I’m Cameron Norman, the founder of Cense. Welcome.
I’m the President and Principal of Cense; we’re a strategic design firm focused on health and wellbeing and social impact, connected through creativity. I founded Cense because I saw that traditional consultancies and academics lacked an unstanding of the complexities of health and social innovation. They had models, processes, and tools that were fit for industry, and often a naïve belief that a standard best-practice works everywhere.
They also didn’t recognize what it meant to lead in this context; that complexity needs strategy, evaluation, learning, and design that’s different.
I’ve spent over two decades working at the intersection of health, design, and complexity as a strategist, evaluator, researcher and as a designer. I love innovation — that creative spirit that connects people’s passion to the problems they wish to solve, the impetus to build things to address those problems and serve people by doing it.
I started this work as a psychologist and researcher, drawn to questions about how people and systems change. Over time, that drew me to design — learning how to build things to facilitate change — and into complexity science, which gave me a language for why health and human services are so hard to get right, and why the standard approaches so often fall short.
The leaders and teams I work with believe that situations can improve, our work can have meaning and impact, and that we can make it happen. They have ideas and and a willingness to put them into the world. That’s why we work together to design for health and innovation.
Design is what gives form to ideas
Motivation
What draws me to health and human services is deeper than professional interest.
At its best, work to promote, protect, treat, and enable health connects us to what it means to be alive.
It’s a tremendous act of generosity of spirit and kindness that health service brings. When we connect to that, we’re at our best. It enlivens us, nourishes us, and brings so much benefit to those we serve. It’s for that reason that it’s such a tragedy when the complexity, bureaucracy, pace, and intensity of the work is so insidious in dampening these benefits.
Health leadership can be one of the most rewarding, creative, and stimulating experiences if designed well.
Education & Experience
My professional training spans psychology, public health, and design.
I hold a PhD in Public Health Sciences from the University of Toronto and a Master of Design in Strategic Foresight and Innovation from OCAD University — a combination that’s unusual enough to be a great asset in the work I do. I’m an Adjunct Professor at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health at the University of Toronto, an Adjunct Faculty Fellow at York University’s Dahdaleh Institute for Global Health Research, and an active member of the faculty and Adjunct Professor in the Design for Health and Strategic Foresight & Innovation graduate programs at OCAD University.
My practice work includes working with small community groups, large healthcare centres, global corporations, governments and centres of academic excellence. I’ve done this as a consultant, trainer, academic, and as an executive.
My work has produced tools in active use — the eHealth Literacy Scale, now translated into more than 40 languages and used in research worldwide, and the Design-Driven Evaluation model, which informs how I approach evaluation and learning with every client. I’m also a Credentialed Evaluator with the Canadian Evaluation Society.
Outside of my work, I’m a photographer, a writer, and an enthusiastic participant in café culture — which is a polite way of saying I do some of my best thinking over a good coffee in a place with a notebook, pen, and interesting people nearby.
If you’re working on something that matters and looking for someone who will take it as seriously as you do, I’d like to hear about it. Let’s talk.
Cameron Norman is a professional member of the Canadian Psychological Association, Canadian Society for Industrial & Organizational Psychology, the American Evaluation Association and is a Credentialed Evaluator (CE) and active member of the Canadian Evaluation Society. He is also a member of the Canadian Public Health Association (where he is a former award winner) and the Ontario Public Health Association.
Cameron continues to support the Systemic Design Association as an active professional member and conference moderator, and as a member of the Design Research Society.
Cameron’s current CV can be downloaded here.
