Paper 1

Mapping Experience Ecosystems as Emergent Actor-Created Spaces

Authors: Andrea Resmini, Bertil Lindenfalk

Volume 47 (2021)

Abstract

The paper introduces a 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, people, and locations in pursuit of individual goals. This conceptualization is anchored to three distinct cultural and socio-technical shifts that characterize the current postdigital condition: the displacement of postmodernism as the cultural dominant; the embodiment of digitality and the emergence of a blended space of action; the occurrence of a postdigital society. It contributes to ongoing conversations on ecosystem-level and systemic design from the point of view of information architecture and user experience in five distinct ways: by centering the discourse on the actor-driven individual experience made possible by the postdigital condition; by framing the problem space from an embodied, spatial and architectural perspective; by considering the environment systemically as a blend of digital and physical non-contiguous spaces; by recasting the object of design to be the semantic and spatial relationships that exist or could exist between the elements of the actor-centered ecosystem; by introducing a mapping methodology that can be used to capture and spatially describe the relational complexity of said ecosystems for further intervention.

Keywords

Experience ecosystems, Systems thinking, Information architecture, Blended space, User experience design, Postdigital, Digimodernism, Embodiment, New media