Design in a Virtual Innovation Ecology: A Cybernetic Systems Approach to Knowledge Creation and Design Collaboration in Second Life

Design innovation makes a substantial contribution to the global economy, however there is a challenge to modern design praxis as design teams face difficulties when it comes to collaborators who are geographically distributed and unable to easily meet face to face in a physical context. This research undertook to interpret the knowledge creation life cycle of design innovation, and adopted a second-order cybernetic approach to describe the design process in the virtual world Second Life (SL). The researcher applied a cyber-ethnographic methodology to collect a bricolage of evidence in SL including observations; interviews; blogs; surveys; and conversations ‘in-world’. The research considered three case studies of groups in SL: Sloodlers, Studio Wikiitecture, and Design 2029 – The End Game. Three models were proposed to help describe cybernetic regulation of the design innovation ecology in SL: the spectrum of fidelity; indosymbiosis; and Lessig’s four modalities of cybernetic knowledge regulation. The first two of these were developed specifically for this research. In addition, a design innovation organism or ‘inogism’ was proposed using a biological metaphor to describe the design innovation ecology in SL. The primary research question considered how Lessig’s four modes of architecture, the law, the market, and norms all interact to affect the design ecology within SL. The secondary research questions considered how tacit knowledge creation and design collaboration could be inhibited or enabled through simulated face-to-face meetings. This research describes how the virtual ecology of SL can enable tacit knowledge creation and design collaboration and therefore contribute towards improved design innovation. It also suggests future research opportunities that could assist innovative design outcomes in other virtual worlds.