We are excited to announce that the scope of Umio’s thinking, framework, services, and new community has widened from health to real experience ecosystems. Whilst still including health and disease, this widening affords a broader engagement with all aspects of the human-in-nature condition and possibility. And it sets a bigger purpose to one of helping our clients, partners, and the new Umio Community for Real Experience Ecosystem Design to create valued impacts in one or more ecosystem contexts of health, care, social, home, work, community, place, or customer experience.
(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.)
What is an experience ecosystem?
An open experience ecosystem frames a particular focal context of real experience. Each contains a dynamic relation of social-cultural, material-spatial, bodily-motor, and perceptual-cognitive entities, flows, forces, affects and tendencies. These inter- and intra-act to mutually constitute, differentiate, and variously stabilise real lived experiences having a certain content, quality and expression in life. Often, a particular focal context can become concentrated in particular geographies and amongst certain social groups and identities.
A focal context can be single or multiple combinations of collective, distributed, and similar human real experience states such as obesity, pain, depression, anxiety, dislocation, precarity, and hopelessness, amongst others; all real experiences that typify the modern-day human condition. A focal context may be further narrowed by a specific place, setting (e.g., workplace), community and / or social group (e.g., ethnic or gender group).
Any framed focal experience context set-up for enquiry, design and interactional creation contains differences (including inequalities/inequities) in the quality, content and expression of that experience, as well as the capacities of experiencers or (what I call) affectees to prevent, avoid, recover, escape, or stabilise their real experience. Discovering these differences (identified and explored in assemblages that form, intensify, and ”sediment” or entrench the experience) drives the value-creation via interactional creation purpose, method and task.
A transversal unifying discipline of interactional creation via experience ecosystems
Very importantly, an experience ecosystem (re)framing offers the potential to unify currently fragmented and distributed domains and disciplines of thought, organisation and practice around whole focal contexts of human real experience and their interactional creation. This means that distinct fields such as science, business, economy, health care, social care, education, architecture, design, housing, transport, environment and others are all redrawn into an interactional ecosystem of creation centred on focal contexts of human real experience. Further, all now share a singular purpose: to prevent and transition unwanted ill-health, unequal or diminished (e.g., dis-ease, disease) experiences, and to create the potential for people and communities to access the valued experiences they desire. Critically, this purpose must fundamentally incorporate and balance the needs of nature, climate and the environment, and their own creation - or more typically and tragically destruction - by humans.
To see, enable and emerge this powerful new view of real experience and the processes of their creation and differentiation in experience ecosystems demands a new set of interactional creation capabilities and practices. These span management and leadership, organisational design, networking and partnering, research method, strategy, innovation, marketing, service design, data and information systems, knowledge-creation, branding, valuation and others.
Umio’s aim is explore, develop and distribute the thinking, skills and resources that we can all harness to see, emerge and enact the means to create and sustain value via the logic and frame of focal experience ecosystems.