Observation - location

During the research me and my fellow classmates will do several observations. One of then is observing a place and what happens there. We will look at how people move around, behave and what they seem to need or want etc. The place me and two classmates are observing is the hospital main entrance. We've been there at two occations and spent in total 5 hours there. It is already clear that there's a lot of people that spend several hours there, waiting for someone or something. They walk in and out of the entrance hall, to, as it appears, try to make time move faster. There's a limit to how long you can sit and stare into walls. Over hearing some conversations, I found out that some people feel forced to sit in the same spot, not going anywhere because they promised someone else that they would meet them there. Some are just waiting for a short message from a doctor, taxi driver or friend. The amount of people waiting for taxis are more than I imagined. There's a special taxi service that works almost like a car pool. One taxi picks up several people that are going to the same area. The taxis come at a specific time, and everyone has to just sit and wait. One man, sitting next to me, explained that he'd been waiting for 2 hours and the taxi should have arrived 10 minutes ago. I saw several older couples meeting old acquaintances, that started talking, reminiscing the old days, smiling, even though it was obvious they were in some pain.

We will go there one more time, then try to sum up the results and visualize it in a comprehensive way. I already see an interesting area to create a service for. The taxi system involves some problems that could be solved by a more fluent and clear information process. Since there's a majority of elderly people using this service, there's is also a challenge to develop a mobile service for this target group, that they actually will want to use. I have not yet specified what area I will be focusing on. The research goes on, with an open mind so far.

Specified eco-system

If we take a look at how an Eco-system for services would look, where services is the endlessly incoming source or “energy” into the system, this is how it might look. The “portal” for the services to reach the end user would be the different devices available (mobile phones, computer, info screens, augmented reality etc). And for the users/consumers to be able to use the services, the devices offer some kind of interfaces. The “nutrients”, what the consumers are consuming, are the different functions that they can access through the interfaces. These functions are equivalent to the needs of the users. In this model, the actual user is taken out and in it's place are the different needs that each one of us needs to fulfill. The hierarchy here is Maslow's hierarchy of needs. (To learn more check out link) http://www.deepermind.com/20maslow.htm

I find this hierarchy appropriate for this Eco-system because we most of the time need to make sure the steps below us in the pyramid is taken care of, before we care to worry abut the ones above. If I can't find food for the day and I'm starving, how much would I care about that my apartment is in a dodgy area where I don't feel safe?

But there's one step in the consumers hierarchy that don't fit in here and that is the detritivores that feed on dead animals and plants, helping to decomposer them and return some nutrients to the ground. What actors in this system decomposes or recycles the “dead” functions or consumers?

What is an Eco-system?

In this project we will look at location based eco-systems for mobile services. The word eco-system is used an an analogy for a system in perfect balance that can sustain and develop itself, without to much interference from the outside. The Iphone "phenomena" is brought up as an example of a well working eco-system with for example its apps store and open source platform.
The first thing I need to understand here is what an Eco-system is and how that structure can inspire my work. Above you can see a visualization of a natural eco-system and how the rules of that system might be applied to a mobile service "eco-system". This visualisation shows the bigger picture. In a natural eco-system the energy from the sun is constantly flowing into the system. The green plants binds the suns energy within their structure through the photosynthesis. They turn this energy into the chemical energy we call nutirents. The plants are therefor called the “producers”. Then we have the consumers which can be catagorized into several groups which of three are mentioned above. Check out the link below if you want to learn more. http://www.globalchange.umich.edu/globalchange1/current/lectures/kling/ecosystem/ecosystem.html.

Looking at how this eco-system model can be applied to a buisness model we can see that what needs to be constantly flowing into it is money. The photosynthesis of this system would be the development of services, the part that turns the money into something usefull to the consumers. The hierarcy of the cunsumers could be seen as the well known adoption curve by Everett Rogers. The waste of the system is what I would call “cyber junk”. That is all the accounts that no one is using anymore, the pictures no one looks at, the old articles that's to no use anymore and so on.

Since I am not doing a masters in buisness, (but in Interaction design) I will try to zoom in a bit closer into the service area where I can acctually design something. In next post you can see a visualization of how the eco-system analogy could be aplyed at that level.