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AUTHORS’ DRAFT :: PUBLISHED PAPER AT https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-62919-2_1
Mapping experience
ecosystems as emergent
actor-created spaces
Andrea Resmini & Bertil Lindenfalk
Keywords
Experience ecosystems, systems thinking, information architecture, blended space, user experience
design, postdigital, digimodernism, embodiment, new media
Introduction
In 2004, before the iPhone, the mobile revolution, and the rise of social media,
William J. Mitchell observed that “once there was a time and a place for every-
thing; today, things are increasingly smeared across multiple sites and moments in
complex and often indeterminate ways” (Mitchell 2004, p. 14). Mitchell was de-
scribing how, in the passage from the industrial age to the network age, “things”
were losing their concrete anchoring to one specific place and time. They were
losing “thingness”, becoming distributed, “smeared”, and this “smearing” meant
an increase in complexity and indeterminacy.
Some sixteen years later, ubiquitous data access, smartphones, tablets, sensors,
ambient appliances, smart environments and wearables have made computing a
dominant part of the cultural and social zeitgeist (Kirby 2009; Floridi 2014). Phe-
nomena such as convergence (Jenkins 2008) and digital transformation (Skog
2019) have blurred the distinction between products and services (Norman 2009;
Resmini & Rosati 2009) and between producers and consumers (Tapscott &
Williams 2010); the rise of an online read/write culture (Lessig 2008, p. 28;
Cramer 2015) and the generational shift (Prensky 2001; Swingle 2016) have chal-
lenged the centrality of authorship and ownership (Sterling 2005); linearity is los-
ing its sway to the rhizome (Deleuze & Guattari 1987).
This has resulted in three distinct cultural and socio-technical shifts: i) the dis -
placement of postmodernism as the cultural dominant (Kirby 2006); ii) the em-
bodiment of digitality and the emergence of blended space (Benyon 2014); iii) the
2
occurrence of a postdigital society (Pepperel & Punt 2000). When considered in
their systemic relationships, these three will be collectively referenced throughout
the paper as the “postdigital condition”.
In design, the personal information revolution that started in the late 1980s has
been variously interpreted, discussed, and acted upon. It has resulted, in the span
of little more than thirty years, in entirely new mainstream artifacts such as video
games, websites, mobile apps, and in new practices and specialized fields of study
such as service design, information architecture, interaction design, and user expe-
rience design (Shostack 1982; Rosenfeld & Morville 1998; Cooper 2004; Garrett
2002). These practices, which will be collectively identified as “new media de-
sign” practices for the remainder of the paper, appear now to be at a point of in-
flection where the challenges introduced by a mature postdigital condition are not
entirely understood nor properly addressed.
For example, Lacerda et al (2018) observe that while information architecture
has maintained a relatively stable epistemological purpose as “the structural de-
sign of information spaces that support an agent’s production of meaning”, it has
nonetheless seen the intrinsic meaning of that purpose change as the postdigital
condition has redefined what these information spaces are. These spaces are now
“experienced differently, used differently”, but the methods and tools employed by
the practice have not entirely caught up with the changes and thus fail to capture
critical systemic aspects now part of the design space. They coerce design practice
into a reductionist way of thinking and conversely result in a reductionist way of
doing.
We posit that to resolve this impasse it is necessary to acknowledge the sys-
temic implications of Mitchell’s 2004 intuition and thoroughly reconceptualize the
object of design to consider the consequences of embodied digitality, post-post-
modern, and postdigital culture.
We do this by methodologically anchoring our conversation to systems think-
ing and information architecture theory and by approaching the problem space
from multiple points of view: a design process point of view, where we adopt for
general reference a simplified version of a diverge/converge model (Gray et al
2010); a philosophy of science point of view, where we adopt Van Gigch and
Pipino’s Meta-Modeling Method (1986) to frame the relationship between prac-
tice and research and to understand to what extent changes in the practice can be
beneficial to design theory; and finally an object of design point of view, where we
recast what it is that new media design practices actually design in accordance
with the postdigital condition.
3
Reference models
When discussing the design process, the paper assumes a generic lifecycle along
the lines of the one described for “creative innovation” by Gray et al (2010), in it-
self a simplification of the UK Design Council’s own Double Diamond process
(Design Council 2007). The Double Diamond diagram (fig. 1) was developed as
“a simple graphical way of describing the design process” and “it maps the diver-
gent and convergent stages of the design process, showing the different modes of
thinking that designers use” through four distinct formal phases called “Discover,
Define, Develop and Deliver” (Design Council 2007).
Fig. 1. The Double Diamond (Source: Design Council 2007)
Gray’s “stubby pencil sharpened at both ends” (2010, p. 9) model shares both
the idea of a rhythmic move from divergence to convergence and its visual repre -
sentation with the Double Diamond. Drawing a parallel with playful behavior,
Gray simplifies further the entire process (fig. 2): at the beginning, the opening re -
quires divergent thinking in order to “populate (the) world with as many and as di-
verse set of ideas” (Gray et al 2010, p. 11). The opening is followed by an ex-
ploratory phase, where the conditions are created to “allow unexpected, surprising,
and delightful things” to emerge. Finally, the process concludes with a closing,
convergent phase where decisions are taken.
It is worth noting that Gray’s is a fairly more open-ended process that is only
concerned with the ideation phase and the creative process. In this sense, it does
not need a conclusive “deliver” phase and could be argued to be a more extensive
version of the first diamond in the Double Diamond model.
4
Fig. 2. 3-step creative process (Adapted from Gray, Brown, & Macalufo 2010)
In approaching the meta-conversation involving the various fields and disci-
plines of design themselves, the relationship between practice and theory, and the
role of this paper within those conversations, the primary point of reference is Van
Gigch and Pipino’s Meta-Modeling Methodology (M3) as applied to information
architecture by Lacerda and Lima-Marques (2014). The M3 is a systemic frame-
work to understand innovation processes as social constructs (fig. 3). It comprises
three levels of inquiry (Van Gigch & Pipino 1986): epistemology, the meta level,
represents the conceptual framework of a scientific community and the locus of
paradigm shifts; science, the object level, presents the theories and models that are
used “to describe, explain and predict problems and their solutions” (Lacerda &
Lima-Marques 2014); practice, the application level, is where practitioners work
to solve everyday problems.
Fig. 3. Van Gigch and Pipino’s M3 (Adapted from Lacerda & Lima-Marques 2014)
5
These three levels influence each other in a loop: epistemological questions
fence the what and the how of scientific progress; scientific theories and methods
are used by the practice to solve day-to-day issues. Day-to-day issues and solu -
tions constitute “a source of evidence” that slowly trickles up to support or confute
theories and methods and, ultimately, produce paradigm shifts.
The space of relationships
Mitchell points us to the dissolution of the solid materiality of individual artifacts
as the process of digitization turns them into distributed, volatile, transient experi-
ences. In Van Gigch and Pipino’s M3, this is an epistemological observation. We
maintain that the epistemological observations that characterize the postdigital
condition necessarily also point to a reframe of our locus of attention at the object
level, where new theories and methods should be co-opted into the current body of
knowledge, and at the application level, where the object of design should be con -
ceptualized as the space of mutual relationships between artifacts.
Design scholar Gui Bonsiepe posited in the late 1960s that the most important
element in an ontological view of design is the design of “interfaces”, defined not
as an “object” but as the “space where the interactions between the human body,
the tools, and the goal is articulated” (Bonsiepe 1969, p. 10). In doing so, Bon-
siepe frames design through a three-part schema: an agent who is ready to perform
an action; the task the agent wants to accomplish; and the tool the agent needs to
accomplish the task. Through their interplay, the interface “transforms mere phys-
ical existence (...) in opportunity” and the static, solid ontology traditionally asso-
ciated with artifacts into a systemic set of interdependent relationships.
Interviewed in the mid 1970s, American architect and TED creator Richard
Saul Wurman described how already in the early 1960s his lectures at the Univer-
sity of North Carolina focused on the importance of relationships. He would teach
his students to “use the problem so they would think about designing the space be-
tween things rather than the things themselves”, because “what’s more important
than the buildings is the space between the buildings” (My 2012).
In an influential marketing paper on “How to design a service” written in the
early 1980s, Lynn Shostack described products, which are “tangible objects which
exist in time and space”, and services, that consist “solely of acts or process(es),
and exist in time only”, as ontologically different (1982). Shostack argued for a
distinction to be made between “things” and “processes”: “products are pos-
sessed” but “services cannot be possessed; they can only be experienced, created
or participated in”. She also pragmatically observed that the two terms bookend a
6
continuum, a “comparative scale of dominance” that goes from pure product to
pure service and which comprises middle-of-the-scale “hybrid entities (in which
the) product and service elements are almost balanced”. Shostack also introduced
a rough conceptual hierarchy in that her model intrinsically considers products as
being the end state or outcome of one or more services. In the context of new me -
dia design, Norman will explicitly address and nullify this hierarchy in the 2000s
stating that for the user any “product is actually a service” (Norman 2009).
Shostack’s 1982 conceptualization will lay the foundations of service design:
the idea of designing “what is in between”, the space of relationships, will instead
become a mainstay of early information architecture in the 1990s (Rosenfeld &
Morville 1998), carry over into the conversations on contemporary information ar-
chitecture in the 2010s (Hinton 2008), and ultimately manifest itself in new media
design practice and theory as a complete reconfiguration of the spatial and tempo-
ral categories used as differentiators by Shostack.
Spatially, new media design moves from artifacts such as chairs and lamps and
telephones, whose solid materiality and spatial whereabouts can not be doubted, to
intangibles such as software programs, websites or digital environments, whose
“virtuality” or “digitality” is often juxtaposed to some other form of “reality”
(Maldonado 1992). Space “becomes a media type” that can be “instantly transmit-
ted, stored, (…) and interacted with” primarily through immersion and navigation
(Manovich 2000, p. 251–252).
Temporally, attention shifts from static, finished objects, whose durability by
and large depends only on the normal tear and wear of physical interactions, to
ever changing, transient, volatile structures whose continued existence is inextri-
cably linked to socio-technical processes of engagement and co-production
(Resmini & Rosati 2011, p. 53; Lucas et al 2012; Benyon 2014).
This spatial and temporal reconfiguration has been variously acknowledged in
specialist theories of design (Garrett 2002; Kolko 2011; Sangiorgi & Prendiville
2017): however, in the practice, the framing of the problem space is ultimately left
to the design practitioner to articulate and explore, and this is usually done
through consolidated design approaches, tools and methods that comply with cur-
rent management and organizational practices (Davies & Saunders 1988).
Design practice and complexity
In different ways, new media design practices such as user experience design and
service design aim to improve service encounters for the customer by focusing on
7
their entire journey (Polaine et al 2013, p. 34). They thus overcome, at least con-
ceptually, some of the problems deriving from the linearization and compartmen-
talization of traditional product design. Still, the myth that a designer can design a
perfectly bounded, finished artifact and simply drop it in place within a dynamic
environment holds fast, at least in the practice (Lindenfalk & Resmini 2016). This
can be ascribed to reasons both organizational and methodological: on one side,
organizations have cultural, practical, and economic incentives to frame and man -
age a service as an intangible product that can be quantified and properly commer-
cialized; on the other, many of the tools and methods used in the practice have
been repurposed from preexisting, product-oriented sources and carry with them
an artifact-bound point of view.
For example, customer journeys and service blueprints are two common deliv-
erables used during the design or redesign process to communicate the design
practitioner’s understanding of people in their role as customers or potential cus-
tomers and their experience of a company’s process or processes (Stickdorn &
Schneider 2010; Polaine et al 2013, p. 91; Gibbons 2018). Both tools allow to ar-
ticulate and then synthetically communicate aspects of what has been learned from
the exploratory phases in a collaborative, empathetic format (Blomkvist & Segel-
ström 2014). Both also predate digital (Whittle & Foster 1989; Shostack 1984).
Service blueprints and customer journeys offer a rather comprehensive over-
view of the service process as they center on the customer’s point of view and do
not focus exclusively on the organizational perspective. However, the organization
remains the entity originating and dictating the boundaries of the problem space
for its “customers”: additional third-party factors and relationships that are rele-
vant to these “customers” but not to the organization do not usually fall within
their scope. When such insights are gained during research, they are either down-
played, discarded, or moved to different sets of deliverables, for example to a
competitive analysis report, because the primary task these tools perform is to de -
scribe the client-product-customer relationship through a linear, synthetic timeline
of its pivotal moments. Unfortunate side-effects of such synthesis are a loss in
complexity, an overreliance on known knowns, and an underestimation of un-
known unknowns.
An example of such a case is discussed in literature by Culén and Gasparini
(2014, p. 91), who describe the redesign of the services of an academic library us-
ing a customer journey approach. The case is primarily of interest for how it en-
tirely neglects, or better chooses not to explore the role of the library within the
specific context in which it exists, considering it instead as a “finished”, perfectly
8
bounded artifact and discarding “the spaces between the objects”. The primary in-
sight offered by the case is that library staff and management was very much fo-
cused on their physical assets while their largest group of patrons, the students,
were instead mainly considering the library’s digital touchpoints. While the au-
thors clearly state that “libraries are practically forced to rethink their role in aca-
demic life, their use of technology and willingness to innovate”, the description of
the various workshops conducted in the course of the project illustrates how any
effort to challenge the unspoken assumption of what a library supposedly “is” did
not result in divergent openings but rather in quiet dismissals. As these efforts did
not comply with the well-defined organizational and spatial boundaries put in
place by the “client”, the library, their role was minimized and underplayed. When
students described how their journeys started almost always online, the librarians
immediately refocused the conversation on the library building (Culén & Gas-
parini 2014, p. 92), greatly diminishing the impact and design value of the stu-
dents’ assertions in the process. The design problem was framed around the role
of the library as part of the university brick-and-mortar infrastructure rather than
around its role in the lives of students.
We do not believe this can be simply characterized as the result of research in-
adequacies or of a design failure: it is rather the necessary outcome of the limita -
tions that tools such as customer journeys introduce. Very often, as in the example
just discussed, the complexity deriving from the interplay of the many heteroge-
neous socio-technical parts involved in the process is reduced to figuring out opti-
mal linear flows for a number of well-identified activities across a number of
touchpoints under the direct control of the organization driving the design efforts.
Customer journeys are the typical tools, albeit not the only ones, through which
such simplification happens.
There are obvious and very visible benefits in focusing on a number of unam -
biguous, identifiable interactions along clearly established touchpoints: control is
the most immediate one; transforming a complex experience into a simpler, more
manageable linear narrative is another. Unfortunately, such abrupt simplifications
artificially constrain or do away with the consequences of Mitchell’s “smearing”
and thus increase the possibility of unwanted reductionism and risky trade-offs. In
this light, it is possible to read Wurman’s and Bonsiepe’s ontological reassess-
ments of the object of design, a space of relationships rather than an artifact, as
opening the way to a different, more systemic approach.
While the very ideas of compounding multiple points of view into a unified vi-
sion and of moving at varying levels of granularity are widely acknowledged and
9
long-standing characteristics of architectural processes (Borden et al 2014), a sys-
temic approach to human-centered design has consolidated only recently (Jones
2014; Hill 2014). This “systemic design”, defined as a design approach that “out-
lines and plans the flow of matter running from one system to the others, pursuing
a metabolization processes which should reduce the ecological footprint and gen-
erate profitable economic flows” and that “optimizes all the actors and parts of an
ecosystem allowing for their coherent and mutual evolution” (Bistagnino & Cam-
pagnaro 2014) represents as of today a big design, top-down approach tackling
large-scale initiatives, and one that has yet to achieve widespread adoption in the
new media design communities of practice. In this paper we propose a different,
bottom-up systemic approach that:
directly addresses the application level in the M3 by building on past and
current attention given to the “spaces between things” in some of the new
media practices;
introduces a perspective shift in new media design practices from a re -
ductionist approach to a systemic approach to respond to current chal-
lenges brought on by the postdigital condition;
leverages current information architecture and user experience ways-of-
doing to facilitate the transition from holistic to systemic (Armson 2011);
makes the digital/physical space of relationships freely instantiated by
systems of actors the object of design.
Reductionist, holistic, and systemic
While “holistic” and “systemic” are often used interchangeably in both academic
discourses on design and the practice, systems thinking literature considers them
different concepts. Figure 4 illustrates the relationship between reductionist think-
ing, socio-technical thinking, holistic thinking, and systems thinking as described
in Armson (2011). Left to right, the horizontal axis sees an increase in complexity,
from reductionism to holism; bottom to top, the vertical axis sees an increase in
the number of perspectives that can be simultaneously held as truthful.
Reductionist thinking considers the system a summation of its parts: under-
standing the individual components in isolation also leads to an understanding of
the functioning of the system. Scientific/mechanistic thinking (bottom left) is a
single perspective reductionist approach. It is best exemplified by traditional
Western science and education models. Reductionist thinking adopting multiple
perspectives is what Armson calls “socio-mechanistic” thinking (top left). Exam-
ples are “many forms of social science” in which “different interpretations, com-
10
ing from different perspectives, co-exist but in a reductionist form” (Armson 2011,
p. 50).
Holistic thinking (bottom right) sacrifices attention to detail to favor the inves-
tigation of the whole over its parts. Holism still favors one single perspective, that
of the whole, and hence “retain(s) the mechanistic qualities of single-perspective
thinking” (Armson 2011, p. 50). Much of the theory and practice of current new
media design that adopts holistic approaches, including much of the practice of
experience and service design, falls into this category.
Systems thinking (top right) considers multiple viewpoints at once: it acknowl-
edges that complex processes, such as those related for example to the design in-
quiry, cannot be centered around one single optimal approach, whatever that ap-
proach might be. These processes require instead conscious movement between
multiple and possibly contrasting perspectives at different levels of granularity for
the inquirer to attain a more complete understanding of what is being investigated.
Fig. 4. Systemic v holistic thinking (Adapted from Armson 2011)
Systemic approaches recognize that complex issues configure “messes”
(Gharajedaghi 2011) or “wicked problems” (Rittel & Webber 1973, p. 160) and
that even reaching an agreement on what the problem is in itself, where its parts
and boundaries are, is more often than not a controversial process that requires ne-
gotiation. In approaching messes, exclusive use of any individual approach can
lead to an impoverished understanding (Armson 2011, p. 32) and invariably result
in a reductionist take on the problems at hand.
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Transition to systemic
New media design practices as they are currently framed are not set up for an easy
transition towards systemic ways of doing. They are constrained by organizational
structures, legacy methods, and processes that reinforce linearity and reduction-
ism, as in the case of the library project described by Cúlen and Gasparini. Holis-
tic approaches as well fall victim to these same constraints and reproduce product
logic in their addressing the object of design as finite, finished, and artificially con-
strained within organizational boundaries.
Additionally, the language in which the conversation is carried out is steeped in
product thinking even when discussing experiences or services (Lindenfalk &
Resmini 2016), defined as encompassing “all aspects of the end-user’s interaction
with the company, its services, and its products” (Norman & Nielsen nd). Focus
remains centered on how “a company intentionally uses services (...) to engage in-
dividual customers” to provide them with a complete, organization-driven “mem-
orable event” (Pine & Gilmore 1998, p. 98) and hence postulates the exact cou-
pling of one “service provider’s explicit action(s)” with “the customer’s choices”
(Koivisto 2009).
Mapping this situation onto Van Gigch and Pipino’s M3 provides us with a bet-
ter understanding of the nature and extent of the current misalignment and of the
specific challenges that differently impact the three levels.
At the metalevel, that of epistemology, new media design appears to be at odds
with moving past a postmodern sensibility especially in relation to the deeper con-
sequences of mass co-creation. While distributed authorship and ownership have
been internalized, albeit in different forms and at different levels of maturity
(Manzini 2015; Spool 2015), letting go of the superstructures of corporate stew-
ardship that result in inward-focused, artificially bound, and facilitated problem
framing is proving to be harder.
At the object level, that of science, the conversation around how to consolidate,
integrate and expand the current body of knowledge is stunted and fragmentary.
New media design is currently perceived to be primarily a practice-driven craft,
with academic discourse falling behind (Resmini 2013; Reeves & Ljungblad
2018) and failing to fill the expectation gap existing between the developments in
the job market and formal professional and academic education (Maccarone &
Doody 2016). Theories and methods remain anchored to product logic and do not
address the volatile, network-like architectures that characterize the postdigital
condition.
12
At the application level, that of the practice, even as the object of design is in-
creasingly shaped by the postdigital condition, in itself inherently embodied and
systemic, the tools and processes remain reductionist in nature, enforce a problem-
atic separation between the digital and physical elements that support an experi-
ence, and are artificially constrained by the linearity of traditional management
processes.
Because of the practice-driven nature of new media design, we maintain that
efforts should be directed at realigning the M3 loop starting at the application
level. We thus:
propose that the postdigital object of design is not a tangible, fin-
ished, individual artifact, but rather the volatile actor-instantiated
spaces of relationships between artifacts;
observe that such a shift in the object of design implies a shift in de -
sign methods and processes to account for the multiplication of per-
spectives and variations of granularity (Benyon 2014) that are
brought in by the systemic interplay of a multiplicity of actors;
characterize postdigital new media design as the design of the rela-
tionships between the elements of an actor-centered ecosystem, de-
fined as the blended, digital/physical environment in which human
experience unfolds and occurs (Benyon & Resmini 2017);
posit that postdigital new media design practice is systemic, architec-
tural, and spatial in nature and that it primarily concerns itself with
the structural and relational design of leverage points to influence be-
havior within said ecosystem.
We explicitly anchor this reframe and its implications for new media design
practice and theory to the ongoing shift towards digimodernist forms of co-pro-
duction and consumption (Kirby 2009), embodied forms of computing (Dourish
2001), and a postdigital culture (Pepperel & Punt 2000).
Digimodernism, embodiment, and a postdigital
culture
While there is general agreement in cultural studies that the displacement of post-
modernism started in the 1990s, what is it that it is taking its place is matter of am-
ple debate and has been variously defined as post-post, trans-, or metamodernism
(Vermeulen & van den Akker 2010). We adopt here the perspective of digimod-
13
ernism as introduced by Kirby (2009) as it specifically pays attention to the
changes induced by digital transformation and to the social aspects of production
and consumption processes. Kirby considers the “effects of computing on society
and culture” as the primary catalyst for change: he frames postmodernism as both
a rejection and a continuation of modernism and of its “fetishing” the author, and
identifies the main differentiation between postmodernism and digimodernism in
how the latter centers on the recipient to such a degree that they become indistin-
guishable from the author (Kirby 2006).
Kirby argues that digital has redefined the nature of authorship, readership, and
textuality, and the relationships between these. Using reality TV shows as a tem -
plate, he argues that digimodernism is a culture without an “audience” and built
instead on “participants”. Such participation is immediate, necessary, “raw, uncut,
visceral”, and thus profoundly different from the detachment, irony, and intellec-
tual pastiche valued by postmodernism (Hutcheon 1988). It is in this sense that
Kirby frames postmodernism as inextricably tied to old media: books, films, the
television screen, all fundamentally built on some form of top-down control on a
finished, complete product usually readily identifiable with a support medium.
Digimodernism on the other hand is a bottom-up new media phenomenon
(Manovich 2001), predicated on disintermediation and remediation, perfectly ex-
emplified by artifacts such as AirBnB, Facebook, or online open world video
games such as Minecraft that “cannot (exist) and do not exist unless the individual
intervenes physically in them” (Kirby 2006) and that are in a constant state of
flow, unfinished, evanescent, transient, and factually co-produced or co-created by
an anonymous mass (Kirby 2009, pp. 59–60).
Postdigital (or post-digital) is a term initially used in art-related discourses to
refer to a renewed interest in the human side of human-computer interactions and
to the possibility of exploring the consequences of digital culture. “The tendrils of
digital technology have in some way touched everyone (and) the revolutionary pe-
riod of the digital information age has surely passed” (Cascone 2000): digital has
been “trivialized”, as Negroponte predicted in a vastly influential article written
for Wired in 1998. On one hand this means it should be possible to observe and
examine “digital” critically; on the other, since digital has permeated every aspect
of society, it marks the emergence of a novel hybrid landscape in which digimod-
ernism acts as the primary cultural aesthetics (Jenkins 2011).
The identification of postdigital from parts of the literature with a specific “con-
temporary disenchantment with digital information systems and media gadgets, or
(with) a period in which our fascination with these systems and gadgets has be -
14
come historical” (Cramer 2015) is here treated as consequential to digital having
indeed become “like air and drinking water” (Negroponte 1998). Rather than di-
minishing its cultural significance, this becoming just another part of the day-to-
day fabric signals an increase in its importance, as technology for the sake of tech -
nology becomes a secondary concern and allows digital to turn into fertile “com-
mercial and cultural compost for new ideas” (Negroponte 1998). In such a con-
text, arguing for “digital solutions” is not only once again a one-perspective, re-
ductionist approach, but an argument as out of its time as one in support of “elec-
trical solutions” would be.
Navigating a postdigital world requires “avoid(ing) binarism, determinism, and
reductionism” if we want to “explain (the) complex phenomena” that have been
set in motion and the continuity between them (Pepperel & Punt 2000, p. 2). It is
in this sense that “post-digital is not anti-digital” but rather “extends digital into
the beyond. The web becomes not a destination in itself but a route map to some -
where real” (Jenkins 2011). This commingling of digital and physical is thor-
oughly changing our understanding of the relationship between the two and has
important consequences in terms of the role of embodiment and of the design at-
tention it receives.
Human-computer interaction literature has thoroughly explored the interplay
between our embodiment and our interactions with digital (Weiser 1991; Dourish
2001). More recently, architectural research (Mallgrave 2013; Williams Golden-
hagen 2017) and neuroscientific research have illuminated an even more relevant
role that embodiment plays in the way we interact with digitally-mediated infor-
mation and information spaces, pointing to spatial constructs as the fundamental
building blocks of human cognition and to all sense-making as being fundamen-
tally embodied (Benn et al 2015; Constantinescu et al 2016; Bellmund et al 2018).
However, the level of abstraction at which systemic research has been con-
ducted has often meant that the role of embodiment within the ecosystem repre-
senting the space of relationships between artifacts, locations, objects, and people
has found little consideration so far. With a few notable but relatively inconse-
quential exceptions (Horan 2000; Institute for the Future 2009), architectural re-
search and information systems research have been respectively focusing on em-
bodiment in the physical world (Norberg-Schulz 1971) and on the meaning of em-
bodiment for our conceptualization of digital spaces, and have rarely crossed
paths. Benyon’s concept of blended space (2014) allows to bridge the gap.
Imaz and Benyon (2007) initially applied Fauconnier and Turner’s conceptual
blending theory (2002) to the study of human-computer interaction and software
15
engineering. Benyon then formalized blended space as a space “where a physical
space is deliberately integrated in a close-knit way with a digital space” (2014, p.
79), creating a new type of space with its own emergent structure, a different set of
affordances, and a novel user experience predicated on a different sense of pres-
ence. Benyon’s blended space is user-centered and characterized by its ontology,
topology, agency, and volatility. A multiplayer video game called “Johann Sebas-
tian Joust”, designed by independent Danish studio Die Gute Fabrik, can be used
to better explain how the concept of blended space can help frame embodiment in
digital/physical spaces and the design of postdigital experiences.
“Johann Sebastian Joust” (fig. 5) is a variation on the theme of a musical chairs
game. As the game website describes it, it “is a no-graphics, digitally-enabled
playground game designed for motion controllers. The goal is to be the last player
remaining. When the music (...) plays in slow-motion, the controllers are very sen-
sitive to movement. When the music speeds up, the threshold becomes less strict,
giving the players a small window to dash at their opponents. If your controller is
ever moved beyond the allowable threshold, you’re out!” (Die Gute Fabrik 2014).
“Johann Sebastian Joust” is most certainly a video game and a new media arti-
fact: it is written as software and requires a Playstation game console to run. On
the other hand, the game cannot be played against the system and requires multi-
ple human players; it also requires an abundance of physical space for players to
move around, an uncommon trait for a video game; the kinetic Move controllers
physically manifest the game’s logic in analog space via sound and light; players
play without the aid of screens and do not need any of the hand-eye coordination
normally required by traditional video games; rounds are won and lost based on
player-to-player interactions that include pushing, shoving, and grabbing one’s op-
ponents in the physical world.
16
Fig. 5. A game of Johann Sebastian Joust (Source: Die Gute Fabrik presskit. Photo: B. Knepper)
In terms of Benyon’s blended space, “Johann Sebastian Joust”’s ontology con-
tains the Playstation game console, the game itself, the players, the Move con-
trollers, their relationships in space and “what functions and facilities they have”
(Benyon 2014, p. 80). Players and controllers are both “nodes” in the physical
space of the game, and “information artifacts” in the digital space of the game; its
topology reflects their mutual spatial relationships and remains relatively dense as
the players cannot move too far away from each other; its volatility is spatially
constrained by topology but varies greatly through time as the players react to the
music and the controllers react to the action; its agency blends “the artificial
agents” represented by the game’s own logic and by the controllers with the play-
ers’ decision and “opportunities for action” in physical space.
Experience ecosystems
If embodiment in blended space is one of the key aspects of postdigital new me-
dia, Kirby’s anonymous mass co-production is another essential component, one
that characterizes any contemporary information-enabled product or service. Co-
production may happen voluntarily, as with most social media or with algorithm-
driven services such as Spotify or Netflix, or involuntarily, through the tracking,
analysis, and clustering of one’s activities across physical and digital space by
means of smartphones, sensors, or credit cards.
In a postdigital landscape, any product or service, or parts of it, can be repur-
posed by actors to become part of a different experience, as relationships between
17
artifacts are followed, exploited, or dismissed arbitrarily depending on the idio -
syncratic needs and objectives of actors. Since the “creative organization of infor-
mation creates new information” (Wurman 1989, p. 3), this constant process of re-
mediation and reorganization of information configures an ecosystem-level co-
creation activity that stems from individual experiences.
While service marketing literature has introduced the concept of service
ecosystem (Vargo & Akaka 2013), which consists of the combined resources of
several service systems that come together through the combined actions of actors
(Vargo & Lusch 2011; Akaka & Vargo 2015), the conceptualization of ecosys-
tems we propose here is more appropriately framed as experience-centered. It fol-
lows seminal work by Resmini and Rosati on pervasive information architectures
(2011), Resmini and Lacerda’s formalization of cross-channel ecosystems (2016),
Benyon’s conceptualization of blended spaces (2014), and Resmini and Benyon’s
subsequent joint developments (2017).
Resmini and Lacerda build on previous work on crossmedia (Jenkins 2008),
bridge experiences (Grossman 2006), and information architecture (Resmini &
Rosati 2011) to outline a generative, bottom-up approach to design, structured
around a systemic view that ties together actors, activities, touchpoints, the seams
between touchpoints, and individual goals into transient, personal, information-
based ecosystems (Resmini & Lacerda 2016).
An ecosystem configures the place in which experiences unfold (Benyon &
Resmini 2017) and is instantiated by the “actor-driven choice, use, and coupling
of touchpoints, either belonging to the same or to different systems, within the
context of the strategic goals and desired future states actors intend to explicitly or
implicitly achieve” (Resmini & Lacerda 2016). In this sense, Resmini and Lacerda
describe a radically user-centered design approach: an ecosystem is an emergent
structure instantiated by the activities carried out by independent actors moving
freely and at will and who connect different products, services, devices, people,
and locations in pursuit of individual goals. Such products, services, devices, peo-
ple and locations configure a varying set of physical, digital or biological touch-
points, making the resulting ecosystem a semantic structure that straddles multiple
non-contiguous digital and physical spaces of relationships and a blended space of
action as described by Benyon (2014). We call this volatile postdigital construct
an experience ecosystem.
An experience ecosystem is not a finite artifact, product or service, resulting
from an organizational process and one that can be fully or wholly designed: it is
rather a space of opportunity entirely structured by actors in which designers can
18
operate at multiple levels of granularity and from multiple perspectives, brokering
between the different instances presented by the space of relationships that identi-
fies the ecosystem itself, the actors, and the designers’ own vision. As a result, de-
sign interventions are not concerned with the (re)design “of” an ecosystem but
rather with influence and design “within” an ecosystem to increase its resilience
and adaptability, so that social or business opportunities can be maximized and in-
dividual or organizational issues minimized. This usually happens in the form of a
recast of one or more specific touchpoints and their seams (Benyon & Resmini
2017).
An ecosystem approach has been successfully adopted for the design of such
diverse systems as the environment of a national art gallery (Resmini 2013), the
customer experience for outdoor recreation gear and sporting goods retailers (Tate
2011), and ambient assisted living solutions for the elderly (Lindenfalk & Resmini
2019).
Design process for experience ecosystems
The design process for experience ecosystems concerns itself primarily with the
global structure and dynamics of the ecosystem itself as defined by the contrasting
goals, views, and desires of the actors in play. In this sense, it is an information ar-
chitecture approach to “dissolving the second-order machine” responsible for
“generating undesirable patterns of behavior” that maintain and recreate the cur-
rent homeostasis (Gharajedaghi 2011, p. 150). Change in the behavioral patterns
existing within an ecosystem is enacted by introducing “a set of alternatives” that
can challenge “underlying assumptions” (Gharajedaghi 2011, p. 65).
This happens through two interrelated processes of discovery and improve-
ment, loosely mapped over the diverge/explore and explore/converge moments of
Gray’s model (fig 2). These first identify “what is relevant and supportive to (...) a
desirable future”, and then diagnose “what turns out to be part of the ‘mess’ and
therefore obstructive to (...) renewal and progress”: “we want to keep the first and
dispose of the second” (Gharajedaghi 2011, p. 150). It must be stressed that “dis-
pose” here does not necessarily mean physically or conceptually eliminate what
appear to be harmful processes or artifacts from the ecosystem, but rather act on
the information architecture so that actors have ways to exit stressful or unuseful
information loops, create new virtuous ones, and break out of counterproductive
system archetypes (Stroh 2015, p. 67).
In its early stages, the process is formally structured around a series of mapping
activities. Mapping is based on data describing the actors’ behavior within the
19
(current) state of relationships acquired through user research and consists of two
distinct phases: the mapping of individual paths, and the mapping of the ecosys -
tem itself (Lindenfalk & Resmini 2019). Two versions of the ecosystem are pro-
duced during this latter phase: one documenting the organizational view and the
designers’ observations, called the prescriptive version; one resulting from the ac-
tors’ data, called the emergent version, documenting the ecosystem resulting from
the actors’ actions. This is done to establish the distance between projected use,
deriving from the organization’s views and desires, and real use.
The methods used to gather data for these two types of maps are usually, but
not necessarily, different: prescriptive maps are often derived from existing docu-
mentation, briefs, and project meetings; emergent maps are derived from ethno-
graphic research, interviews, or questionnaires that are meant to capture the per-
sonal narratives that will be subsequently streamlined into individual paths.
This is a straightforward process: touchpoints are identified within the narra-
tives in conjunction with a task and arranged in a temporal sequence expressed
topologically. For example, an actor describes “going to the movies” according to
the following narrative: “I saw the trailer for a new movie on YouTube yesterday
so I checked if the local cinema was screening it. They did, so I called a friend to
see if she wanted to come see it with me and then I booked the tickets online. I
had dinner home, took a bus, and we met in the lobby fifteen minutes before the
9pm show. We both liked it”. An analysis of the narrative identifies “trailer”,
“YouTube”, “website”, “cinema”, “friend”, “tickets” as the initial individual
touchpoints, related to tasks such as “knowing about the movie”, “checking avail-
ability”, “asking for company”, “buying tickets”.
A simple syntax is then used to represent these touchpoints as elements in an
individual path in a standardized, spatially-oriented way (fig. 6). Touchpoints are
represented by colored hexagonal tiles, and seams are represented by gray hexago-
nal tiles between them. Seams identify steps in the path: an actor that moves from
a touchpoint “a” to a touchpoint “b” through a seam moves one step. Arrows are
employed to provide a general indication of directionality from start point to end
point. With every single step, an actor has the option to move to another touch-
point within the ecosystem which is either at their immediate disposal, in their
proximity, or not in their proximity.
Immediately available touchpoints are “personal”, color-coded green, and syn-
tactically occupy the straight-on position (fig. 6). Touchpoints in the actor’s prox-
imity are “local”, color-coded yellow, and take one of the two right-handed posi-
tions: right-forward identifies a stronger local touchpoint, right-backward a
20
weaker one, “based on the degree of effort their usage requires”, with “stronger
touchpoints requir(ing) less effort (and) weaker touchpoints requir(ing) more ef-
fort” (Lindenfalk & Resmini 2019).
Fig. 6. Spatial syntax for positioning touchpoints along a narrative path
Touchpoints not in the actor’s proximity are “remote”, color-coded red, and
take one of the two left-handed positions: left-forward identifies a stronger remote
touchpoint, left-backward a weaker one, following the conventions laid out for lo-
cal touchpoints. Seams are always laid out between touchpoints in the straight-on,
forward position: this allows to keep the touchpoints themselves consistently ori-
ented all along the time arrow of the narrative path. In fig. 6, the remote touch-
point in step 2 is a weaker remote touchpoint (left-backward, red) following a
stronger local touchpoint in step 1 (right-forward, yellow).
Seams represent the information flows that allow actors to move from one
touchpoint to the next. In the case of a local touchpoint, that might be information
they themselves already possess, such as “prior knowledge of how to book tickets
online” in the movie example given above, or “something they carry on their per-
son, such as a smartphone” (Lindenfalk & Resmini 2019). In the case of local
touchpoints, it might be “a real-time display that can be checked for information”
or “a bystander who can be asked”. In the case of remote touchpoints, usually im-
plying delay, movement, or both, it might be “a rarely used or previously un -
known online source” or “a public office when the actor is home”.
As paths traverse the blended space of the ecosystem, proximity between two
touchpoints can be either physical or semantic. If necessary and if data is available
to support an increase in detail, the level of granularity can be dynamically ad-
justed to zoom in (or in case zoom out) at specific steps along a path: a “mobile
phone” could satisfyingly represent a meaningful touchpoint as much as ”mobile
21
phone”, a specific “app installed on the same phone”, and a specific “task per-
formed via the app” could represent the same as three consecutive touchpoints, de-
pending on context and design needs. The final result of this phase is a variable
number of path diagrams illustrating how individual actors scope out the ecosys-
tem by simply traversing it.
It is important to observe that paths represents the actors’ own sense-making
rationalization of their actions and remain a linear narrative: they do not represent
in any way the full extent of the relationships existing within the ecosystem and
they do not individually represent the ecosystem itself.
On the other hand, the topological syntax used to describe paths heuristically il-
lustrates how any given step in the narrative “relates to the principle of least effort
for acquiring information” (Bates 2002), so that paths effectively provide an initial
visual appreciation of “how easy or strenuous it is for specific actors to attain a
certain desired future state” (Lindefalk & Resmini 2019). Considering the right-
left spatial continuum resulting from the application of the syntax, the diagrams
immediately show that:
paths that require the least effort are mostly straight sequences. They rely
primarily on personal touchpoints, immediately available to actors. Addi-
tionally, these paths do not usually include an unwieldy number of steps;
paths that require more effort veer towards the right. They rely more on
local touchpoints and environmental clues;
paths that require the most effort veer towards the left. These paths rely
more on remote touchpoints not readily available to actors and usually re-
quire movement between locations or temporal delays.
In general, all experiences that have actors moving between touchpoints that
are far apart from each other, either physically or cognitively, will suffer delays,
introduce additional touchpoints and seams between them, and as a consequence
require more effort (Lindenfalk & Resmini 2019).
In the second phase, existing spatial relationships between touchpoints identi-
fied in the individual narratives represented in the path diagrams are merged into
one or more synthetic maps of the ecosystem. Colored hexagon tiles are used for
touchpoints and gray hexagon tiles are used for seams. Touchpoints which appear
in any of the path diagrams belong to the experience ecosystem and are mapped as
clusters of tiles “whose number equals the number of times overall in which that
specific touchpoint has been a part of an actor’s path” (Lindenfalk & Resmini
22
2019). Seams connect touchpoints which have been mentioned as connecting at
least once by any one actor.
The synthetic maps of the ecosystems discount any type of directionality and
only account for touchpoints and seams and their mutual relationships of physical
or conceptual proximity: “any two touchpoints which are more than one seam
away from each other, or which are separated by empty slots, do not share a rela-
tionship” (Lindenfalk & Resmini 2019) and did not see actors move between
them. In this sense, the ecosystem maps are more akin to cartography maps de-
scribing a territory than to the diagrammatic “journeys” new media design has
been traditionally using.
Additional useful pieces of information can be added to the map by means of
color, for example highlighting channels (“all digital touchpoints” or “all touch-
points which belong to production processes regardless of organizational bound-
aries”), or shapes, for example signaling through increasingly thicker borders how
many times a certain seam has been traversed. This sub-phase is usually repeated
at least twice: once to produce the map describing the prescriptive view, usually
amounting to the organizational conceptualization of what the experience ecosys-
tem is; and once to produce the emergent map of the ecosystem as it comes into
being from the individual actions of actors trying to achieve a future state.
The prescriptive map and the emergent map can be immediately compared to
visually measure the distance between the organizational view and the actual
ecosystem in which the actors’ experience takes place: for example, how the de-
gree of integration of touchpoints (Chalmers 1999), their relative weight, their se-
mantic distance vary between the two maps; how information flows or does not
flow between specific touchpoints and what effects point-to-point recasts such as
opening new seams, eliminating or introducing additional touchpoints would have
on the ecosystem; identify factual fallacies in the predicted interplay of the diverse
constitutive elements or structural weaknesses that globally affect the ecosystem.
These observations are usually formalized through any number of deliverables
that “tell the story” (Gharajedaghi 2011) and identify leverage points to be recast
to better suit the goals of some or all of the different actors at play. The practical,
exploratory nature of the mapping phases themselves is also an important part of
this “telling the story”: the intimate understanding of the complex space of rela-
tionships constituting the ecosystem that derives from the necessity to make its ar-
chitecture explicit, so that it can be observed and discussed, is a most important
design outcome.
23
These mapping activities are intended to gradually shift attention away from
the linearity of individual narratives to the systemic space of relationships of the
ecosystem, represented by means of reciprocal spatial relationships of proximity
or separation that avoid any enforcement of directionality. Their primary outcome
is to provide designers with a way to discuss interventions that take into account
the second-order structure of the ecosystem so that:
relationships are made explicit and the risk of unintended consequences
reduced;
leverage points that can influence systemic change are identified;
unwanted behaviors are addressed by their root causes and not symp-
tomatically;
virtuous behaviors are supported;
the resilience of the ecosystem itself is increased.
In line with Armson’s systemic approach, the exploratory and convergent ac-
tivities that follow usually see the adoption of multiple different perspectives
working at different levels of granularity, with individual interventions being im-
plemented according to the specific tools and methods of existing new media prac-
tices. For example, a change in a mobile interface might require user interface and
interaction design expertise.
This design process thoroughly differs from that of user experience design
(Garrett 2002; Unger & Chandler 2012). It also differs from how the design of ser-
vices is practiced by Culén and Gasparini (2014) or as it is described by Polaine
(Polaine et al 2013, p. 22) in both its object and its conceptual foundation. In Po-
laine’s example the customer is hampered by “the division of the (organization’s)
silos (that) makes sense to the business units, but makes no sense to the customer,
who sees the entire offering (of the organization) as one experience.” The ecosys-
tem approach outlined here posits that the customer is first and foremost an actor
whose behavior is inextricably intertwined with the current layout of the ecosys-
tem and with its information flows, and that their experience is in no way limited
to what is offered or supported solely by any single actor or organization.
24
Fig. 7. Design process model for experience ecosystems
The process described here (fig. 7) can be represented as a variation of the Dou-
ble Diamond model in which the two diamonds (here hexagons) explicitly work at
two different levels of granularity: the first one considering the ecosystem view
and the second one working at the specific practice level required to “develop”
and “deliver” the leverage point recasts that have been “discovered” and “defined”
through the mapping activities.
An individual, organizational, or social pain acts as a catalyst for the process
(represented by the question mark symbol as in Gray’s model). Organization is
here to be intended in a broader sense and to include also public bodies or non-
profit operations. User research is performed and both influences and is influenced
by a parallel data collection activity conducted on the organization, its goals, its
structure, and its outlook (org survey in fig. 7). These two activities produce re-
spectively the actor path diagrams and the prescriptive ecosystem map, with the
org survey having possible bearing also on the actor paths. For example, in some
further specification of the actor groups being considered.
The actor paths, obtained through the mapping activities described in the previ-
ous section (mapping phase 1), are used to produce the emergent ecosystem map
(mapping phase 2). The two maps are compared, discussed, and used to identify
leverage points for recast (LP recast in fig. 7). LP recasts are defined towards the
end of the systemic stage and developed and delivered as part of the local and con-
textual stage. Methods, tools, and perspectives change in scope, disciplinary con-
text, and granularity between the two stages.
25
“Better courses”
Figures 8 and 9 show respectively two individual actor paths and the emergent
ecosystem map part of a course project run with students from the Master in Infor-
matics at Jönköping University (JU) in 2014-15. The project was concerned with
“improving courses” and originated with school management informally asking
staff to identify ways to “make courses better”. It was run as a series of collabora-
tive workshops that started by asking students to first define what “better” meant
in the context, and then consequently identify who were the primary actors.
Agreement was quickly reached that “better” should be taken to mean as “improv-
ing the students’ own overall experience of courses”, since they were the primary
recipients, and that very little was known about this. With students becoming the
primary actor group instantiating the course ecosystem, staff and management
were cast as the organizational counterpart.
Data for the prescriptive ecosystem map was then gathered from briefs and
documents and by examining the course infrastructure in place at the time, while a
total of fifty students were asked to describe what was their goal when attending a
course, how they went through a course, and what activities that implied, to pro-
vide standing ground for the emergent ecosystem map. Data was collected over a
period of one week by means of an open-format local online survey that allowed
the students to narrate their “course experience” using as many steps and touch-
points they needed, and through four subsequent individual semi-structured inter-
views with selected students belonging to the same sample group.
The students who responded to the anonymous questionnaire were 54% male
and 36% female and their median age was 26: “knowing more about the subject”
(92%), “passing the course” (36%), and “no specific goal” (6%) were the three
primary non-exclusive goals declared in the questionnaire. The minimum number
of steps in any individual path was four (and five touchpoints) and the maximum
was fifteen (and seventeen touchpoints), with an average of eleven steps (and four-
teen touchpoints). An initial insight derived from mapping phase 1 was that a con-
sistent number of students began their courses way before classes started, either by
“investigating the topic”, by “find(ing) more info from a google search or specific
site”, by “looking at the syllabus (online)”, but they did not engage teaching or ad-
ministrative staff beforehand.
26
Fig. 8. Two individual path diagrams from the “better courses” ecosystem mapping project
The two sample paths in fig. 8 exemplify these different behaviors: the top dia-
gram sees the student engaging with a number of different online touchpoints, ex -
plicitly identified in the narrative, with the goal of “finding out” about the course;
the bottom one abruptly begins with the student attending class.
Both paths veer to the right of the directional arrows (the bottom here as the
two figures are turned ninety degrees clockwise), due to a prevalence of mostly
stronger local digital touchpoints (university website, online syllabus, library cata-
log). Third-party, non-university platforms such as Facebook and Google Docs
appear as intermediate steps between the content of lectures and homework lead-
ing to final assignments. Remote touchpoints indicating physical movement be-
tween locations such as the student’s home and campus, where classrooms, the li-
brary, and the teacher’s physical mailbox are located, are also named.
The emergent ecosystem map in fig. 9 is a scaled down version of the final one
realized during mapping phase 2 for the project: it only accounts for twenty-two
out of fifty actor paths. The clusters of similarly colored tiles represent touch-
points, for example “Groupwork”, with the number of tiles equaling the number of
times that specific touchpoint was instantiated as part of any of the twenty-two ac-
tor paths. In the case of “Groupwork”, six times (fig. 9).
The gray tiles represent the seams between two touchpoints. If any two touch-
points have no seam between them, or are separated by empty slots or by more
than one single seam tile, no actor reported moving between them and no relation-
27
ship was identified: the significance of this absence, whether positive, negative, or
neutral, and whether it warrants or requires any type of design intervention, en-
tirely depends on the context of the experience ecosystem being described.
Fig. 9. Emergent ecosystem map from the “better courses” ecosystem mapping project (simplified)
As this is a compound view, the presence of a seam between two touchpoints
means that at least one actor took that specific step, and that some piece of infor -
mation allowing passage (personal, local, or remote, and contextually defined) was
available, even if temporarily, within the ecosystem.
A first observation is that this ecosystem configures a blended space of action
that is semantically contiguous but spread out both temporally and spatially. Its
touchpoints include a number of different physical locations (campus, classrooms,
library, homes), a number of digital environments (the online courseware plat-
28
form, Facebook, Google Docs, the online library, online book stores, the univer-
sity website, and more), a few actors (teachers, classmates), and course-related
formal events (final assignment, groupwork, lectures, exam). A few of these
touchpoints were both significant size-wise and presented a high degree of integra-
tion: lectures (22, 16), books (13, 9), classrooms (15, 5), and exam (10, 6).
These are some of the additional observations that were offered during discus-
sion of the map and that were later summarized in a list of possible leverage points
that could be recast to “improve courses”:
“Lectures” were clearly a central moment for students. The fact that they
had a seam from and towards “Teacher” and “Classroom”indicated a cer-
tain relevance of the physical nature of “being in class”;
no seam between “Teacher” and “Exam”, even though teachers were and
are directly responsible for the content of exams and for grading them;
no seam between “Exam” and “Groupwork”, even though project work
accounted for 45% of the final credits in the course;
no seam between “Syllabus” and “Books”. Syllabi at JU contain course
bibliography and teachers constantly point to them when asked about
what needs to be read for a course. The map suggested this was not an
effective strategy;
Facebook was only mentioned once and was not particularly central to
any experience. The data is from 2014-2015: anecdotal observations sug-
gest its weight and degree of integration would be different if data were
to be collected now;
the introductory lecture (“Introduction”) had some weight (7) but very lit-
tle integration (3). Despite the rather central role given to it by staff and
administration, students mostly only used it to receive information about
how to access the online courseware platform.
It is important to stress that these observations were contextual to this specific
inquiry and that fig. 9 does not describe a generic “course” ecosystem that can be
used to represent any “course” anywhere: this is a very specific ecosystem whose
spatio-temporal dimension is an integral part of its ontology (what elements it
contains), of its topology (how do these elements relate), of its volatility (when did
these elements relate), and of its agency (what did these elements afford). Hence,
its resulting map is more akin to a map of the world from a specific time than to a
29
diagram. It is also both the outcome of a systemic design process and the originat-
ing moment for interventions that will vary greatly in scope and perspective.
Conclusions and further research
Even when adopting holistic perspectives, new media design practices still suffer
organizational and methodological constraints that reproduce long-standing as-
sumptions, inevitably pushing the design process towards what is ontologically a
product-oriented approach. This results in unwanted reductionism and shallow
symptom-level solutions.
We present here an expanded conceptualization of experience ecosystems as
semantic blended spaces instantiated by the activities carried out by independent
actors moving freely and at will between different products, services, devices, peo-
ple, and locations in pursuit of individual goals. This conceptualization expands
on work by Lindenfalk and Resmini (2019) and is based on extant previous work
in the fields of information architecture and user experience design (Resmini &
Rosati 2011; Resmini & Lacerda 2016; Benyon and Resmini 2017). We introduce
a mapping methodology that can be used to capture and spatially describe the rela-
tional complexity of said ecosystems.
The conceptualization is anchored in the acknowledgment of three distinct cul-
tural and socio-technical shifts that characterize the postdigital condition: i) the
displacement of postmodernism as the cultural dominant (Kirby 2006); ii) the em-
bodiment of digitality and the emergence of blended space (Benyon 2014); iii) the
occurrence of a postdigital society (Pepperel & Punt 2000). It introduces a meta-
level shift rooted in Van Gigch and Pipino’s M3 for scientific and innovation pro-
cesses that reformulates the problem space from being an organization-space
problem (as the library is in Culén and Gasparini’s case) to being a user- or actor-
space problem (as the courses were in the JU course project example). In doing so,
we:
move the conversation to a bottom-up, actor-centered systemic way of
doing that is rooted in systems thinking and in architectural rather than
design conceptualizations;
consider the environment actors move in systemically, as a blend of digi-
tal and physical, and one that is directly experienced and primarily under-
stood through embodiment and the spatial relationships existing between
elements;
30
suggest that instead of focusing on what individual touchpoints in a spe -
cific sequence a generic “consumer” interacts with, a systemic approach
has as it object of design the ecosystem itself, the semantic and spatial re-
lationships of its components, their interplay, and the resulting mess.
By altering the way the problem space is framed, the conceptualization of expe-
rience ecosystems and the mapping methodology presented here provide new me-
dia design practices a non-reductionist approach to respond to the changed socio-
technical and cultural landscape, thus providing increased value to both individual
actors and organizations, and to strategically make long-term human-centered
change a design priority by primarily:
helping realign the practice, science and epistemology of new media de-
sign in response to the changes brought on by the postdigital condition;
producing a view of the ecosystem that is not organizationally bound,
thus removing some of the constraints that compel design practitioners to
respond to systemic issues with organizational quick-fixes;
providing a practice-friendly tool that acknowledges complexity and con-
tributes to practice-based understanding of the object of design as a space
of relationships by explicitly structuring it spatially and systemically.
The ecosystem maps resulting from the application of the methodology do not
offer the narrative directionality of widely used tools such as customer journeys,
but rather make use of spatial primitives such as proximity or separation in a way
similar to world maps to provide the point of view of actors going through an ex-
perience by mapping the actors themselves, the tasks, touchpoints and seams
within the ecosystem they instantiate through their actions while pursuing a de-
sired future state.
References
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