Design Dialogues is a publication of Peter Jones, founder of Redesign and managing partner of Dialogic Design International.
I live and work in Toronto, and manage Redesign from Toronto and Dayton (company location) as a specialized innovation research firm focused on professional informatics and complex work systems. Dialogic Design helps organizations and problem-focused communities address wicked problem systems facilitated by strategic dialogue. (You can read about that in the Publications page).
I’m a faculty lead for the new OCAD program M.Design in Strategic Foresight and Innovation and a Senior Fellow of the Strategic Innovation Lab (sLab). I am also a visiting scholar at the University of Toronto working on collaborative informatics in healthcare research.
I started Redesign in 2001 to focus on user experience research, information product design, and organizational innovation. We continue to lead the design and user understanding research for market-leading information services used in professional practices, including (over the years) Elsevier’s sciencedirect.com and Procedures Consult, and LexisNexis’ CaseMap.
In a current book project, Design for Care, I envision the information experiences of consumers, patients, and healthcare professionals as a continuous and complex social system, shared by all and innovated by many. We are all participants co-creating better health care for all members of our society, All forms of care and caring in information, practice, environment, and services are to be considered in the quest for enhancing the human experience of health. Therefore, healthcare design concerns are presented not from a traditional user experience perspective, but from the lived experience and perspective of the patient, practitioner, and designer in the health field. We aim to establish the role of information, service, and system designers as critical team members in the health professions, as necessary as other traditional roles in the healthcare system.
My Union Institute doctorate (2000) examined the relationship of organizational values embedded in innovation processes to the maintenance of power and decision control. This work inspired continuing research into the organizational dynamics of innovation, collaborative information practices, and how people think with and use information. My current management research involves changing organizational practices to enable reflective renewal to improve innovation and facilitate transformation.
As a board member of the Institute for 21st Century Agoras, I work with a worldwide practice network to advance the principles of dialogic design for inclusive, multi-stakeholder participation in solution creation for complex problems. As a non-profit, the Agoras Institute focuses on global and civil society issues primarily.
In summary, my lifelong professional and social interests are to humanize systems and institutions, enabling harmonious futures co-created through collective wisdom.
