banbutsu Buzz // Ecosystems
An excursus to find the roots of the term ‘ecosystem’ and its relevance today.
We often associate biology with the study of animals and plants, but it is much more than that. Biology is the scientific study of life. It regularly proves that it lives up to this definition by explaining natural phenomena that occur in our daily routine. ¹
An ‚ecosystem‘ is such a phenomenon. The word ecosystem was introduced and shaped by biologists of the 19th and 20th centuries, but its origins go back much further.
The term ‘eco’ comes from the ancient Greek ‘Oikos’ which means ‘home’. The second part, ‘system’, can be derived from the ancient Greek ‘systema’, a synonym for describing ‘the organized whole’. ² ³
And this is exactly how the ecosystem meant by biologists can be described:
It is a limited geographical space in which living parts, such as plants and animals, and non-living parts, such as rocks or soil, exist in a high level of interdependence and form an environmental unit. ⁴ ⁵
Today, the word ecosystem is used much more widely than only in biological contexts. We at banbutsu have also adopted the term ecosystem and interpreted it for our case.
In our ecosystem, there are numerous partners from the most diverse areas. In a figurative sense, the geographical space described in biology is for us the technical and content-related connection of the partners in an application. Unlike in nature, where there are strong and weak ecosystem participants, in the banbutsu ecosystem, all partners are justified partners on eye level. Only together and in the perfect combination of their individual expertise, the partners can contribute to the best possible user experience.
Stay tuned to read which implications this definition of ecosystems will have in its implementation…
