Peter H. JonesOntario College of Art and Design University · Design
Peter H. Jones
PhD
About
51
Publications
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1,369
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Citations since 2017
Introduction
Dr. Peter Jones is an associate professor at OCAD University, Toronto, in the Strategic Foresight and Innovation and Design for Health MDes graduate programs. A founder of the Systemic Design Association and its conference series, the RSD Symposia, Peter conducts design and research in systemic design, applied to complex social systems, public policy, health services, and stakeholder decision making.
Publications
Publications (51)
This chapter proposes a developmental design approach to build a long-term design research agenda to study and advise healthcare services towards meeting sustainability challenges. The study involved the application of systemic design tools in a participatory design workshop to create a formative understanding of the stakeholders, contexts and syst...
Editorial. In the 10th year of the Relating Systems Thinking and Design Symposium (RSD), the Systemic Design Association (SDA) board decided to bring a new journal into being for the scholarly community forming in systemic design. As board members, RSD hosts, and editors, we are delighted to announce the availability of a community-driven journal f...
The synthesis map presented here has been developed from the designed outcomes of a workshop on systemic design for healthcare sustainability hosted by Jones and Arun Kumar (2021) at RSD10. The map is the second phase of an ongoing long-term project envisioned as a developmental design approach to engage with complex socio-technical problems of hea...
We report on systemic design methods and outcomes from a workshop and continuing design development for a research agenda to propose effective waste and environmental strategies in the healthcare industry. The recent interest in systems and expansion of systemic design research has produced new avenues for designers to contribute to complex socio-t...
Transformation (T-) systems are innovative collections of initiatives and efforts geared to bringing about a flourishing socio-ecological system in a given context. They comprise of the totality of initiatives, people and organizations who are collectively seeking to transform a particular issue or geography in a common direction, when they attempt...
Design Journeys through Complex Systemscombines systemic design, leading thinking practices, and years of the combined authors’ experiences into a practitioner’s handbook for design thinking. By drawing upon the authors’ Systemic Design Toolkit, this book provides detailed knowledge of systems science, expanding upon essential systemic design texts...
This workshop delves into healthcare sustainability and understanding consumer choices in healthcare for design-aware citizens.
Any healthcare service or individual choice in the healthcare system triggers a set of actions, interactions with service providers, and material, energy and information flows from supply chains. Healthcare as an industry...
Design and design management are increasingly called to respond to the world’s complex, dynamic problems. Yet, no standards or methodology exists to help designers understand, model, and design solutions for complex wicked problems. Program theory and social innovation promote the use of theory of change models to develop linear pathways of outcome...
Systemic design integrates systems thinking and theory with advanced design methods in an evolving interdisciplinary field to effect anticipatory change in complex social sociotechnical and social systems. Systemic design (or systems-oriented design) differs from the commonly-designated systems design in that systemic design is a design field (syst...
Many systemic design processes include the development and analysis of systems models that represent the issue(s) at hand. In causal loop diagram models, phenomena are graphed as nodes, with connections between them indicating a control relationship. Such models provide mechanisms for stakeholder collaboration, problem finding and generative insigh...
Synthesis maps integrate research evidence, system expertise, and design proposals into visual narratives. These narratives support communication and decision-making among stakeholders. Synthesis maps evolved from earlier visualization tools in systemics and design. They help stakeholders to understand design options for complex sociotechnical syst...
Since 2014, an international collaborative of design leaders has been exploring ways in which methods can be augmented, transitioning from the heritage legacy focus on products and services towards a broad range of complex sociotechnical systems and contemporary societal problems issues. At the RSD4 Symposium (2015), DesignX co-founder Don Norman p...
The concept of co-creation includes a wide range of participatory practices for design and decision making with stakeholders and users. Generally co-creation refers to a style of design or business practice characterized by facilitated participation in orchestrated multi-stakeholder engagements, such as structured workshops and self-organizing mode...
Evidence-based practice has advanced in public administration, with increasing reliance on social research and population sampling in decision making. Yet the evidence-based turn risks marginalizing the value of strategic foresight and futures competencies in informing policy and planning. Where evidence enables policymakers to select the best near...
The Second Symposium of Relating Systems Thinking and Design was held in Oslo, Norway at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design 9-11 October, 2013.
The second Oslo symposium engaged over 120 participants in the emerging renaissance of systems thinking in design. The emerging context is being revealed in transdisciplinary responses to increasin...
Better alternatives to improving population health have been sought by healthcare policymakers and the front-line clinicians who see patients in everyday care settings. While public health experts and primary care clinicians recognise the significant effects on health from social determinant factors they have limited tools for addressing these caus...
Salient findings and interpretations from the canimpact clinical cancer research study are visually represented in two synthesis maps for the purpose of communicating an integrated presentation of the study to clinical cancer researchers and policymakers. Synthesis maps integrate evidence and expertise into a visual narrative for knowledge translat...
This paper investigates how a close understanding of human activity can inform the design of culturally and contextually sustainable innovations for subsistence markets. Building on existing literature related to poverty alleviation initiatives and an ethnographic field study, this project attempted to understand the cultural and contextual challen...
Business is increasingly employing sustainability practices, aiming to improve environmental and social responsibility while maintaining and improving profitability. For many organizations, profit-oriented business models are a major constraint impeding progress in sustainability. A formally defined ontology, a model definition, for profit-oriented...
We have joined two issues of FORMakademisk to accommodate two sets of articles developed from remarkable early work presented at the 2013 Relating Systems Thinking to Design Symposium in Oslo. We organized these papers into a theory set, and a set for practice of systemic design, although most of these theoretical works are deeply informed by desig...
![Fig. 1. Strategy-to-Task framework. From Lewis and Roll [1].](profile/Peter-Jones-36/publication/262564679/figure/fig3/AS:667782588936205@1536223184948/Strategy-to-Task-framework-From-Lewis-and-Roll-1_Q320.jpg)
![Fig. 3. Series of methods in Structured Dialogic Design [11].](profile/Peter-Jones-36/publication/262564679/figure/fig5/AS:667782593138714@1536223185476/Series-of-methods-in-Structured-Dialogic-Design-11_Q320.jpg)
An action case study demonstrates an effective integration of collaborative planning using long-range foresight in a hierarchical government research organization. The purpose of the study was to evaluate the effectiveness of collaborative, bottom-up strategic planning as a complement to top-down strategizing. Large research institutions plan inves...
Systems theory and design thinking both share a common orientation to the desired outcomes of complex problems, which is to effect highly-leveraged, well-reasoned, and preferred changes in situations of concern. Systems thinking (resulting from its theoretical bias) promotes the understanding of complex problem situations independently of solutions...
The recent development of systemic design as a research-based practice draws on long-held precedents in the system sciences toward representation of complex social and enterprise systems. A precedent article (Jones, 2014) established an axiomatic and epistemological basis for complementary principles shared between design reasoning and systems theo...
Design for Care: Innovating Healthcare Experience
Foreword by Dr. John Halamka
Design for Care brings methods and practices found effective across healthcare contexts to designers in all situations, illustrated by current cases & design research. We aim to inform information, service, & system designers to make a positive difference in healthcare....
An emerging design practice developed by natural extension of the mode of participatory design known as 'bodystorming' is often considered a form of prototyping in context, and is enacted instead as a technology directly supporting collaborative embodied cognition. The goal of embodied storming is not just the instrumental formulation of better exp...
Editor's Note: In last year's January + February issue Usman Haque, Paul Pangaro, and I described several types of interaction---reacting, regulating, learning, balancing, managing, and conversing. In the July + August 2009 issue, Paul Pangaro and I described several types of conversing---agreeing, learning, coordinating, and collaborating---and we...
This paper presents a model and our experience of a lateral, participatory approach to creating and sustaining new sociotechnical practices within organizations. Working closely with a user-centered design and project team in a large (US) IT product company, we designed a socialization process as an alternative to institutionalization for new produ...
The proposed tutorial presents a half-day experiential process engaging participants in learning Structured Dialogic Design (SDD). Dialogic design is a radically democratic design perspective and set of methods for engaging mixed stakeholders in design and consensus action for complex sociotechnical problems shared in common. Based on a systems thi...
Proponents of the resource-based view of strategic management have argued for processes that align organizational knowledge resources to business strategy. In this view, a unique competitive advantage accrues from accelerating organizational learning and non-appropriable knowledge. An empirical approach known as socialization counters theories of b...
Dialogic design provides efficient, reliable approaches for organizations to envision and implement cohesive, comprehensive, and compelling roadmaps for enterprise evolution. Using structured dialogue to integrate the collective intelligence of stakeholders, we produce a shared representation of the intelligent enterprise, enabling "organizing arou...
How people harness their collective wisdom and power to construct the future in Co-Laboratories of Democracy, by Alexander N. Christakis and Kenneth C. Bausch. Information Age Publishing, 2006. ISBN: 1593114818
The paper presents a novel user interface (Gardner, et al., 2005) designed by LexisNexis® to assist researchers navigating large hierarchical structures. This navigation tool allows users of large hierarchies (e.g., tables of contents or file directories) to select an item (node) in the structure and expand (or collapse) it across multiple levels w...
In many professions, the right balance between generalist and specialist skills is difficult to find. In UCD, we need to distinguish between method specialization and domain specialization, both of which have their own sets of pros and cons. Many internal UCD staff tend to be de facto domain specialists, simply because they naturally focus on the b...
A cognitive ethnography study investigates information practices in experimental life sciences research. Activity analysis of collaborative research projects and cognitive artifacts revealed a series of seven cognitive information tasks performed in the lifecycle of the research project. Life scientists exhibited habituated patterns of search behav...
This special issue presents current research organized by the theme of Collaboration in Context. Most of the six papers explore cognitive and organizational/cultural artefacts as objects expressing the details of collaborative work practice, and as research tools for understanding the contextual structures of collaborative work. The overall theme i...
This extended abstract describes the workshop Cognition and Collaboration - Analyzing Distributed Community Practices for Design, the Third International Workshop on Analyzing Collaborative Activity.
The Indian folk tale recorded in the well-known John Saxe poem tells of six blind men, each grabbing a different part of an elephant, and describing their impression of the whole beast from a single part’s perspective. So the elephant appears to each blind man to be like a snake, a fan, a tree, a rope, a wall, a spear. As the poem concludes:
“And s...
As startups become large mainstream corporations, many lose the intense “breakthrough” mentality that characterizes their initial achievements. The willingness to take risks is replaced by a focus on growth and market share. Rather than moving on to the next threshold, satisfying customers becomes the priority. Peter Jones examines this fascinating...
Knowledge management (KM) has received extensive business press over the last two years, and offers substantial promise for long-tern gains in competitiveness and organizational effectiveness. Due to both hype and interest, the field has expanded greatly, making it difficult to understand what's KM, what's worthwhile, and understanding how it might...
The purpose of the study was to determine the relative efficacy of training (advance organizers) and interface design in the formation of a mental model of a menu-oriented data base management system. The study employed a 2 × 5 factorial between-subjects design with two levels of Menu Interface (Data vs. Task) and 5 levels of Advance Organizers (No...
This work-in-progress paper presents the interpretive findings from a dissertation research project based on case research from software projects and two large product firms. It exam-ined embedded values in product innovation processes that obstructed effective design practice.
Projects
Projects (8)
The two special issues of FormAkademisk comprise a selection of articles developed from presentations at the seventh Relating Systems Thinking and Design (RSD7) Symposium, held at Politecnico di Torino, Turin, 23th-26th October 2018 (Barbero, 2018). The first edition was released in the January 2020 and the second is planned to be released in autumn 2020.
