Outline of Umio’s approach to the interactional creation of health in real experience via experience ecosystems
The way Umio approaches any health-disease ecosystem strategy is to deploy an integrative focal real or lived experience lens for the design of value via interactional creation in the frame of an experience ecosystem.
The Umio model of real experience identifies and integrates four “affective domains” defining whole, unified dynamic real or lived experience: bodily-motor, perceptual-cognitive, social-cultural, and material-spatial (see model here and a dynamic video version at the end of this article).
(NB I increasingly prefer “real” rather than “lived” experience, as the latter usually has the more limited meaning of a certain narrative of an experience given by e.g., a patient, for a program context or research input, rather than actual whole real experience, its origin, constitution, emergence, difference, and persistence.)
Umio Model of Production / Differentiation of Lived Experience via Affects in Interactional Flows. CLICK TO EXPAND. Copyright Umio Ltd.
Each affective domain contains a certain flow and force of entities involved in the production and recurrence of real experiences with health/disease. Some diseases are more genetic-biological (bodily-motor) in origin, some are more social-cultural, and some material-spatial, yet all diseases / illnesses have a different relative mix and force of influencing “agencial” entities in each of the four domains.
Also, in the same disease, e.g., obesity, the force of the domains varies in different social groups, places and individual persons; some persons with obesity have a more genetic – biological origin of their obesity, some a more social-cultural origin, some more material (e.g., excess calorific input), etc. So, in this sense, we can’t really say that all disease is 30% behaviour, 30% due to social determinants of health, and 20% due to clinical factors, etc.
Rather, all four affective domains are inherently interactional or intra-actional in their production of disease, with their force varying according to the focal experience context (obesity, type of chronic disease etc.) and the differences within it. These forces originate and exist outside any individual human body; they are pre-individual or pre-experienced: Certain places, social groups and communities have more intensities of these forces and are therefore more prone to disease.
By focusing on questions of formation-origination, differentiation, and persistence of different qualities (content, expression. affects, emotions) and affective capacities (powers to affect and be affected) for any focal real experience context (e.g., diabetic obesity), and using the Umio Health Ecosystem Value Design framework, we can define a number of interacting / overlapping action spaces to create / design / intervene with novel approaches that reveal and can address hidden possibilities for creating health and/ or preventing-recovering disease.
Framed by an experience ecosystem, these action spaces contain mutually supportive, reinforcing interventions to address a disease context and to create more health. Generically, they are as follows:
1. Address the originating (relation of) forces of the creation/production/recurrence of a focal context of lived experience in four relational affective domains (social-cultural, material-spatial, bodily-motor, perceptual-cognitive)
2. Understand and address/change the perceptions, beliefs, presuppositions, dispositions, and tendencies of affectees (individual persons, families, groups, communities, places with the lived experience, e.g., persons experiencing obesity) and of affectors (professional health actors, non-health actors, social actors, industry, digital tech, etc.) and the thinking, methods and practices that prevent them from seeing and addressing these forces, and why the focal lived or real experience is stuck and worsening
3. Determine differences in affectee lived experiences for a focal context, (in an assemblage of strata of affects and capacities around poles of positive and negative experience), define desired transitions in the lived experience and identify the forces preventing their movement / enaction
4. Design a multi-dimensional experience ecosystem strategy (for the focal context) that enables and enacts the desired transitions in experience (involving traditional and non-traditional actors, technologies, services, channels, places, communities, tendencies, ideas)
5. Build and lead the creation of ongoing experience ecosystem affective capacities to adapt, learn and sustain the multi-pronged strategy and that continue to create-improve the focal lived experience for persons affected by disease, and persons to avoid the disease in the first place.
Example “Nautilus Design” for interactional creation of desired valued lived experience with chronic pain via experience ecosystem thinking (CLICK TO EXPAND)
Why the Umio nautilus?
When seeking to enact transitions and impacts in a focal health-disease experience ecosystem, we must deploy a multi-dimensional strategy, policy, and program model which as in the Umio logo, is defined as an ongoing experimental process of overlapping activities in action spaces. I visualize this using the logarithmic or golden spiral as embodied by the cephalopod nautilus (550m years old so it knows a thing or two), a creature that propels itself forward by drawing flows of water into its body then expelling them out to move in a desired direction.
The Umio Nautilus serves as an analogy for the fluid living enterprise driven by dynamic configurations of see, enable, and emerge capacities and capabilities needed to create value interactionally in flows of real (lived) experience with health-disease-illness.