Dr Petia Sice

Petia holds a PhD in Systems and Complexity Thinking for Understanding Humans and Organisations. She is passionate about interpreting and applying insights from complexity theory for facilitating positive transformation in individuals and organisations. She is academic lead and facilitator of the Wellbeing, Complexity and Enterprise (WELCOME) interdisciplinary research group, Convenor of the UK EPSRC Systems Practice and Managing Complexity (SPMC) network, member of the advisory board of the Health for Humanity International Forum, and Senior Associate Editor of the International Journal of Systems and Society. Her research interests focus on exploring quintessential insights and synergies between quantum physics, systems and complexity sciences, interpersonal neurobiology and the arts, and how these may inform a new paradigm of thinking in wellbeing and lead to new applications of technology.

Petia Sice is a Reader in the Department of Computer and Information Sciences, specialising in Wellbeing Informatics. This is a term that she first proposed in an article for the international conference on the Challenges of Delivering Sustainable Development Goals and the role of Systems Thinking and Practice, Bristol, 2015.

The theories of informatics have evolved from the study of information as an abstract object (Shannon, 1963) to the recognition of the irreducibility of human experience, from the duality portrayed by the embodiment and the situatedness of the human agent in the theory of autopoiesis and interpersonal neurobiology; and to the acceptance of the concept of emergence and coherence from complexity sciences, as relevant to understanding information and communication (Maturana and Varela, 1980; Sice, 2004; Siegel, 2010; Mitchell, 2012).

At the same time research into human flourishing, mindfulness and mindsight, suggests that effective and sustainable information and communication environments are only possible when wellbeing: physical, mental, social, emotional and spiritual, is taken into consideration (Post, 2005; Seligman, 2005; Siegel, 2007; Williams 2012). There is a need for trans disciplinary research to study and understand information and communication from the perspective of wellbeing and to use our understanding in the design and evaluation of information and communication environments. We define this field of study Wellbeing Informatics (Sice, 2015, forthcoming).