Blog
In this article, I outline a mode and content of thought that I believe can advance our collective learning and creative capacities, and that can be explored and deployed in contexts of everyday real or concrete and especially diminished more-than-human real experience.
In an age of accelerated change and widening divergence of experience, largely driven by rapid personal, corporate and service digital intermediation, I argue that we too must reflect on the explanatory powers of our dominant logic of experience and its design-creation.
In this short piece, I argue for and introduce a new geographical analogy for the so-called social determinants of health framework.
In this post, I summarise the five distinguishing dimensions of more-than-human real experience along with their implications.
If we think of how certain people and groups have varying capacities to affect, accommodate or balance the demands of sliced clock time in their increasingly controlled, burdened and routinised lives, such "temporal dyssynchronicity" can be seen as an important and pervasive force in the late modern production of health-wellbeing inequities. Such a force is rarely - if ever - included in any social determinants framework to explain causality of disease or health inequalities.
Whether at the micro or macro level, we know that reality consists of flows of ongoing creation and differentiation of various phenomena.
Flows bearing natural matter, processes, and tendencies that produce individual living things and beings.
And that form and continuously shape natural environments.
In this piece, I evolve a summary of the value-creation logic of interactional creation via (real) experience ecosystems in twelve steps.
Folded into the reality of interacting (and in a sense intra-acting, entangled) agencies of nature, objects and things in space-time are human practices of observing, knowing, measuring, boundary-setting, and describing reality; practices that (re)configure and designate material, natural and socio-cultural entities, and which with them constitute the reality of always-becoming dynamic phenomena to which we belong and in which we interact.
We are excited to announce that the scope of Umio’s thinking, framework, services, and new community has widened from health to real experience ecosystems. Whilst still including health and disease, this widening affords a broader engagement with all aspects of the human-in-nature condition and possibility. And it sets a bigger purpose to one of helping our clients, partners, and the new Umio Community of Interactional Creation to create valued impacts in one or more ecosystem contexts of health, care, social, home, work, community, place, or customer experience.
The way Umio approaches any health-disease ecosystem strategy is to deploy an integrative focal lived experience lens for the design of value via interactional creation in an experience ecosystem. In this short piece, Chris Lawer summaries the Umio Health Ecosystem Value Design approach for addressing disease and creating health via interactional creation in experience ecosystems.
I’d like to first set-out some of the foundational concepts of my framework – Umio Health Ecosystem Value Design or HEVD – the main method deployed in the Design + Health Open Studio at NYIT this Spring semester.
Also, I shall briefly propose how the framework informs the method and task of transdisciplinary urban design with health …
In my book Interactional Creation of Health, I introduce a model of prosperity as health that I call social desire. And I define an end-to-end process and method for its creation. In this article, I outline the concept of social desire and explain how it is variably produced in the real experiences of people, communities, places, social and ethnic groups and populations.
Jobs-to-be-done (JTBD) is a popular method to inform product and service innovation-design, and market entry or growth strategy. This brief post explores some of their limitations and outlines how the Umio approach - with its emphasis on affects forming experience in experience ecosystems - can be used to augment JTBD thinking.
The following is an extract from my book Interactional Creation of Health: Experience Ecosystem Ontology, Task and Method, published January 28th 2021
In this sense of the outside being inside, lived experiences with health are not seen as separate from exterior socio-environmental contexts, from social determinants of health or from underlying social structures (as is typically the case in much public health discourse and empirical realist method). Rather, these forces are present in potential pre-individual, pre-personal affects, tendencies and capacities in interactional flows and via their interaction, are actualized in our actual lived experience.
In redefining health, I go beyond the dominant biomedical, reductionist and individual behavioural agency / person-centric view of health as normal baseline functioning, end-state absence of disease, risk mitigation and a resource for living.
This blog contains a list of 75 common challenges experienced in community health co-creation and transformation efforts. These were complied from research into program successes and failures, and from numerous and ongoing discussions with program leaders and participants in the US and UK. If you have any additional challenges and / or perspectives on the list, do let us know.
In this article, Chris Lawer introduces an ecosystem reframing of health and disease experience to help us rethink, redesign and realise more health and greater wellbeing in the post-covid-19 era.
I start with a simple premise …
Our diverse experiences with health, illness and disease are by-products of our encounters in the world …
