Cocreating a Mexican World Model for the 21st Century

Peter JonesDesign research, Dialogic Design, Modeling, Systemic Design

Mexican World Model: Rethinking Mexico’s future by understanding deep systemic challenges Mexican Model: a structured, systems-based framework that identifies how social, political, economic, cultural, and environmental forces interact to shape the country’s long-term trajectory. Mexico faces complex challenges that cannot be understood in isolation.Using a systemic methodology inspired by the “problematique” and Logosofia models, this project maps the interdependencies behind the country’s most pressing issues. Our goal is to create a shared, accessible understanding of Mexico’s structural dynamics one that can inform better decisions, policies, and future scenarios. Mexico has its own unique history, institutions, inequalities, and cultural structures. This work aims to build a model rooted in Mexican realities, one that speaks from within. Logosofia can be used by small research groups like ours to build models of problem systems (challenge maps) and solution formation (cross-impact maps). The Mexican world model follows this methodology and the interactive map demonstrates …

Evolutionary Stakeholder Discovery

Peter JonesCo-Creation, Cybernetics, Dialogic Design, Systemic Design

A significant source of both power and error in social system design originates from the distribution mix of participants in design and planning engagements. Designers rely significantly on the lived experience of participants in such sessions, but rarely qualify the distribution of that experience as a form of knowledge translation. The unqualified inclusion of “any or all” participants leads to socialized forms of sampling error, one which cannot be corrected within a given session. Stakeholder selection can be significantly biased by default and unreflective practices common in design engagements. When stakeholders are selected to participate in sessions conceived as co-creation practices, where participants are the “designers of the system,” the onus of group design decisions relies solely on their knowledge base. A discovery process of evolutionary stakeholder sampling resolves this concern by adapting multiple dimensions of ontological and social identification. Sampling can be defined as commensurate with the requisite variety …

Discovery Sampling for Requisite Social Variety

Peter JonesDialogic Design, Governance, Social Systems Design

Stakeholder selection may be the most critical step in the design of fair and inclusive dialogues that reflect a community’s contributions and perspectives. This is a classic social systems problem that we resolve through a stakeholder identification and recruiting process that, in Dialogic Design, is called Evolutionary Stakeholder Discovery. Over the last decade we have been instrumenting, through careful definition of criteria and observation, how stakeholder discovery can be conducted to identify and recruit optimal participants from a theoretical population sample. As a documented case, in 2012 the Strategic Innovation Lab convened a Dialogic Design Co-Laboratory as a multi-stakeholder panel for the SSHRC Imagining Canada’s Future initiative, as one of the six regional cross-Canadian panels. With only 20 stakeholders, we aimed to represent Southern Ontario for the question of future impacts of urbanism in the region for a 20 year horizon. For this project we selected participants by an evolutionary …

Anticipatory Factors in Dialogic Design

Peter JonesDialogic Design, Social Systems Design, Strategic Foresight

Presented at ISSS 2016, Boulder CO  July 28, 2016 Applications of the systemic practices of dialogic design (Structured Dialogic Design and it variants) have recently developed and integrated futures and foresight models as anticipatory frameworks for policy and long-term planning situations (Weigand, et al, 2014). We have identified this model of practice as collaborative foresight, reflecting the perspective from practice that futures literacy must be considered an essential complement to multi-stakeholder deliberation where complex and competing interests are considered in planning and decision making. This study proposes approaches to advancement in science and practice that integrate essential properties of collective anticipatory modelling for design decisions. Scientific principles for dialogic design have been developed and practiced over the course of nearly 50 years of developmental evolution, following Warfield’s (1986) Domain of Science Model (DoSM) and Christakis’ (2006, 2008) research extending the DoSM. One of the key principles in the DoSM refers …