Professor Jeff Johnson

My research interest is in the application of systems thinking and complexity science for designing the future at local, national and global scales.

I am currently focussed on education and research to support Ukraine during the conflict as its people reconstruct its social, economic and environment systems over the decades to come.

See RESILIENCE-UKRAINE.CS-DC.

I joined the Design Discipline at the OU in 1981 after three years in the Geography Department at Cambridge University working with Graham Chapman and Peter Gould. Before that I was in the Mathematics Department at Essex University working with Ron Atkin on his theory of Q-analysis for social systems. This has developed into what I now call multilevel hypernetworks. This research involves the policy-oriented application of hypernetwork theory in the design and management of complex social and technical systems at local and global levels.

My BA and PhD are in mathematics. I am a Fellow of the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications, a Fellow of the British Computer Society,  a Chartered Mathematician and Chartered Engineer. I have been director of various engineering and consulting companies and am the CEO of Vision Scientific Ltd, a company I founded with Phil Picton in 1989. I am a Past President of the Complex Systems Society, and Deputy President of the UNESCO UniTwin Digital Campus for Complex Systems (CD-DC).

My OU undergraduate teaching has included: creating the CADPAC suite of interactive computer exercises for T363: Computer Aided Design; creating the SmartLab suite of interactive computer exercises for T395 - Mechatronics, Designing Intelligent Machine and co-authoring with Phil Picton the textbook Mechatronics: Concepts in Artificial Intelligence; leading the development of T183 - Design and the Web, T184 - Robotics and the meaning of life, A178 - Perspectives on Leonardo, TM190 - The Story of Maths, T218: Design for Engineers,  writing the interactive computer exercises for T174 - Engineering the Future, chairing the  production and presentation of  T212 Electronics: sensing, logic & actuation,  creating 'VisionLab' for the T312 Electronics module production team, and producing teaching materials for the new Open STEM Laboratory giving students remote access to hand-on electronics and robotics experiements. This includes leadng the creation of the NanoLab suite of interactive experiments for T366 NanoTechnology .

I worked with teams creating FutureLearn MOOCS for the CS-DC including: Global Systems Science and Policy,  Systems Thinking and Complexity, and First Steps in Data Science with Google Analytics In 2020 I created the course Pandemics, modelling and policy.

My most recent books are  Hypernetworks in the Science of Complex Systems (2014) and Non-Equilibrium Social Science (2017). My new book, Designing the Future, scheduled for 2023 shows how a synthesis between the design process, complex systems science and hypernetwork theory provides a framework for sucessfully creating and managing the complex social and socio-technical systems of the future.

My OU PhD supervisions include: Richard Murphy -Constraint-based design synthesis for computer aided design (1993); Meng Hua - A neural network based strategy for robot navigation in dynamic environments (1994), Paul Margerison - An algorithmic and interactive approach to computer art (1995), George Glaze - Graphic design evaluation: towards a rule-based system (1995), David Durling - Teaching with style: computer aided instruction, personality and design education (1996), Claudia Eckert - Intelligent support for knitwear design (1997), Linda Waddoups - A binary representation for built form (2001), Jack Cawkwell - An automated guided vehicle for local transport (2004), Sunny Bains - Physical computation and embodied artificial intelligence (2004), Nick Scott - Measures from complexity science provide manufacturing companies with insights previously unavailable to them (2004), John Welford - Artificial Intelligent for classifying oral lesions (2005), Pejman Iravani - An architecture for multilevel learning and robotic control based on concept generation (2005), Valery Rose - Evolutionary adaptive self-learning machine vision (2010), Joan Serras - Multidimensional multilevel representation for traffic simulation models (2008), James Law - Abstracting multidimensional concepts for multilevel decisionmaking in multirobot systems (2008),  Vikas Chandra - Patenting and publication networks in stem cell research (2009), Paul Morley. Investigation into automated laundry sorting (2012), Anthony Johnston - Sensory augmentation for navigation in difficult urban environments by people with visual impairment (2013), Iain Kusel - A computational model of the emergence of seriation in the young child (2014), Tasos Varoudis - Augmented visibility in architectural space influencing movement patterns (2014), Bjorn Madsen - How to Make the Most Productive Intervention in a Complex Economic System (2015). Cristian Jimenez-Romero - A heterosynaptic spiking neural system for the development of Autonomous agents (2017). Pam Garthwait - Resilient Hospital Refurbishment (2017).  Charlotte Foster:  A ‘self-production approach for charities’: supporting and developing in-house video production in small UK charities (2021), Ruggero Rossi, Hypernetworks Analysis of RoboCup Interactions (2022).  Current supervisions:  Richard Charlesworth - Representing multilevel systems for self-programing machines, Phil Davies - Systems thinking and complexity in policing, Barry O'Reilly - Antifragility in software systems design, Neil Andrews - Cooperating and Swarm Robots,  Davin Parrot - The probabilistic assessment of intelligence and decisionmaking.

email: jeff dot johnson at open dot ac dot uk