The Digital Context
At Pollen we call ourselves digital business designers.
In giving that scope to our work we soon need to talk about what we exactly mean by the word ‘digital’ (business and design easier to define, though rarely simpler to do).
This introspection can seem unnecessary since the digital aspect of our work is every day evident in the products and services we build for our clients, and in the tools that we use.
However defining the word has helped us talk about the material we work with as designers, constructors and partners for our clients, and in that sense it’s become a useful thing to frame what we call the digital context.
Here’s our current working definition:
People, businesses and things connected over the internet for an exchange of value.
Within the connection (red rings) there are
- interfaces for brand experience and value exchange,
- there is newly arrived blockchain for contracts (which underpins better value exchange), and lastly
- the transport layer of TCP/IP (which is the necessary component that sets the context as digital).
There are disintermediating and recursive connections as well — business-to-business, person-to-person and now too the onset of thing-to-thing.
Finally these connections and exchanges take place in the larger context of the public realm, the greater spheres of society, governance and even the planet of life-sustaining resources we inhabit. The public realm provides us with the basis of value and frame too for thinking. Within this frame we can consider the externalities that range from the competitive context to cultural practices and norms — ethics even — and broader social and sustainability impacts that are material or can be designed.
These are all things that we think about in our work at Pollen.
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Get in touch if you’d like us to work on your digital business design problems.
