Design Dialogues

Inquiries in design, complexity, & collective wisdom

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ABOUT

Design Dialogues is a publication of Peter Jones, founder of Redesign and managing partner of Dialogic Design International, LLC.

I live and work in Toronto, and manage Redesign as a boutique design research firm focused on professional informatics and complex work.  Dialogic Design is a new partnership (with Aleco Christakis and Tom Flanagan) that helps organizations and problem-focused communities resolve wicked problem systems using strategic dialogue for collaborative sensemaking. (Yes, 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 Research 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. I have led design, research, and information architecture for leading resources in professional practices, including (over the years) sciencedirect.com, ProceduresConsult.com, and CaseMap.

In a current book project, Designing 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. I founded Dialogic Design International with Alexander Christakis and two partners in 2007 to develop Dr. Christakis’ Structured Dialogic Design process for strategic dialogue for complex organizational problems. These enterprises are developing collaborative tools for participatory whole system design for problem systems, products and services design, and decisionmaking in social systems.

I wrote Team Design: A Practitioner’s Guide to Collaborative Innovation in 1998 (McGraw-Hill) and revised it in 2002. In summary, my lifelong professional and social interests are to humanize systems and institutions, enabling harmonious futures co-created through collective wisdom.

A Peter Jones Place

If we express design concepts through conversations, we find our shared understanding through dialogue. Dialogue gives us a chance to make sense of each other's perspectives and to create something from that understanding.

What I mean by dialogue is probably not what you mean.

Dialogue enlivens diverse perspectives by honoring their credibility and standing. Unlike the strategic goal of designed experiences, where we become spectators or at best players, dialogue enacts the real. Dialogic design is not merely reinventing the social; it is intentional social system design, not the social web. While we may all use the tools of participation, dialogic design is not technique; it is inquiry, understanding, enactment. It means asking questions that help us discover what matters.

Questions like: How can Design do better by doing good? How might we innovate a future with more meaning and less stuff? What are the emerging practices of new citizenship? Who are we educating ourselves to become?

Innovation is always turning toward what's next, and what's next is the move toward socially relevant and sustainable practices. A generation ago Ivan Illich called for convivial tools that would help us move toward sane limits to human excess. We have called for tools for thrivability, the foundation of which is dialogue.

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