Mapping the Behaviour Economy

Project Description

Mapping the Behaviour Economy of Cloud Computing across Business, Education, and Personal sectors. These progressive mind-map diagrams — titled Cloud Computing Near Future Improvements — demonstrate how human behaviour generates demand, and how that demand is answered by products and services built on cloud infrastructure. The map is not an inventory of technology. It is a spatial argument about cause and effect: behaviour comes first, services follow, and the distance between any two items on the map reflects the directness of that causal relationship.

Exploration

This map demonstrates the emerging context and scoping while mapping the changes in the economic and societal context over the past 10 years (2009–2019). The purpose is to train our ability to recognise emergent data points (Cloud Computing) and reflect them in a visual map that discloses the full data set of the behaviour economy.

The Innovation Object for this mapping exercise is Data as Material (Cloud Computing) as well as the Behaviour Economy — the roles of cloud computing in different sectors. The map represents the interplay of the data points with each other.

This is an opportunity to experiment with mapping as a model of thinking and visualising the whole ecosystem — the immediate as well as the macro ecology of the behaviour economy. This visualisation allows us to experience at one glance the complexity of product systems and subsystems, and the interrelationship between parts of the system.

How Behaviour Creates Products and Services

Every item on this map began as a behaviour, not a technology. People wanted to stay connected regardless of location — cloud storage appeared. People felt the anxiety of being constantly reachable — privacy tools appeared. People wanted to learn languages without attending classes — Duolingo, Babbel, and Busuu appeared. The map makes this sequence visible: behavioural tensions sit at the innermost rings of each sphere; the products and services that respond to them radiate outward in order of distance from that original human impulse.

The three sphere labels — Personal, Business, Education — are not industry categories. They are behavioural contexts. Personal describes how individuals experience and respond to connectivity in daily life. Business describes how organisations convert that connectivity into operational and commercial value. Education describes how society reproduces the knowledge and skills that make both of the other contexts possible. Cloud computing is the substrate all three share — which is why AWS, Azure, Google Cloud Platform, and IBM Bluemix appear at the geometric centre of the diagram, touching every sphere equally.

Reading the Map: Proximity as Meaning

Each sphere is drawn as concentric circles. Position within those rings is not decorative — it encodes a hierarchy of intimacy and dependency. Items closest to a sphere’s centre are its most foundational, identity-defining elements. Items sitting near or on the boundary line of a sphere are liminal: they are actively shared with an adjacent sphere, or on the threshold of becoming so. Items sitting between two boundary lines simultaneously serve both spheres.

The closer a service sits to a boundary, the more it has been generalised, commoditised, or expanded by its original market pressure. Services begin life deep inside a single sphere — purpose-built for one behavioural context. Over time, cloud infrastructure enables them to migrate outward and cross into adjacent spheres. Proximity in the map is therefore also a timeline: inner position means origin, outer position means maturity and crossover.

The Three Core Spheres — Ring by Ring

Each sphere is read from its innermost behavioural identity outward to its boundary, where it begins to overlap with adjacent spheres and generate new service categories.

How the Spheres Interact

The three spheres are not isolated. They overlap through cloud computing as a common backbone, and the map makes these overlaps spatially precise. As the diagrams progress from Map 04 to Map 10, new connection lines and colour highlights trace the actual routes services travel from one sphere’s boundary into another.

Personal ↔ Education boundary: Language learning tools (Duolingo, Babbel, Busuu, Google Translate, Hellotalk) and platforms (Khan Academy, EDX, Codeacademy) sit precisely on the shared edge. They started as Personal tools — casual, consumer-facing — but their pedagogical depth placed them at the Education boundary simultaneously. Google Pixel Buds, placed at this same boundary, signals the next product evolution: translation hardware embedded in consumer earwear. The “AI Integrated Devices — Learning Language and Translation Services on the Go” callout in Maps 09–10 formalises this as a distinct commercial category that behaviour created and technology answered.

Personal ↔ Business boundary: Wearable Computing, subscription platforms, and the autonomous vehicle cluster (Uber Autonomous, Boeing Self-Piloted Drone, Amazon Scout) sit in the overlap zone between Personal and Business. These services began as consumer lifestyle items but their logistics, data, and monetisation models are fundamentally commercial. The desire to have everything delivered, automated, and personalised is the behaviour; the subscription economy is the service it created.

Business ↔ Education boundary: Machine Learning, Deep Learning, IBM Watson, Digital Factory, LMS platforms, and maker/3D printing tools all cluster at this edge. The behaviour driving this boundary is the demand for skills that did not previously exist. Businesses need practitioners who understand AI and cloud infrastructure; educational institutions respond by building the curricula and tools that produce them. The “Data Scientist Education — Importance on AI and ML” callout names this boundary directly.

The three-way centre: AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, IBM Bluemix, and Alibaba Cloud appear at the geometric centre, equidistant from all three sphere centres. They are the infrastructure substrate — the material from which every other service in the map is made. No sphere owns them. All spheres depend on them.

Business Opportunities from Sphere Intersections

The richest commercial opportunities emerge precisely at boundary zones — where one sphere’s behaviours are close enough to another’s to create shared demand. Each opportunity below is named by the boundary it comes from, and grounded in the spatial evidence of the map.

Map Progression — What Each Diagram Adds

Maps & Visualisations