Rethinking Design / Systems / Thinking

Peter Jones Design Management, Sensemaking, Systemic Design

The design community is once again rethinking all the thinkings. It’s about time, as we’ve been through more than a decade after the last global crash and we are now at the start of the next, much longer crash, or the Long Crisis of the Anthropocene. This crash will be political, cultural and financial (unlike the 2008 Minsky Moment (credit implosion) based on the corrupt underpinnings of mortgage-backed securities). Will the design community and design education be prepared this time? Or will we be arguing about ideology and single-cause design activism? Perhaps the compelling ideas of the prior decade are fuzzy by now, but we were busy bringing new design-led interdisciplines into schools and defying the complaints of those that insisted “design education must change.” It was changing – and now we’ve seen several hundred graduates from the OCAD University Strategic Foresight & Innovation MDes. We saw the rise and …

Foresight Playback: Cyclic Models in Foresight Research

Peter Jones Cultural innovation, Innovation, Strategic Foresight

In a series of posts here, I’m continuing to discuss our Strategic Foresight & Innovation research after student graduation. Neal Halvorsen completed his MRP Foresight Playback (Mapping the Future of Industrial Regions by Learning from Historical Cycles of Innovation) after conducting field research in my hometown of Dayton, Ohio. Dayton is almost 500 miles south of Toronto, following the 401 to I-75 South to  Detroit, Toledo, Lima, and then Dayton (a string of cities connected on I-75 to the auto industry). Neal’s MRP on learning from historical cycles of innovation is at: Notably he draws on the mix of cyclic anticipatory models “Kondratieff, Schumpeter, Elliot waves and the Fourth Turning generational cycles are brought together to show how cycles of innovation and decline can be mapped over long periods, adding to the insights that other foresight methodologies can bring to cluster planning.” Uniquely. He integrates these to synthesize their complementary …

Systems Change for New(s) Media

Peter Jones Civil media, Media Ecology, Systemic Design

(First posted on Medium) We have credible understanding to suggest that news media, and the journalism supposedly informing the news, no longer contributes to a meaningful shared public reality. With the arrest of Julian Assange, and Big Media’s denouncement of him as a publisher/journalist and as a person, society suffers another major blow from officialdom in the ongoing struggle to locate responsibility in public reporting. Assange built Wikileaks into a self-organizing publishing system, the newsroom of the future. If Western media actually cared about access to truth via “certified authentic documents” there might be less distrust of the content, process, and intentions of news organizations. But instead, when the Guardian (of all outlets) and New York Times actually cheer on the framing and takedown of an influential independent publisher, who has arguably put his life on the line, it serves the function of a political gang hit on a rival …

Systemic Design Toolkit

Peter Jones Co-Creation, RSD, Systemic Design

The Systemic Design Toolkit was developed by Namahn’s Kristel van Ael and her team for initial workshopping at RSD5 in Toronto. We launched the Toolkit at Relating Systems and Design 7, October 2018, after a year or so of partnering with Phillipe Vandenbroeck from ShiftN, Alex Ryan of MaRS Solutions Lab, and myself with Systemic Design Association. Civilian and educational versions of the Toolkit are now in process and used in training. The Toolkit encompasses the progression of knowledge building over the course of 7 RSD conferences, with the methods tested in workshops and now graduate coursework, at OCADU’s Strategic Foresight and Innovation and at U Antwerp, Belgium. The Systemic Design Toolkit is based on design principles and original systems science foundations. to show how methods cannot replace the evolution of one’s own systems thinking competencies in social and systemic design. I recently presented a brief workshop on the SD …