I have long since acknowledged that both information professionals and visual communication design professionals just do it better, communicate complex ideas visually. Upon presenting some of my early diagrams to a group of UX designers, produced in MS Word or Pages, the whole group groaned (some did this aloud). Whilst I was proud of my stick figures (women with triangle bodies and men a straight line and both genders with a circle head), I concede that there are better ways, and platforms, to do this.

Regardless, here I go again. I am currently preparing for an industry-facing talk on the social impacts of driverless vehicles, the sharing economy and the future of work. Naturally, I needed to brush up on the state of many things, including the economic model upon which these articulations are founded. It’s the nerd in me. I need my conceptual model to be able to frame the working parts and use this as a platform to spring off (sometimes it’s a swan dive and other times it’s a belly flop).

Because it’s a back end work up kind of thing, I decided to share it with you. Making my assumptions and frameworks transparent is definitely one way that I learn. In this model, I attempt to work out the basic forces of a market economy (with the emphasis on basic). These are the blue boxes (do note the rounded edges). I consider these elements to be intertwined. In the green boxes, I’ve highlighted the associated mechanisms and agendas that are shaping our current economic contexts. The zigzag of lines traces the dominant relationships, with all elements founded upon a complex system of mess (spontaneous emergence) in which they are all interrelated. The purple boxes drop down from the central forces and illustrate the dynamic nature of these interlocking systems. The word cloud is all of the associated words that spring to mind as I label these boxes and dig back through the waterfall of articles, conference presentations, talks and media that I have voraciously consumed.