent.
To achieve a well-thought-out and feasible design, it helps to validate solutions as quickly as possible with test models and prototypes. From quick 'cardboard-and-tape' models for initial critical insights to a fully functional prototype as a solid basis for the tender. Before tendering the design, you want to make sure it meets all specified requirements, not afterward.
"Before introducing the improved bins on the street, we subject them to thorough tests to ensure they function well. We start with a wooden prototype and will bring several working steel models to the neighborhood."
- Vincent Karremans, alderman municipality of Rotterdam
From various stakeholders within a municipality, sometimes conflicting requirements arise. An important role of the designer is to distill the essence of the product to be developed from a complex set of requirements, wishes, and ambitions: what are we really trying to achieve, and what matters less? Together with the various disciplines within the municipalities, we create control over this and make choices. The result is a sharper focus on development, a more realistic development framework, and broad support for the new product within a municipality.