EGGS Design - Work - Nye Øygarden - Three municipalities become one

Three municipalities in western Norway, Fjell, Sund and Øygarden, merged into one, called Øygarden Kommune. How can we use this as an opportunity to design new ways of working together to serve citizens better? EGGS has teamed up with the municipalities to create the ideal model. Services for vulnerable children and teenagers are the starting point.

Cooperation and co-creation are crucial

One of the biggest challenges the project faces is in the coordination and cooperation across the municipalities, as well as the different service sectors of health, employment, and education. And that’s where EGGS comes in. Together with StimuLab, and administered by Difi and DOGA, we contributed with service design. The project applies user insights and conducts experiments to find the best solution for the new municipality’s citizens.

Joining three municipalities requires a large amount of coordination and cooperation to succeed. Both between the municipalities but also across sectors and areas of responsibility.

Insights through experiments

Vulnerable children and teenagers require high quality and coordinated services to avoid the pain of bureaucracy. They demand effective collaboration and excellent communication. The snag is understanding how to go about that. What’s called for is a model that offers quality services that are consistent and equal, yet flexible enough to meet citizen’s needs when they arise. By creating design experiments for the municipality, we tested different hypotheses and gathered insights from things that have failed to find new ways of working together – methods prompting solutions that are of maximum benefit to all.

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

Familielos - a holistic concept

After having tested ideas and experiments with a diverse group of experts, employees, and citizens, the concept Familielos was created. The idea is to catch families who are in need of several different services from the municipality, and who risk falling between the cracks due to a lack of cooperation between different departments. The concept still needs to be tested further before it can be implemented in the entire municipality.