Justin
Cook

Justin is a strategic designer working on the world’s most challenging problem sets such as healthcare, sustainability, and education. His passion is to tackle these systems challenges by designing innovative organizational architectures. Justin is the founder of the strategic design consulting firm Commonwealth Advanced Projects. He is also founding director of the Center for Complexity and Systems Practice at the Rhode Island School of Design, which works to reveal how design and other creative practices can navigate and manage complex problems. Until 2018, Justin was the senior lead for strategy at the Finnish Innovation Fund, where he spent a decade working to transform Finnish society toward greater sustainability and human wellbeing. He has also advised research teams at MIT and Harvard on how to use design as a transformative capacity. In 2016, he joined the OECD’s Observatory for Public Sector Innovation as an advisor. He holds a master’s degree in architecture with commendation from the Harvard Graduate School of Design and a BA from the University of Washington.

I am most excited to work on projects that… challenge assumptions and existing epistemologies.

I am looking for partners that can help me… find new sources of insight—new and old ideas about the present, past, and future.

A moment when I felt most inspired in my work was… when I could see a new way of doing an old thing better. For instance, how we build cities or how we treat ischemic stroke.

Innovations in my field that I are most excited to work on… include giving artists and designers greater agency and access to a world full of complex challenges.