(Beyond the user) Navigating Business Ecosystems
As I learn more in the design world, I am finding that many roles have very abstract meanings. One I find interesting is the role of an Experience designer. An Experience designer could do anything from UX/UI work to service design. It seems this title — Experience designer is the industry’s way of expressing the intentional focus on human-centeredness. But there is a clear understanding that an Experience designer doesn’t create experiences. They inform conditions with the intention of creating desirable human experiences.
Informing conditions is key in this understanding because the actual experiences are what happens during use. Daniel Kahneman, psychologist and author of Thinking Fast and Slow wrote that “Our memories tell us stories. That is, what we get to keep from our experiences is a story”. In other words, what experience designers are trying to do is influence what memories can be because that’s what usually drives action. These foundational ideas of design practice— an attempt to inform conditions are fodder for some of the post-human-centered design approaches emerging in the design world. One of which is designing for ecosystems.
As designers continue to think about how to influence conditions, it's becoming more evident that there is a need to think beyond the human. Roberto Verganti, author of Design-Driven Innovation wrote that
“If you radically want to change the meaning of things… then you actually have to step back from users because otherwise, users pull you into the current meaning of things.”
Designing for ecosystems is also influenced by the fact that the business world has moved in that direction.
What is an ecosystem? An Ernst and Young expert describes a business ecosystem as “a purposeful business arrangement between two or more entities (the members) to create and share in collective value for a common set of customers. Every business ecosystem has participants, and at least one member acts as the orchestrator of the participants. All members in a business ecosystem, whether orchestrators or participants, have their brands present in the value propositions”
In recent times there has been a lot of focus on Ecosystem orchestrators; Amazon, Uber, Google, and the likes. One of the noteworthy characteristics of Ecosystem orchestrators is that they are not producers, they aggregate with participants in the ecosystem to create their value. This is why a key characteristic of a successful ecosystem orchestrator is not to cannibalize their participants’ businesses. Eg. Amazon can’t cannibalize third-party sellers to keep their relationship with those participants.
Understanding this context of ecosystems for Experience designers goes to show the relevance of thinking beyond the human. Within ecosystems, there are relationships that need to consider beyond the human experience to understand how a product/service is delivered. Systems thinking approaches in design have frameworks to assist in this process. Thinking in Systems by Donella Meadows is a seminal example of a systems approach that helps to design for an ecosystem. The basic premise of the book discusses what systems are, first defining that they are not a sum of their parts. Meadows argues that systems work in stocks and flows and with feedback loops(balancing and reinforcing loops).
This sort of thinking reveals mostly the balance of power within an ecosystem as would be expected with an ecosystem orchestrator and where there is a concentration of a high-value experience to design for.
Business Ecosystems are still in flux and not every business ecosystem has proven profitable. A Harvard Business Review article on Business Ecosystems rightly states, for every Amazon, there is a Spotify. For designers, this means juggling and critically thinking through challenges to determine where to include new thinking on ecosystems.
