Linda Blaasvær, Elisabeth Skjelten, and Simón Sandoval
The Norwegian Labour and Welfare Administration (NAV) was established in 2006 with the ambition of providing citizens with “one door” to public welfare services. It was the result of merging three different organizations: The labour market agency (A-etat), The National Insurance Service (Trygdeetaten) and Social Services (Sosialtjenesten). NAV is a complex organization and systemic design can have a key role in helping people to navigate complex challenges and create systems change.
Since 2018, NAV has been experimenting and using systemic design mindsets and methods in different areas and projects. In this presentation we will talk about NAV as a system and dig into one case that mirrors the complexity of NAV: how payments of social benefits work in Norway. We want to show and reflect on how designers can play a key role in bringing different perspectives to a conversation. What happens when we bring together different puzzles of an issue into one surface, for example, citizen’s experiences, work processes, technological aspects and regulations? Through concrete examples, we want to show how visualization can be an important instrument to facilitate dialog and (hopefully) common understanding between different people, disciplines and parts of an organization. In addition to this, we want to dive into how we can unpack regulatory issues and help people grasp something that is often complex and abstract, and through this, identify need for change in our regulatory systems.
PROFILES
Linda Blaasvær and Elisabeth Skjelten are systemic designers and Simón Sandoval is a policy designer at the Norwegian Labour and Welfare Administration (NAV).