JOHN BRUCE is Assistant Professor of Strategic Design and Management at the School of Design Strategies at Parsons. His teaching and professional practice involve empathy, ethnography, and creative intervention. He serves as senior strategist at Forward Mapworks  — a whole­systems consultancy — providing insight and design for ventures and movements operating in complex ecosystems. John's work in a variety of media formats explores possibilities for modes of immersive experience, engagement, and exchange. He studied painting and installation at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, and sustainable systems at Pinchot in Seattle.

As a GIDEST fellow, John will continue his research on people experiencing dying. End of Life examines strategies to evolve a culture of intentionality for the design and practice of compassionate care and other critical decisions impacting end of life experiences. In collaboration with filmmaker Paweł Wojtasik, John’s fieldwork involves audio and video recordings of people experiencing a variety of stages of the process of dying, the spaces they inhabit, and the lines that are drawn between the systems surrounding life and the systems surrounding imminent death. A particular focus of the research is on the distances created between the living and the dying.