Contexts – The Systemic Design Journal

Peter Jones Media Ecology, Research innovation, Systemic Design

The board of the Systemic Design Association and our Publications team have published Volume 1 of Contexts – The Systemic Design Journal. Now available online. Executive editor Cheryl May and I have finished our build and test sufficiently to soft launch the journal and maybe get some early feedback. We have a small collection of five articles and an editorial, in online and PDF formats – which is not huge, but the very first set on a new platform does take some work.We first announced the journal project at RSD10 and showed the first articles in press at RSD11, and its live as of this week. The following titles and authors are included: Find the journal site page on the SDA platform, and the articles at the Volume 1 Table of Contents. The journal was a system design from the beginning, and has taken us until the first month of …

Design Journeys – A Systemic Design Tourbook

Peter Jones Service Design, Social Systems Design, Systemic Design

We have completed updates for a second printing of Design Journeys through Complex Systems, the first practitioner handbook for systemic design practice, based on the Systemic Design Toolkit. The tools are largely the same, with some updated cases or images. We have edited throughout to improve clarity, especially for the instructions for use of the tools, some of which were completely new in 2022 when BIS Publishers printed the first run. The feature image now shows our first translation, a Japanese edition translated by service design professor Masanao Takeyama of Keio University who works with the design firm ACTANT. The Japanese edition is beautifully composed and published, and with this quality of production we have a high bar set for the next translation. We are exploring translations now in Spanish, Italian, and Korean. Design Journeys was written as an accessible tourbook style, a handbook for the journeys and many destinations …

Cancer Screening Pathways for Indigenous Communities

Peter Jones Design for Care, Health design

In healthcare design, many projects are done over stages of study, proto-construction, and longer/deeper feedback cycles than in private sector or commercial projects. One of our OCADU Health Design collaborative design projects, with Cancer Care Ontario (CCO), initiated pre-Covid and after some time in reviews, was recently completed and distributed to stakeholders. The First Nations Cancer Screening Access Guides were designed in collaboration with Laura Senese, senior researcher with Cancer Care Ontario, working with PI Dr. Jill Tinmouth with Sunnybrook Research Institute. The Access Guide, a bespoke product for the Wequedong Lodge, was finalized and recently printed in English, French, Ojibway and Oji-Cree language versions. The baseline English version we designed (with the ideas and design work from several research assistants) was created as a concise, vernacular, culturally-relevant guideline for First Nations use across Ontario. While in principle the design of a health communication artifact is a straightforward process of …

Metaplanning with Design Journeys

Peter Jones Co-Creation, Social Systems Design, Systemic Design, Systems Thinking

The Journeys are staged to help the organising team separate the goals of each stage of learning, and to structure the participation for stakeholders in a clearly defined way, with a definitive logic. The Journeys design approach is all pre-development (or implementation) and can be understood as a complete metaplanning[1] and strategic design planning process, but for complex social systems and system change intervention. A participatory design style is essential to system metaplanning because the planners will be the stakeholders and risk-bearers, those with skin-in-the-game, who will be responsible for implementation.  Therefore it’s critical they understand every step of the design planning journey. Real stakeholders invested in the outcome might be very different than the convenience-sample groups that we drum up for organizational workshops, or in the public sector invitational sessions we often convene. The five-sided figure shows a model for stakeholder sampling, based on Alexander Christakis – who defined …