Imagining Canada’s Future

Peter JonesDialogic Design, Strategic Foresight

Canada’s research council for social science and humanities, SSHRC, funded six regional panels to understand and imagine possible futures for the country in a global context through the next two decades.  Strategic Innovation Lab (sLab) at OCAD University led a panel for the Southern Ontario region, in partnership with University of Ontario Institute of Technology (UOIT), Ryerson, Windsor and York universities and our combined intellectual communities. The panels were charged with defining their Top 10 challenge areas for which future research strategies would be applied. Each regional panel employed a different methodology, some of them grounded in public engagement to explore the futures question, some (like  OCADU’s) were based on a foresight method. This week SSHRC research leads and panel leaders attended a two-day scenario workshop in Ottawa led by Scenarios to Strategy on the same focal question. The workshop employed the classical scenario method for a large group of …

Same As It Ever Was

Peter JonesDialogic Design, Social Systems Design, Strategic Foresight

We have been in the same global mega-crisis for 50 years now. Two proposals were presented to the Club of Rome in 1969. The board selected the System Dynamics modeling project supported by Jay Forrester’s World Model, with the results published by Meadows, Meadows and Randers in 1972 as The Limits to Growth. The Club of Rome convened March 1 at Smithsonian’s sponsorship for a global symposium and revisited the Limits to Growth. Dennis Meadows spoke and was interviewed by Smithsonian, where he claims we missed our chance to repair the foreseeable: Is it Too Late for Sustainable Development?  When the Club of Rome selected the systemic modeling approach, it perhaps unknowingly placed a strong bet on a technological view of ecological and social systems. There was at the time an optimistic social belief that society would do the right thing, if presented with a sound scientific case. After all, …

Social systems design for complex services : A workshop

Peter JonesDesign research, Dialogic Design, Service Design, Social Innovation, Strategic Foresight

What are the deep drivers of your problem system? Social systems design for complex services I’m holding a workshop this week on dialogic design at Oslo School of Architecture and Design. Their unique program in Systems-Oriented Design has a  lot in common with OCADU Strategic Foresight and Innovation. A workshop on dialogic design for complex systems and social systems methodologies. There is an urgent need to wisely address complex social issues effectively and democratically. There is a social and educational need to improve design methods for social and systemic innovation. There are underlying systemic forces that all social, business and policy innovation will deal with in a given horizon. We can develop sound understanding of these forces in scenarios and as interdependent problem systems through dialogic design practices. Systemic design methods provide capacity to mixed stakeholder groups and organizations for navigating complexity and identifying challenges with the highest leverage in …