Jeffrey Johnson | The Open University (original) (raw)
Papers by Jeffrey Johnson
Connectivities between processes in product developments indicate both conflicts of resources and... more Connectivities between processes in product developments indicate both conflicts of resources and potential synergies. These represent constraints and potential opportunities in planning design Each product development comprises a network of processes. Similarity between processes is analysed by a layered classification ranging from common components to shared design knowledge. The connectivities between products arising from similarities among products are represented by a multidimensional network. Design planning is described by flows or 'traffic' on this network which represents a structural model of complexity. Comparison is made with information based measures of the complexity of designs and processes.
The project will devise new theory and implement new ICT-based methods of delivering high-quality... more The project will devise new theory and implement new ICT-based methods of delivering high-quality low-cost postgraduate education to many thousands of people in a scalable way, with the cost of each extra student being negligible (< a few Euros). The research will create an in vivo laboratory of one to ten thousand postgraduate students studying courses in complex systems. This community is chosen because it is large and interdisciplinary and there is a known requirement for courses for thousand of students across Europe. The project involves every aspect of course production and delivery. Within this the research focused on the creation of a Socially Intelligent Resource Mining system to gather large volumes of high quality educational resources from the internet; new methods to deconstruct these to produce a semantically tagged Learning Object Database; a Living Course Ecology to support the creation and maintenance of evolving course materials; systems to deliver courses; and ...
Lecture Notes of the Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering, 2013
3rd International Winter School and Conference on Network Science, 2017
Network science has made great progress in the study of binary relationships between pairs of ele... more Network science has made great progress in the study of binary relationships between pairs of elements. Although it has been known for decades that n-ary are ubiquitous in complex systems, progress in this area has been much slower. A condensed account is given of the family of network structures which includes graphs, networks, multilevel networks and multiplex networks for binary relations, and hypergraphs, simplices complexes and hypernetworks for n-ary relations. These structures are naturally integrated in a generalising framework. This family of network structures supports a new theory of multilevel systems where structures at one level become vertices at higher levels through part-whole aggregation interleaved with taxonomic aggregation. Although the structures presented are necessary to understand the dynamics of complex multilevel systems, there are many open questions. These are presented for consideration by the network community.
The motivation of the European Etoile project is to create high quality free open education in co... more The motivation of the European Etoile project is to create high quality free open education in complex systems science, including quality assured certification. Universities and colleges around the world are increasingly using online platforms to offer courses open to the public. Massive Open Online Courses or MOOCs give millions of people access to lectures delivered by prestigious universities. However, although some of these courses provide certification of attendance and completion, most do not provide any academic or professional recognition since this would imply a rigorous and complete evaluation of the student's achievements. Since the number of students enrolled may exceed tens of thousands, it is impractical for a lecturer (or group of lecturers) to evaluate all students using conventional hand marking. Thus in order to be scalable, assessment must be automated. The state-of-the-art in automated assessment includes various methods and computerised tools including multi...
The way that human beings live and consume the natural and environmental resources of the planet ... more The way that human beings live and consume the natural and environmental resources of the planet are not sustainable. Sustainability involves changes in individual beliefs, expectations, values and behaviours at the microlevel, changes in policy at the ...
STAIRS 2004: proceedings …, 2004
STAIRS 2004 259 E. Onaindia and S Sioah (Eds. l IOS Press. 2004 Application of concept grounding ... more STAIRS 2004 259 E. Onaindia and S Sioah (Eds. l IOS Press. 2004 Application of concept grounding techniques to reduce dimensionality in sensory-motor spaces Pejman Iravani, Lucia Rapanotti and Jeffrey Johnson The Open University. Department of Computing. Walton Halt. ...
International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media, 2007
... dancers were placed across the roof of buildings in Manhattan, NYC and were ... interdiscipli... more ... dancers were placed across the roof of buildings in Manhattan, NYC and were ... interdisciplinary, seeking the answers to some fundamental questions about evolving, adaptable, changeable systems. ... the system on a relatively &amp;#x27;good&amp;#x27; trajectory, steering it towards desirable states ...
Understanding Complex Systems
The vision of Global Systems Science (GSS) is to provide scientific evidence and means to engage ... more The vision of Global Systems Science (GSS) is to provide scientific evidence and means to engage into a reflective dialogue to support policy-making and public action and to enable civil society to collectively engage in societal action in response to global challenges like climate change, urbanisation, or social inclusion. GSS has four elements: policy and its implementation, the science of complex systems, policy informatics, and citizen engagement. It aims to give policy makers and citizens a better understanding of the possible behaviours of complex social systems. Policy informatics helps generate and evaluate policy options with computer-based tools and the abundance of data available today. The results they generate are made accessible to everybody-policy makers, citizens-through intuitive user interfaces, animations, visual analytics, gaming, social media, and so on. Examples of Global Systems include epidemics, finance, cities, the Internet, trade systems and more. GSS addresses the question of policies having desirable outcomes, not necessarily optimal outcomes. The underpinning idea of GSS is not to precisely predict but to establish possible and desirable futures and their likelihood. Solving policy problems is a process, often needing the requirements, constraints, and lines of action to be revisited and modified, until the problem is 'satisficed', i.e. an acceptable compromise is found between competing objectives and constraints. Thus policy problems and their solutions coevolve much as in a design process. Policy and societal action is as much about attempts to understand objective facts as it is about the narratives that guide our actions. GSS tries to reconcile these apparently contradictory modes of operations. GSS thus provides policy makers and society guidance on their course of action rather than proposing (illusionary) optimal solutions.
Understanding Complex Systems
Systems theory is fundamental to understanding the dynamics of the complex social systems of conc... more Systems theory is fundamental to understanding the dynamics of the complex social systems of concern to policy makers. A system is defined as: (1) an assembly of components, connected together in an organised way; (2) the components are affected by being in the system and the behaviour of the systems is changed if they leave it; (3) the organised assembly of components does something; and (4) the assembly has been identified as being of particular interest. Feedback is central to system behaviour at all levels, and can be responsible for systems behaving in complex and unpredictable ways. Systems can be represented by networks and there is a growing literature that shows how the behaviour of individuals is highly dependent on their social networks. This includes copying or following the advice of others when making decisions. Network theory gives insights into social phenomena such as the spread of information and the way people form social groups which then constrain their behaviour. It is emerging as a powerful way of examining the dynamics of social systems. Most systems relevant to policy have many levels, from the individual to local and national and international organisations and institutions. In many social systems the micro, meso and macrolevel dynamics are coupled, meaning that they cannot be studied or modified in isolation. Systems and network science allow computer simulations to be used to investigate possible system behaviour. This science can be made available to policy makers through policy informatics which involves computer-based simulation, data, visualisation, and interactive interfaces. The future of science-based policy making is seen to be through Global Systems Science which combines complex systems science and policy informatics to inform policy makers and facilitate citizen engagement. In this context, systems theory and network science are fundamental for modelling far-from-equilibrium systems for policy purposes.
Policy design is a new area of inquiry that takes the methods and traditions of design into the w... more Policy design is a new area of inquiry that takes the methods and traditions of design into the world of social, economic and environmental policy. Even though they may not know it, policy makers are designing future worlds and implementing these designs in the hope of realising their visions of the future. However, the methods of design are different to the methods generally used in the formation and execution of policy. In design requirements coevolve with the generation and evaluation of new systems. In policy some requirements may be ideologically fixed and pre-empt good overall solutions. Assuming that policy design is indeed an important new area of design there are implications and opportunities for the design community. Since most policy makers have little formal knowledge of design, in the short term designers must engage in policy if policy-as-design is to be formulated in a designerly way. At the same time there is a need to educate policy makers in the theory and practic...
The role of peer assessment in education has become of particular interest in recent years, mainl... more The role of peer assessment in education has become of particular interest in recent years, mainly because of its potential benefits in improving student’s learning and benefits in time management by allowing teachers and tutors to use their time more efficiently to get the results of student’s assessments quicker. Peer assessment has also relevant in the context of distance learning and massive open online courses (MOOCs).
About the book: If we are to capitalise on the potential that a design approach might bring to in... more About the book: If we are to capitalise on the potential that a design approach might bring to innovation in business and society, we need to build a better understanding of the evolving skill-sets that designers will need and the contexts within which design might operate. This demands more discourse between those involved in cutting edge practice, the researchers who help to uncover principles, codify knowledge and create theories and the educators who are nurturing future design talent. This book promotes such a discourse by reporting on the work of twenty research teams who explored different facets of future design activity as part of Phase 2 of the UK’s research council supported Designing for the 21st Century Research Initiative. Each of these contributions describes the origins of the project, the research team and their project aims, the research methods used and the new knowledge and understanding generated. Editor and Initiative Director, Professor Tom Inns, provides an i...
Advances in Network Science
Most network scientists restrict their attention to relations between pairs of things, even thoug... more Most network scientists restrict their attention to relations between pairs of things, even though most complex systems have structures and dynamics determined by n-ary relation where n is greater than two. Various examples are given to illustrate this. The basic mathematical structures allowing more than two vertices have existed for more than half a century, including hypergraphs and simplicial complexes. To these can be added hypernetworks which, like multiplex networks, allow many relations to be defined on the vertices. Furthermore, hypersimplices provide an essential formalism for representing multilevel part-whole and taxonomic structures for integrating the dynamics of systems between levels. Graphs, hypergraphs, networks, simplicial complex, multiplex network and hypernetworks form a coherent whole from which, for any particular application, the scientist can select the most suitable. Keywords n-ary relation • graph • hypergraph • network • simplicial complex • multiplex network • hypernetwork
Volume 4: 13th International Conference on Design Theory and Methodology
Connectivities between processes in product developments indicate both conflicts of resources and... more Connectivities between processes in product developments indicate both conflicts of resources and potential synergies. These represent constraints and potential opportunities in planning design Each product development comprises a network of processes. Similarity between processes is analysed by a layered classification ranging from common components to shared design knowledge. The connectivities between products arising from similarities among products are represented by a multidimensional network. Design planning is described by flows or ‘traffic’ on this network which represents a structural model of complexity. Comparison is made with information based measures of the complexity of designs and processes.
Lecture Notes of the Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering
Connectivities between processes in product developments indicate both conflicts of resources and... more Connectivities between processes in product developments indicate both conflicts of resources and potential synergies. These represent constraints and potential opportunities in planning design Each product development comprises a network of processes. Similarity between processes is analysed by a layered classification ranging from common components to shared design knowledge. The connectivities between products arising from similarities among products are represented by a multidimensional network. Design planning is described by flows or 'traffic' on this network which represents a structural model of complexity. Comparison is made with information based measures of the complexity of designs and processes.
The project will devise new theory and implement new ICT-based methods of delivering high-quality... more The project will devise new theory and implement new ICT-based methods of delivering high-quality low-cost postgraduate education to many thousands of people in a scalable way, with the cost of each extra student being negligible (< a few Euros). The research will create an in vivo laboratory of one to ten thousand postgraduate students studying courses in complex systems. This community is chosen because it is large and interdisciplinary and there is a known requirement for courses for thousand of students across Europe. The project involves every aspect of course production and delivery. Within this the research focused on the creation of a Socially Intelligent Resource Mining system to gather large volumes of high quality educational resources from the internet; new methods to deconstruct these to produce a semantically tagged Learning Object Database; a Living Course Ecology to support the creation and maintenance of evolving course materials; systems to deliver courses; and ...
Lecture Notes of the Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering, 2013
3rd International Winter School and Conference on Network Science, 2017
Network science has made great progress in the study of binary relationships between pairs of ele... more Network science has made great progress in the study of binary relationships between pairs of elements. Although it has been known for decades that n-ary are ubiquitous in complex systems, progress in this area has been much slower. A condensed account is given of the family of network structures which includes graphs, networks, multilevel networks and multiplex networks for binary relations, and hypergraphs, simplices complexes and hypernetworks for n-ary relations. These structures are naturally integrated in a generalising framework. This family of network structures supports a new theory of multilevel systems where structures at one level become vertices at higher levels through part-whole aggregation interleaved with taxonomic aggregation. Although the structures presented are necessary to understand the dynamics of complex multilevel systems, there are many open questions. These are presented for consideration by the network community.
The motivation of the European Etoile project is to create high quality free open education in co... more The motivation of the European Etoile project is to create high quality free open education in complex systems science, including quality assured certification. Universities and colleges around the world are increasingly using online platforms to offer courses open to the public. Massive Open Online Courses or MOOCs give millions of people access to lectures delivered by prestigious universities. However, although some of these courses provide certification of attendance and completion, most do not provide any academic or professional recognition since this would imply a rigorous and complete evaluation of the student's achievements. Since the number of students enrolled may exceed tens of thousands, it is impractical for a lecturer (or group of lecturers) to evaluate all students using conventional hand marking. Thus in order to be scalable, assessment must be automated. The state-of-the-art in automated assessment includes various methods and computerised tools including multi...
The way that human beings live and consume the natural and environmental resources of the planet ... more The way that human beings live and consume the natural and environmental resources of the planet are not sustainable. Sustainability involves changes in individual beliefs, expectations, values and behaviours at the microlevel, changes in policy at the ...
STAIRS 2004: proceedings …, 2004
STAIRS 2004 259 E. Onaindia and S Sioah (Eds. l IOS Press. 2004 Application of concept grounding ... more STAIRS 2004 259 E. Onaindia and S Sioah (Eds. l IOS Press. 2004 Application of concept grounding techniques to reduce dimensionality in sensory-motor spaces Pejman Iravani, Lucia Rapanotti and Jeffrey Johnson The Open University. Department of Computing. Walton Halt. ...
International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media, 2007
... dancers were placed across the roof of buildings in Manhattan, NYC and were ... interdiscipli... more ... dancers were placed across the roof of buildings in Manhattan, NYC and were ... interdisciplinary, seeking the answers to some fundamental questions about evolving, adaptable, changeable systems. ... the system on a relatively &amp;#x27;good&amp;#x27; trajectory, steering it towards desirable states ...
Understanding Complex Systems
The vision of Global Systems Science (GSS) is to provide scientific evidence and means to engage ... more The vision of Global Systems Science (GSS) is to provide scientific evidence and means to engage into a reflective dialogue to support policy-making and public action and to enable civil society to collectively engage in societal action in response to global challenges like climate change, urbanisation, or social inclusion. GSS has four elements: policy and its implementation, the science of complex systems, policy informatics, and citizen engagement. It aims to give policy makers and citizens a better understanding of the possible behaviours of complex social systems. Policy informatics helps generate and evaluate policy options with computer-based tools and the abundance of data available today. The results they generate are made accessible to everybody-policy makers, citizens-through intuitive user interfaces, animations, visual analytics, gaming, social media, and so on. Examples of Global Systems include epidemics, finance, cities, the Internet, trade systems and more. GSS addresses the question of policies having desirable outcomes, not necessarily optimal outcomes. The underpinning idea of GSS is not to precisely predict but to establish possible and desirable futures and their likelihood. Solving policy problems is a process, often needing the requirements, constraints, and lines of action to be revisited and modified, until the problem is 'satisficed', i.e. an acceptable compromise is found between competing objectives and constraints. Thus policy problems and their solutions coevolve much as in a design process. Policy and societal action is as much about attempts to understand objective facts as it is about the narratives that guide our actions. GSS tries to reconcile these apparently contradictory modes of operations. GSS thus provides policy makers and society guidance on their course of action rather than proposing (illusionary) optimal solutions.
Understanding Complex Systems
Systems theory is fundamental to understanding the dynamics of the complex social systems of conc... more Systems theory is fundamental to understanding the dynamics of the complex social systems of concern to policy makers. A system is defined as: (1) an assembly of components, connected together in an organised way; (2) the components are affected by being in the system and the behaviour of the systems is changed if they leave it; (3) the organised assembly of components does something; and (4) the assembly has been identified as being of particular interest. Feedback is central to system behaviour at all levels, and can be responsible for systems behaving in complex and unpredictable ways. Systems can be represented by networks and there is a growing literature that shows how the behaviour of individuals is highly dependent on their social networks. This includes copying or following the advice of others when making decisions. Network theory gives insights into social phenomena such as the spread of information and the way people form social groups which then constrain their behaviour. It is emerging as a powerful way of examining the dynamics of social systems. Most systems relevant to policy have many levels, from the individual to local and national and international organisations and institutions. In many social systems the micro, meso and macrolevel dynamics are coupled, meaning that they cannot be studied or modified in isolation. Systems and network science allow computer simulations to be used to investigate possible system behaviour. This science can be made available to policy makers through policy informatics which involves computer-based simulation, data, visualisation, and interactive interfaces. The future of science-based policy making is seen to be through Global Systems Science which combines complex systems science and policy informatics to inform policy makers and facilitate citizen engagement. In this context, systems theory and network science are fundamental for modelling far-from-equilibrium systems for policy purposes.
Policy design is a new area of inquiry that takes the methods and traditions of design into the w... more Policy design is a new area of inquiry that takes the methods and traditions of design into the world of social, economic and environmental policy. Even though they may not know it, policy makers are designing future worlds and implementing these designs in the hope of realising their visions of the future. However, the methods of design are different to the methods generally used in the formation and execution of policy. In design requirements coevolve with the generation and evaluation of new systems. In policy some requirements may be ideologically fixed and pre-empt good overall solutions. Assuming that policy design is indeed an important new area of design there are implications and opportunities for the design community. Since most policy makers have little formal knowledge of design, in the short term designers must engage in policy if policy-as-design is to be formulated in a designerly way. At the same time there is a need to educate policy makers in the theory and practic...
The role of peer assessment in education has become of particular interest in recent years, mainl... more The role of peer assessment in education has become of particular interest in recent years, mainly because of its potential benefits in improving student’s learning and benefits in time management by allowing teachers and tutors to use their time more efficiently to get the results of student’s assessments quicker. Peer assessment has also relevant in the context of distance learning and massive open online courses (MOOCs).
About the book: If we are to capitalise on the potential that a design approach might bring to in... more About the book: If we are to capitalise on the potential that a design approach might bring to innovation in business and society, we need to build a better understanding of the evolving skill-sets that designers will need and the contexts within which design might operate. This demands more discourse between those involved in cutting edge practice, the researchers who help to uncover principles, codify knowledge and create theories and the educators who are nurturing future design talent. This book promotes such a discourse by reporting on the work of twenty research teams who explored different facets of future design activity as part of Phase 2 of the UK’s research council supported Designing for the 21st Century Research Initiative. Each of these contributions describes the origins of the project, the research team and their project aims, the research methods used and the new knowledge and understanding generated. Editor and Initiative Director, Professor Tom Inns, provides an i...
Advances in Network Science
Most network scientists restrict their attention to relations between pairs of things, even thoug... more Most network scientists restrict their attention to relations between pairs of things, even though most complex systems have structures and dynamics determined by n-ary relation where n is greater than two. Various examples are given to illustrate this. The basic mathematical structures allowing more than two vertices have existed for more than half a century, including hypergraphs and simplicial complexes. To these can be added hypernetworks which, like multiplex networks, allow many relations to be defined on the vertices. Furthermore, hypersimplices provide an essential formalism for representing multilevel part-whole and taxonomic structures for integrating the dynamics of systems between levels. Graphs, hypergraphs, networks, simplicial complex, multiplex network and hypernetworks form a coherent whole from which, for any particular application, the scientist can select the most suitable. Keywords n-ary relation • graph • hypergraph • network • simplicial complex • multiplex network • hypernetwork
Volume 4: 13th International Conference on Design Theory and Methodology
Connectivities between processes in product developments indicate both conflicts of resources and... more Connectivities between processes in product developments indicate both conflicts of resources and potential synergies. These represent constraints and potential opportunities in planning design Each product development comprises a network of processes. Similarity between processes is analysed by a layered classification ranging from common components to shared design knowledge. The connectivities between products arising from similarities among products are represented by a multidimensional network. Design planning is described by flows or ‘traffic’ on this network which represents a structural model of complexity. Comparison is made with information based measures of the complexity of designs and processes.
Lecture Notes of the Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering