Emergent Fusion of Systemic Service Design

Peter JonesService Design, Systemic Design

Recently Routledge published the edited volume titled Systemic Service Design, co-edited by me and Mari Suoheimo, Birger Sevaldson, and Sheng-Hung Lee. The 14 chapters cover a extreme range of emerging areas of study, many with fuzzy boundaries into applications that would never have been conceived as service, unless taking into account a bigger containing social system. As systemic design has expanded to develop and publish new service design studies, transition design research, socioecological, sociocultural, eco-territorial, and even spiritually-emergent design, the boundaries between these knowledge practices are blending and rhizomically connecting. From power relations to system mapping, criminality to care systems, from aging to urban planning – I would say these studies are not defining a new field, so much as mediating a conversation that enriches the design for complex service needs with a deeper understanding of the systems in which they have developed. Our schools were happy to support the …

Design Journeys – A Systemic Design Tourbook

Peter JonesService 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 …

SDN Touchpoint: Systems Thinking in Service Design

Peter JonesDesign for Practice, Service Design, Systemic Design

Touchpoint is back! The long-awaited issue on systems thinking in service design was just published by the Service Design Network, and of course, we find it is beautifully designed. The guest editors were two well-regarded academics, J. Tuomas Harviainen from Tampere University and Josina Vink, who is a graduate of an early cohort in the OCADU SFI MDes program, and is now a service design professor at Oslo’s AHO, a partner school of ours for many years. Josina’s editorial titled “The Systems Turn in Service Design” sets out a grand challenge for both disciplines: “There is a transition underway in service design that ischallenging traditional ways of working. As the scopeof service design projects continues to expand, servicedesigners are increasingly confronted by the immensecomplexity of overlapping service systems. Amidentangled global crises – including climate change,migration, eroding democratic norms and strainedhealthcare systems – there is growing awareness of theurgent need for …

Synthesis Maps from CanIMPACT | Mapping the Clinical Cancer System

Peter JonesDesign for Care, Service Design, Systemic Design

The CanIMPACT project (Canadian Team to Improve Community-Based Cancer Care Along the Continuum) is a multidisciplinary pan-Canadian program studying how to improve cancer care to patients in the primary care setting. Funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research for 5 years (2013–2018, Grant no. 128272) the project was led by Dr. Eva Grunfeld, Director of Research at U Toronto’s Dept of Family and Community Medicine.  For the CanIMPACT synthesis map project, our sLab team (Jones, Smriti Shakdher, Prateeksha Singh).  Two synthesis maps were prepared to reflect the discovered insights from the multi-year investigation, a clinical system map and a patient-centred map informed by the CanIMPACT Patient Advisory Council. The resulting maps were published (a first for a system map method) in Current Oncology and presented at the first Canadian Partnership Against Cancer (CPAC) conference, and MedicineX 2017. Jones, P.H., Shakdher, S. & Singh, P. (2017). Synthesis maps: Visual knowledge …