About
Overview
The Metapattern Institute is a Montréal-based independent research and knowledge mobilization organization focused on health, technology and public life.
We are living through a remarkable transformation in our relationship with information and knowledge. Digital technologies have placed vast intellectual resources within reach, while artificial intelligence is opening new possibilities for research, learning and communication. Yet greater access to information does not necessarily bring greater understanding. We may obtain answers without knowing how they were reached, preserve documents without retaining their meaning, or accumulate knowledge without learning how to make good use of it.
These developments present an opportunity to reconsider some fundamental questions. How do we discover what is worth knowing? How can knowledge be preserved, examined and shared across disciplines, institutions and generations? What does it mean to exercise sound judgment when information is increasingly abundant and intelligent systems are becoming part of everyday life?
Drawing on the digital humanities, library and information science, and knowledge management, the Institute seeks to contribute to this inquiry. Its interests extend from research discovery and scholarly communication to organizational learning, digital curation and the development of intellectual resources. These fields offer complementary approaches to understanding how knowledge is created, organized, interpreted and put to use.
The Institute approaches these questions through independent research, methodological development and opportunities for collaboration. Scholarly inquiry and practical experience have much to offer one another. Research can reveal possibilities that established practices have overlooked, while the difficulties encountered by people and organizations can raise new questions for investigation. Bringing these forms of understanding into conversation requires intellectual openness, careful methods and respect for the knowledge and experience of others.
Underlying this work is a philosophical concern for human dignity, agency and flourishing. Technology can expand our capacities, but it cannot determine the purposes for which those capacities should be exercised. The value of knowledge lies not only in what we can discover or accomplish, but also in how it contributes to understanding, judgment and the quality of human life.
The challenge, then, is not simply to manage more information or develop more capable technologies. It is to consider how these extraordinary possibilities might help us become more knowledgeable, more discerning and wiser in the ways we live and work together.
Vision
The Institute envisions a scholarly and public culture in which the expanding possibilities of information and technology contribute to deeper understanding, greater participation and human flourishing.
It seeks a future in which knowledge can be discovered, questioned and shared across disciplinary and institutional boundaries; where intellectual resources remain accessible and meaningful across generations; and where technological progress strengthens rather than diminishes our capacity for learning, judgment and purposeful action.
Mission
The Institute's mission is to advance independent, interdisciplinary research and knowledge mobilization across health, technology and public life.
Drawing on the digital humanities, library and information science, and knowledge management, it seeks to develop methods, scholarly resources and collaborative initiatives that improve how knowledge is discovered, preserved, communicated and used, while contributing to a broader understanding of its significance for human development.
History
The Metapattern Institute grew out of a communications, marketing and managed IT services business established in 2018. Its subsequent evolution brought practical experience in digital communication and technology into closer relation with a growing interest in research, libraries and the organization of knowledge.
The intellectual roots of this transition began earlier, through engagement with historical research, archival preservation and public scholarship. These interests opened a path into library and information science and knowledge management: how bodies of knowledge are assembled, how their sources and context are preserved, and how they become accessible and useful beyond the settings in which they were produced. As these concerns increasingly informed its direction, Metapattern evolved from a commercial service provider toward independent research and knowledge mobilization.
In November 2024, Metapattern publicly articulated this research identity, bringing digital humanities and philosophical inquiry together with digital curation, knowledge management, and library and information science. Questions of human development, technology and society provided a broader context for this work, connecting the study of knowledge systems with the people and institutions that create and use them.
The Institute has since continued to develop its research methods, scholarly resources and digital knowledge environments. Its present direction carries forward both strands of its history: a practical understanding of communication and technology, and a scholarly concern with how knowledge is preserved, interpreted, connected and brought into professional and public life.
Founder & Director
Erik Haines is a Montréal-based researcher and knowledge mobilization specialist whose professional background spans the nonprofit and community sector, information technology, knowledge management, and financial services. He holds a degree from Concordia University in Religious Studies and Applied Human Sciences.
His work grew from longstanding interests in interdisciplinary research, organizational development, behavioural health, and how knowledge moves into practice. After Concordia, he pursued these questions through independent research, professional work, and dialogue with researchers and practitioners across these fields.
As Founder and Director of the Metapattern Institute, Haines leads its organizational development, research infrastructure, knowledge mobilization, and collaborative work. His role is concerned with building the institutional conditions through which research can be developed, connected across fields, translated into practice, and brought into dialogue with professional and public audiences.
Alongside his institutional role, Haines conducts independent research on human flourishing under contemporary technological and institutional conditions. His philosophical work is anchored in integral facticity and enactive fallibilism, two foundational concepts through which he is reformulating integral humanism for contemporary conditions. Together, these concepts provide a framework for understanding human beings as situated yet capable agents, whose knowledge and judgment remain partial and open to revision, and whose action is embodied and relational. The work develops through a broad interdisciplinary dialogue spanning philosophy, critical theory, contextual behavioural science, and post-secular public theology.
His ongoing independent research includes Integral Awareness & Commitment Training (IACT), a developing philosophical and practical inquiry into human agency, psychological flexibility, and values-committed action. Drawing on acceptance and commitment approaches, contextual behavioural science, and integral perspectives, IACT explores how individuals become more aware of their experiences, understand the contexts shaping their thoughts and behaviour, and develop greater flexibility in responding to life's challenges. It is particularly concerned with the relationship between awareness, learning, personal meaning, and the capacity to act purposefully in accordance with one's values.
Bringing contextual behavioural science and evolutionary approaches into dialogue with integral theory, enactivism, pragmatism and critical theory, Haines is also exploring the relationship between human agency and artificial intelligence. He is particularly interested in how AI and robotics can support human learning, judgment and meaningful action without equating computational adaptation with subjective experience.
In 2022, Haines launched the Integral Facticity Podcast, producing 21 episodes of scholarly dialogue with researchers and public intellectuals.