Visualizing the Internet ecosystem developed by Shai Carmi, Shlomo Havlin, Scott Kirkpatrick, Yuval Shavitt and Eran Shir and 5,000 volunteer as part of a research project at Lanet-vi program of I. Alvarez-Hamelin et al*

You know when you find material that finally helps you validate/articulate a thought that you have been chewing on for a long time, but can’t quite shape it into a framework for others to get?  Well, here’s my eureka moment: The name digital ecologist came from the idea that digital media is a complex system where everything is interconnected and interdependent –- like in an ecosystem (see picture above) — and that an ecologist was someone that studied those interrelations and the elements that formed that vast and almost un-graspable network. So I was ecstatic to find this same type thinking applied at Live|Work, a UK service design consulting firm. Reading about Live|Work’s design philosophy and case studies helped me clarified my own approach to digital communication…

The idea of designing services is to apply the design thinking process to those things we use rather than own. To me that makes complete sense; so much design goes into hardware and the interfaces, why not design the entire interaction experience with a service?

Live|Work’s founders Chris Downs, Ben Reason and Lavrans Lovlie developed a process to do just that. They map the user experience across multiple touch points (and multiple mediums) and represent this visually (a.k.a synthesis). They called this understanding the ’service ecology’ (Moggridge, 2007, p. 417). You can see this method applied in their case study of the Danish Rail System, where they identified 25 customer service issues using a Service Usability Scorecard. Essentially, this analytical process allows them to holistically assess and synthesize complex experiences and identify opportunities for improvement throughout the entire system.

Live|Work’s service only uses a portion of the design process — perhaps the most rational part — where you seek to understand and identify opportunities for improvements. The follow up would be to harvest the unconscious mind into producing solutions, which according to Moggridge’s book** requires a much more chaotic and unconscious process. Companies like IDEO have tried to deconstruct the design process (and commercialize) for the rest of us.

Real life chaotic Design Process from Moggridge 2007 p. 730

So how do I apply this to digital communication?

Stay tuned to my next post.

—————notes at the foot —————-

* Link to the original article published in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Journal.

** Bill Moggridge is the co-founder of IDEO

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