Justin Dean

About Justin Dean

Justin founded Envent 21 years ago after a decade moving between wayfinding, industrial design, and museum exhibition work. He is an industrial designer by training. It shows in every machine.

He can read a kiosk the way a structural engineer reads a bridge: grip height, screen angle for someone in a wheelchair, how the edge trims wear after ten thousand hands. The earliest Envent machines were his own designs, including a robot-shaped book-finding kiosk built for children in a public library. Something a seven-year-old would approach without hesitation.

Two decades on, he has not slowed down.

The Research

Justin is a PhD candidate at the University of Newcastle. His question: what actually makes a person trust an AI?

Not abstract trust. Real trust. The kind that decides whether a 74-year-old woman, alone in a hospital for the first time, uses the kiosk to find radiology, or walks straight past it.

He runs workshops with people across every age group, background, and culture. He tests language, tone, and what happens when the AI gives a wrong answer. The findings feed directly into how Envent builds its healthcare AI avatar. This is not research kept separate from the product. It is the product's foundation.

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The Way

One idea Justin keeps returning to.

Envent's job is to help people find the way, show them the way, and let them go their way.

Twenty-one years of kiosks, mobile maps, and PhD research in AI trust. All of it points at the same outcome: a person who needed to get somewhere, got there.

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