About Spencer
I'm a 30-something dad, Torontonian, and consulting designer.
Interests
- Cooking
- Tabletop Roleplaying Games
- Making things with wood
- Parenting a 0.25 year old child and a 4.42 year old child
- Music (recently: twangy mid-century country and drone-y contemporary post-classical)
Big Questions for 2026
- Household Decarbonization & Electrification
- What are the bottlenecks preventing system transition at the household level?
- What are the common experiences, pathways, and personas of electrification or decarbonization action?
- What system levers could unblock bottlenecks? What interventions can reduce barriers to individual action?
- Ed.: In particular here I'm interested in heat pumps and the process of getting off gas, more than the decentralized generation side of things!
- Civil Defense
- What might a voluntary 'civil defense' model look like in Toronto?
- Is it a club? A community of practice? How permeable should it be? What's the right scale? What keeps people coming back to a voluntary commitment?
- What lessons can we learn from other contexts with a civil defense model?
- What might a voluntary 'civil defense' model look like in Toronto?
- AI-Supported Work
- What are the right ways to leverage LLMs in early-stage exploration of a complex socio-technical service system? Where are the limitations?
- In what ways can these tools be used that doesn't hollow out a practitioner (cognitively, emotionally) or a community of practice?
- What expectations are partners starting to develop around how practitioner employs these tools?
- How do those expectations change the texture of the work?
- What opportunities are there to expand one's practice through these tools, to be bolder and more clever, instead of being a thin human veneer on top of the bot?
Professional Stuff
I work as an independent strategic designer and consultant.
In plain language:
- I discover and define opportunities to make things better in a given context,
- test out possible approaches with the folks who will ultimately need to exist within that context,
- and then align teams responsible for delivery around the best way forward.
In plainer language: I do my best to care more deeply about all the bits of a problem than anyone else can manage within their role scope, put those bits together in exciting new ways, and then get everybody onboard.
This way of working is often in service of a client or convening organization, but not always.
Behzod Sirjani talks about being a "forward-operating executive" and I think his framing does a good job of articulating how I like to work. I'm an avid generalist, and I work best when I'm "first into the breach" in a complex problem space, working closely with subject matter and delivery experts all along the way before handing off to them for delivery. I bring an interdisciplinary approach to this work, combining aspects of human-centred and service design, product management, systems and strategic thinking, ethnographic and generative research, and facilitation to apply leverage when and where it's required to move things forward at speed.
In the past six years of independent practice, I've worked on:
- Co-designing the vision and values for one of the world's premier transport agencies
- Defining how software should support next-gen anatomical pathology (i.e., cancer detection!) workflows for Canada's biggest diagnostic lab
- Designing cross-disciplinary policy labs for decarbonization
- Launching a new delivery channel for consumer health
- Helping a struggling service business go from consistently-bad NPS and revenue to beating targets year over year
- Supporting the national scale-up of a new kind of public service outside government
- Defining how voice commands and chatbots can provide customers with new ways of making the most of their telco services
Prior to striking out on my own, I worked in-house in Alberta's Department of Energy as a systemic designer (2017-2018), as a service design consultant at Bridgeable (2013-2017), and as a researcher for the Technologies for Aging Gracefully Lab at the University of Toronto (2012-2013). I have a BA (Hons.) from the University of Toronto with a specialization in Sociology.