Apologies for the problems hyperlinking – I’m undergoing some renovations to this WordPress version.
Visiting the Design Thinking Facebook group (https://www.facebook.com/groups/301603971905/), I saw a familiar Venn Diagram of business, users and tech, and a question about where innovation and sustainability would live in that diagram. At the heart of the diagram would work – if one has to pick one place, but then it would ‘knock out’ innovation, unless they shared the center space. In some ways I see innovation and sustainability as two separate domains, and both need to be reflected in the landscape – although both influence each of those circles. Placing sustainability in the center is good, since it should affect the business, user and tech circles; at the same time, where would the innovation go? I think this is where I was going with the suggestion to put it in the ‘background’ grey layer, underlying everything – similar to Jesse James Garrett’s Elements of UX diagram (http://konigi.com/files/konigi/images/jjg-elements-ux.png); I also like this one (http://www.upf.edu/hipertextnet/_img/201301.6.png), where ‘sustainability’ can be added to user needs, strategy and business goals. The problem is that the Venn diagram is useful as a starting point, but it doesn’t quite reflect the nuances of the human experience and how we think about and design landscapes. Even the concept of modeling itself undergoes constant innovations as our technologies improve, and our designs evolve. This maybe where interactive and 3D models (even incorporating an extra plane, like JJG’s layers do) can help. I also see some of this as shifting; sustainability and innovation are important and valuable, but if you’re doing well in an area (like crade to crade, or have continuous innovation), when is it necessary to move onto other areas that need attention, and to stop innovating for the sake of innovating? Maybe that 3D model of the Venn Diagram needs to change to be more of a living model – where real time data visualizations can live. I think about the title of the Club of Rome book, ‘The Limits to Growth’, and wonder where the Limits to Modeling are, too.

Leave a Reply