Ecosystems: A model and metaphor for all disciplines? Greg Hearn

1. Ecosystems: A model and metaphor • for all disciplines? • Greg Hearn • Professor: Creative Industries Faculty • QUT

2. Reasons why “ecosystem” might be a model for all disciplines • The types of big problems we are trying to solve • The changing nature of change

3. #1 Problems of interacting systems

4. One of the fastest growing sectors is what is often referred to as knowledge intensive services

5. Wicked Problems similarly often require • Technical or scientific knowledge and capacities • Social knowledge and capacities • Creative communicative knowledge or capacities

6. General theoretical challenge to conceptualise three types of systems and their mutual influence Material or technical systems Social systems Meaning systems

7. A classic problem which illustrates the interaction of material/social/meaning systems

8. Solving biological systems problems is a knowledge set that recognises the interaction of material/social/meaning systems

9. #2 The nature of change is changing

10. For example: • Change is non-linear (eg Critical mass effects/ rapid growth and decline); • The meanings as well as the rates of phenomena change • Change and non-change co-exist

11. complex system change options • Stay the same (autopoesis)

12. Complex options change systems ….. • Stay the same (autopoesis) • Mutually adapt (exogenous self-organisation)

13. systems change ….. complex options • Stay the same (autopoesis) • Mutually adapt (exogenous self-organisation) • Split or merge (chaotic bifurcation)

14. complete system change option….. • Stay the same (autopoesis) • Mutually adapt (exogenous self-organisation) • Split or merge (chaotic bifurcation) • Transform (endogenous evolutionary mutation)

15. Complex system change options….. • Stay the same (autopoesis) • Mutually adapt (exogenous self-organisation) • Split or merge (chaotic bifurcation) • Transform (endogenous evolutionary mutation) • Cease to exist (die, crash, go belly-up, become an ex-system)

16. Change is complex system evolution • which addresses the three essential and mutually influential processes of system evolution, namely…….

17. Self-reference (the process whereby system identity continues) • Self-transformation (the process whereby new ideas are introduced into system identity) • Self-organisation (the process wherein novelty is reconciled with continuity)

18. Self-referencing (Cohesion) • The system seeks to assert the continuance of existing system in terms of its identity, procedures and boundaries

19. Self-Organisation (Adaptation) • Self-Organisation: systems mutually affect each other to come to a new pattern of functioning

20. Self-transformation (Innovation) • Not only do the patterns relating existing subsystems evolve but new subsystems emerge endogenously

21. Some features of problems which ecosystem as a metaphor might help with • dynamic • fragmented • dense connectivity, • system/environment boundary porosity • indeterminancy, • non-linearity • coexistence of competitive and cooperative processes

22. Questions: • How do exogenous and endogenous change interact? • What precisely is the thing that is changing (identity, structure, processes)? • How applicable are biological/material systems thinking? • What is the role of language in all of this? • What is the role of human agency in all of this?

23. Some examples of ecosystems thinking applied in various disciplines… • Digital ecosystems • Business ecosystems • Industrial ecology theory • Family systems theory • Interactive music algorithms • Semantic/meaning systems

24. Over to you…. + + + =