Peter Zakrzewski

Background

About Peter Zakrzewski

Peter is a design strategist, researcher, and coach — a Feldenkrais-inspired practitioner who builds functional awareness through guided design practice. He advocates for applying transformative design thinking and participatory design methods to the creation of new value, media, user experiences, and social change.He is an Assistant Professor of Communication and Visual Arts at Thompson Rivers University. He is a former creative director of the emerging technologies conference EmTech at MIT. Prior to that, Peter's design consulting career included 15 years of working on user experience (UX) design, retail, and branding programs for organizations, including global brands, start-ups, non-profit groups, and educational institutions such as MIT, Astra Zeneca, Glad, Kraft, and Loblaws. He is a recipient of the MIT President's Citation Award for his research, design, and strategy work for the MIT Enterprise Forum.Peter's current research develops the concept of ecological fit as a design criterion for complex sociotechnical systems, drawing on Kauffman's complexity theory, Peirce's abductive logic, and the neuroscience of embodied cognition to propose design thinking as the Mechanism of Consilience — the cognitive architecture that makes the unity of knowledge across disciplines executable in practice. This work extends his ongoing research into the structural requirements for ecologically sound human+AI collaboration, immersive experience design, and the role of participatory design methodology in navigating complex problem-solution spaces.Peter is the lead author (with David Tamés) of Mediating Presence: Immersive Experience Design Workbook for UX Designers, Filmmakers, Artists, and Content Creators published by Focal Press/Routledge. He is the author of Designing XR: A Rhetorical Design Perspective for the Ecology of Human+Computer Systems, published by Emerald Press (2022). The book addresses the escalating blending of immersive technologies with advanced computation, which has created an emerging domain that allows socio-technical system makers to produce not human-computer interactions butimmersivehuman+computer systems. The book lays out a proposal for ushering in the creation of an ecologically sound augmented mind based on (1) a framework for the design, implementation, and iteration of purposeful, multi-minded immersive H+C systems; and (2) the extended reality experience (XRX) design practice that rhetorically invites users to engage with immersive systems while exercising their agency based on informed choice.