We walk confidently through the woods with a flashlight but our beam does not show what lies in the darkness around us. Digital technology has opened up a world of ease and comfort we had never envisioned – not so much robots serving us coffee as machines giving us information that we eagerly accept with too much gratitude and too little skepticism.

My research background is in the intersection of humans and computers — Human‑Computer Interaction (HCI) — but I believe we have already passed that era years ago. Digital technology has entered our domain and has become so integral to our personal and societal infrastructure that the human world, as we know it, would collapse should the technology falter.

Our evolutionary journey has given us the power to communicate, organize, and build as no other species can. And we have literally changed the face of our planet with that power. So much so, that virtually nothing is free from its influence or impact… including us.

We build to realize visions of a greater future but we live in the consequences of what our predecessors did not see around the blinders of those visions. The Organic Digital Domain is a study of the world beyond the limited views we have from the perspective of HCI. It broadens the research to all things that nature nurtured in millennia past and seeks understanding of how the digital factor can shape our collective futures.

The domain is broad, covering everything from organic chemical reactions and biological foundations of organic vigilance to digital interface design that can lead or mislead us, and societal behavior grounded in emergent properties of concentrated collective information.

• How do we design for vigilance rather than only for convenience?
• Where do second‑order effects hide when usability metrics look green?
• What new methods link organic limits with digital scale?
• How do institutions absorb—or resist—organic‑digital change?