• Affinity: the interaction rate between the person who posted ant the person who receives it.
• Weight: the relevance of what is being posted based on the content type (picture or text) and the interactions gathered around (likes and comments).
• Decay: the content’s age. The oldest, the smaller the score.

This abstract description does little to understand the consequences of the Edgerank algorithm in the formation of social groups. For example, when someone is liking content only from right-wing friends, she might be receiving less and less content from left-wing friends. This is what Eli Parisier calls a filter bubble.

To discuss the impact of Edgerank in the formation of political groups, I proposed a parlour game to be played at the Brazilian Free Software Forum. There the Social Participation Lab was organizing public experiments about current and future social participation technology. Facebook is the most used channel by Brazilian politicans to interact with their ellectorate, and perhaps also the main channel for citizens to discuss politics with each other. The goal of the public experiment was to make explicit the Facebook’s mediation of the political debate.

The game consists of people sharing updates on Post-its to other people who is connected by a wool thread (a friendship connection). Every player has a set of 21 like stickers to put on updates from other players. When an update is received, the player may choose either to put a sticker on it (the equivalent of a like button) and forward to another friend, or to return to the giver. When the update reaches its author, it cannot be distributed any longer, but if everybody is liking the update, it circulates across the network. The winner of this parlour game is the one who has the most likes in his updates minus the remaining like stickers left on his hand.

In the experiment at the Free Software Forum we asked players to post updates about the reduction of the penal age, a constitutional change currently being discussed by the Brazilian Congress. The updates that got the most likes were the ones in favor of penal age reduction, but there were more updates against the penal age reduction. The popular updates circulated so much that at some point nobody knew who was the original author and could not return the update to him or her. This was considered analogous to viral spread.

We could also observe changes in friendship. If a player had all his updates rejected by a friend, he would not try sending more updates to him. In contrast, a player who was liking everything had more chances to make new friends and spread his own updates. Not surprising, the winner was the one who gave all his like stickers at the beginning of the game.

After playing, we held a debate about the algorithm. The participants were surprised to know how quickly they can be isolated into bubbles if they are consistent in their behavior. They learnt that if they want to be aware what others are thinking, they need to like content that they do not really like, otherwise the algorithm does not show them any longer. This rather counter intuitive behavior is the only way to prevent being isolated with people of the same opinion in Facebook.

The Facebook parlour game has demonstrated a good approach for bringing the controversy around social network algorithms to the public. We expect the game to be also useful for designing algorithms that prevents people from isolation.

Nevertheless, humans draw their own boundaries too with fences, walls, maps, and languages. Those boundaries may be even more difficult to cross than the natural ones due to prohibition, penalties, or bureaucracy. As history unfolds, an invisible boundary may become harder and harder to cross, up to the point that physical artifacts are built to reinforce it. These can, of course, be destroyed later to signify reunion even that doens’t mean the boundary is gone. It may remain active in the collective memory still.

Boundaries stems from differences between cultures and organizations. However, these differences are not immutable. In fact, they change quite fast. A homogeneous group of people can be quickly fragmented by the spread of a separatist ideology. Conversely, an heterogeneous group can be reunited by integrative technologies. In any case, the differences will not go away, but change into something else.

In a capitalist society, the differences produced by organizations are shaped by competition and collaboration. These processes have a difference of their own regarding value. Competition aims at exchange value, whereas collaboration aims at use value. Since objects are produced both to be exchange and used, these processes are in contradiction. Boundaries emerge when the contradiction between exchange value and use value is manifested.

As mentioned before, the competition for exchange value reduces differences to quantitative scales: cost, productivity indicators, product features, stock price, and so on. These differences do not lead to boundaries because they are produced to unite organizations on a common ground. They accept this situations because it facilitates trading commodities with the minimal tension.

Similarly, when people are collaborating to build an unique object together, they accept suggestions and new contributors because they want to make it good. A new person might bring a perspective that hasn’t been thought by the collaborators before. The differences here are qualitative and cannot be easily compared. People engaged with the collaboration for use vale refrain from being compared against each other. This is because the motivation stems from building something that represents the collective as a whole.

The contradiction rises when the unique object must be exchanged for something else and when, in the opposite direction, the commodity must have great use value. Boundaries emerge to protect use values from abuse and to negotiate exchange values without disclosing cost information. They make it more difficult to exchange as well as to use the object’s values.

I have studied the emergence of boundaries in construction projects as part of my PhD research. In The Netherlands, this type of project uses to involve many organizations, related to each other not by clear hierarchies. These organizations need to collaborate to deliver the construction object and at the same time to compete in the market for new projects.

To understand how boundaries emerge and are crossed in construction projects, our research team interviewed stakeholders from the many organizations involved. From what we’ve got, I tried to map the boundaries in a particular point in time of the project. Each boundary corresponds to a company and the triangles are their main activities. The resulting image is quite messy and probably not very accurate. The boundaries between organizations are for the most part invisible and fluid, but nevertheless active.

As mentioned in the last post, the organizations were trying to homogenize their differences through the adoption of integrated collaborative technologies. This didn’t work as expected and the boundaries remained active. At the center there is a lot of overlap in the concurrent engineering activity, when all the stakeholders meet to review and adjust the design together.

Well, not all the stakeholders. The user was not present and did not understand very well why so many alterations have been made to the design. Then, the user thought that changing the requirements late in the project would not be a problem. He bought a device that consumes extra electricity without consulting the engineers and caused a major rework in the design.

In retrospect, the professionals admitted that there was too much emphasis in setting the boundaries within the technological framework and little work in engaging the user through lesser technical means.

Based on the experience of this and other construction projects studied, I designed a board game about boundaries in construction projects: The Expansive Hospital. Each player takes a professional role and they choose either to compete or to collaborate with the others. If they play only within the boundaries of their role and do nothing extra, there is little chance they will succeed in the game as a group. They need to cross boundaries and produce further differences to win the game.

I tested the game with bachelor-level facility design students and the results show that the team that crossed boundaries to collaborate raised more capital. The figure below is a map of the players’ boundaries in one particular group of players.

Each player is a triangle and the boundaries around overlap if he shares an object with another player. There were little shared objects during the game, however, at some point the construction professionals collaborated to raise their own incomes at the expense of the hospital financial health. As a result of this strategy, the hospital built by this group was soon bankrupt and could not rise more than the initial capital.

In contrast, the other group of players managed to develop shared objects that mutually reinforce each other: patients — on the healthcare side of the table — and design — on the construction side of the table. With integrated facilities, the hospital could treat more patients and with more patients, the hospital could invest in more integrated facilities. The hospital built by this group raised four times the initial capital.

Players in both groups crossed boundaries, nevertheless, with different motivations. In the first group, players wanted to influence the others for their own benefit, whereas in the second group, they tried to build something that was good for the hospital first.

The conclusion of this study is that boundaries are not bad for competition or for collaboration. Boundaries are places where differences are confronted, for codestruction or for cocreation between the sides. The impact of boundaries at work organizations depends on the way each professional deals with them.

Globalization puts into contact distant cultures, but also changes them. Cultural analysts alerts for the demise of traditional cultures in favor of globalized lifestyles. These lifestyles are linked to market exchanges, such as buying certain products and they are quite homogeneous across cultures, much like these products. The cultural differences that prevented cross-cultural exchanges until the XIX century are now becoming a matter of taste, for the differences are greatly reduced by the homogenization.

Homogenization can be explicated from a political-economic standpoint. When two different things are to be exchanged in the market, they need first to be compared against a common measure such as money. This measure does not take into account the qualitative differences in use value, but the quantitative differences in exchange value. These are related to production costs and market demands and have little regard for culture.

The homogenization of differences come as a side effect but also as an inducer of competition for exchange value. Thanks to homogenization, one thing may be valued twice as much as another different thing. This greatly expands the possibility for exchange, but severely reduces the possibilities for use. To be valued in the global market, the spaces, the products, and the services must be designed to be used in the same way. Since the use value is lower than local items, these are discarded or replaced early.

Multi-national organizations are major players in the homogenization of differences. They are responsible for pushing the items created in one culture to another. Some of them are so large and so wide that they even claim to have their a culture of their own — the corporate culture. This is made of the peculiar habits, beliefs, symbols, and procedures that are reproduced by the organization members without explicit mandates.

Due to its association with the conservation of the status quo and continuosly doing things in the same way, corporate culture is often blamed for tensions in the work environment. In the hope of eliminating the tension, top managers try to explicitly interfere with the corporate culture by discouraging certain differences and standardizing procedures. In the short term, strategic homogenization is hardly achieved; the response is often an acute reaffirmation of the difference.

Differences are preserved to survive the internal competition that organizations hold among their units or professionals — be that explicit or not. Competitive differentiation is as much as important for companies as it is for professionals in the labor market. Both try to show that their work outcome is valuable enough to exchange by other things. This sometimes prevents them to recognize the differences produced by other professionals or companies that could be complementary to their own.

The homogenization of differences does not encourage collaboration and cocreation, but fierce competition on a quantitative scale. Nevertheless, this process is counter-acted by the emergence of boundaries, which will be the topic of the next post.

In my PhD research, I have studied the attempts of companies and professionals in homogenizing differences in healthcare construction projects. The most common complaints I heard were:

• Professionals do not understand each other because they do not speak the same language
• Professionals do things in their own way and are not willing to change
• Professionals don’t take into consideration their peers’ point of view before making a decision
• Professionals look at the same drawings and get different interpretations

These problems typically entail rework. In order to avoid that, some companies tried to push the adoption of collaborative technologies such as BIM. They believed that sticking to a more contracted form of representation would concentrate better the communication efforts into one single channel. Previously, the team members had to communicate through many channels — emails, phone calls, meetings — and eventually important issues got lost in the shuffle.

BIM collaborative technology enables construction professionals to work with linked or single models. The model can be set to display only the relevant information to a certain discipline. In this way, the information from all the design disciplines can be homogenized and stored in a single model, from which multiple views can be generated.

The contraction of design representations was expected to optimize work processes in the healthcare projects studied, but they ended up alienating the team from design possibilities. The homogenization of differences between the design disciplines and their epistemologies — what is considered to be relevant knowledge — lead to misunderstandings.

Unable to fully understand what model edits meant by another professional, the designers were making wrong assumptions and producing technical errors. Further, the quantification of work outcomes into software statistics instilled more competition for exchange value, just the opposite of the desired collaboration for use value. The designers did not engage long enough with users and late use requirements appeared, what demanded painful rework.

In evaluation, the professionals recognized that collaboration and coordination were worse than without the collaborative technology, but they believed this was a necessary investment to be done. They expected that sooner or later, the new technology would become commonplace and they would lose competitiveness in the market. The main force behind this change was indeed the competition for exchange value.

In order to communicate and experiment the difficulty of handling the contradiction between exchange value and use value in design projects, I designed a board game called The Expansive Hospital. The game put the players in a situation in which this contradiction may or may not arise, depending on the level of the players’ engagement.

Each player has a role, with a different power and income scheme. Players gain money according to their actions and the richest wins at the end. This is the first winning condition.

If players stick to these roles, they might not win the second winning condition: reaching the hospital excellence award. This means generating great use value for workers and patients through the hospital design. If the hospital is good for patients, there is also more money in the game and players can become even richer.

However, the roles are set as to make this difficult due to the conflicts of interests. Initially, players are only concerned about their own self-interests and may or may not make the turn to common interests. If they make the turn, the collaboration for use rises and counters the competition for exchange value. From this point on, the contradiction is manifested in the game. Otherwise, if players compete only and do not collaborate at all, there is no contradiction and the game is soon over.

A double stimulation experiment was held with facility design students to study how players deal with this contradiction. There were two groups: one that just played as prescribed by the rules and went bankrupt in a few rounds, and another group that discovered a flaw in the rules and succeeded in building a profitable hospital. The flaw made collaboration more appealing than competition for everybody and they ended up building a hospital with great use value.

The experiment results lead to conclude that players — and perhaps design professionals — need to resist the homogenization of differences by standardized process, contracts, and collaborative technologies and produce their own differences. They need to go beyond the quantitative differences prescribed by the rules — in the case of the game, income scheme and decision power — and develop qualitative differences such as negotiation profiles, sense of belonging to a group, and common goals. These differences become complementary instead of mutually exclusive, moving the multidisciplinary team a step forward towards collaboration for use value.

In the next post, I’ll share how the production of further differences created boundaries between the players. Surprisingly, this was not in disadvantage for the project.

The use value (a.k.a. value in use) corresponds to the product applications found by the user. If the user cannot find an application or the product is too difficult to use, the use value is low.

In the long run, this imbalance may also affect exchange value due to the word-of-mouth and product reviews shared between the users. If no one wants the product, the exchange value falls and price becomes the attraction. From this point on, the product loses all its differentials and becomes a commodity that can easily be copied and sold cheaper.

For this reason, organizations are eager to differentiate their products and create unique experiences that cannot be matched. A common strategy for that is to expand products into services. The product becomes part of a service that includes other products seamlessly integrated to support the user. Use value is co-created between the multiple organizations attached to the service, including the user. The major advantage of this strategy is that even if the product can be replicated, the service cannot.

This integration is hard to achieve by companies organized to compete for exchange value, though. The organization is fragmented into silos, and the silos do not communicate very well because communication cannot be exchanged for something else. Each unit has their own product and they are not willing to dissolve the products into a more consistent service. In these organizations, the use value is a distant target that cannot grant direct benefits to work exchanges.

In order to expand into a service with value co-creation, competition must give room to collaboration. This is because only through collaboration unique use values can be co-created. Instead of working with separate objects that are later exchanged internally and externally, the organization works with co-created shared objects.

The organizational boundaries stands on the way to shared objects. Boundaries grow differences between departments or companies to enable competition. When in need of collaboration, a few organizations try to eliminate differences while many others prefer to work with them. Boundary crossing strategies try to reduce differences through integrative technologies or contracts and boundary crossing tactics aim at finding complementary differences through ad-hoc improvisation.

The shared object begins to grow when boundaries become a site for co-creation. This replaces the typical rivalry and fights that can be found at the boundaries. Use value motivates workers better than exchange value because it can be reverted back directly to their producers. People collaborate because they also like to use what they create.

The collaboration for use value does not replace the competition for exchange value though. It is still necessary to be competitive in a capitalist economy in order to get the necessary supplies. Hence every interaction at the boundaries must face this contradiction between collaboration and competition.

An interesting question is how to co-create unique use values while still maintaining a decent exchange value? Such question guided an experiment I run as part of my PhD. The experimented consisted in inviting design students to play a board game about the design of an expansive hospital.

Each player picks a role with a different power and income scheme. This creates an artificial boundary between the players, instigating competition. If the players do not overcome the competitive setup and realize how to collaborate, the hospital is quickly bankrupt and the game is over.

This happens because the design quality suffers when the players are designing with a competitive mindset. In order to win the game as a group, the players need to realize how to maximize the hospital’s use value, represented by the way patients are treated. If patients aren’t satisfied, the hospital and the players do not get money.

The results suggests that boundary crossing tactics are more effective than boundary crossing strategies to co-create use values. In other words, improvisation is more important to collaboration than integration is. This is because over structuring collaboration can easily turn into under covered competition, in which the players holding power over the structure manipulate the others.

The contradiction between exchange value and use value cannot be eliminated. Even when everybody seems to be collaborating, there might be one person with vested interests. This can be healthy if the collaborative structures are fluid and distributed. To secure that, the collaborative work should feed itself, i.e. people should use what they produce. A journal paper about the experiment is on its way to be published.

The object’s value is shaped, therefore, by the amount and rate of exchanges in the economy. Every time an exchange is consummated, the object’s value may change according to the law of supply and demand. When the demand is higher than the supply, people compete to produce the object faster and cheaper.

This the cornerstone of capitalist growth; as soon as people start competing, the value is lowered and the object becomes widely accessible. The drawback is that the object might not be useful anymore after going through this transformation into a commodity.

Competition for exchange value does not affect solely the production of goods. Any industry is subject to the commodification of objects. Even art works can be transformed into mass produced products. In knowledge work, the commodification implies the optimization of work processes, since human labor is the defining resource.

Knowledge work cannot be optimized without compromising the quality of produced objects, though. These objects are useful as much as they relate to what people already know, but this cannot be properly measured for exchange. People use to rely on abstract measures borrowed from other fields, which leads to generic applicable yet less useful objects.

Given that competition for exchange value has a short-term concern this is not a problem. As soon as the object is sold, the problem is over. There is no worry for the object because it will loose exchange value through use anyway. Even if the object turns to be useful, the exchange value is not affected because it depends on the market, not on the user.

This is also valid for internal exchanges in the value chain. The departments of a company can be said to exchange intermediary objects, which are later assembled into an object for external exchange. If the departments are competing internally for exchange value (measured not necessarily in money but maybe in reputation or influence) they display the same behavior: the object is no longer a concern after it is exchanged. The work may be of a low quality and difficult to build upon for the next department, but if it reaches the desired exchange value, it is considered fine.

I have run an experiment in my PhD about the competition for exchange value in design work. Design is often a multidisciplinary endeavor, based on the activities of different experts. I wanted to observe how people engaged in design face the competition for exchange value and how they overcome it. This is an important question since design is expected to deliver useful objects, not plain commodities.

The experiment is based on a board game called The Expansive Hospital. In this game, players have a choice either to compete or collaborate in building a hospital. If they compete too much, the hospital is bankrupt, whereas if they collaborate too much, someone takes an advantage. I played this game with design students as an experiment about competition.

The result of the experiment shows that even if students know they must collaborate to succeed as a group, they find very difficult to give up self-interests. Embodied in their roles as design experts, they are initially concerned about influencing others and securing their own profits. If they keep playing like that, the hospital suffers and they loose the game as a group.

Some students manage to overcome the initial drive through negotiation, but this is not always the case. The key for overcoming the hurdle is to find shared objects between players that can be used as a baseline for collaborative work. For example, the healthcare players must figure out that the patient is the core of their work.

The students that win in a winner’s group raises more money than the students that win in a loser’s group. The lesson is that the competition for exchange value must give rise to the collaboration for use value if design is to be sustainable in the long run. I’ll discuss this in more depth in the next post.

The rise of the assembly line brought a new strategy for factory space: the spatialization of the workflow, i.e. to ascribe tasks to certain spaces and to position these spaces according to the chronological order they are supposed to happen. These spaces are laid out on the basis of task duration; if a task lasts for a few seconds, the workspace around the line is very narrow, whereas if the task is lengthy, the space around the line is broader and more intricate.

The assembly line is the result of abstracting the work processes from the workers, analyzing them under a rational framework, and reintroducing them as physical constraints. The disposition of workers, supplies, and products in the ordered plan provided a quick overview of task accomplishment status to managers.

From the origin at the assembly lines, the spatialization of workflow has spread far beyond the industrial organizations. Modernist architects have taken the strategy to schools, hospitals, and even homes. Alexander Klein proposed in 1927 that the home should be designed to prevent the flow of inhabitants to cross each other. The Functional House for Frictionless Living intended to avoid family conflicts by reducing the everyday confrontation with the other.

Functionalist architecture embraced the spatialization of the workflow even when the flow was not about work. Le Corbusier went as far to say that the house was a machine for living. In line with this vision, he was one of the first to use bubble diagrams to describe functional relationships between different spaces in a new building.

The use of infographics in magazines and newspapers spread a means for seeing the spatialization of the workflow in complex buildings in a simple way. The Toni Molkerei dairy processing plant by Bosshard and Widmer is a point in case (1974).

This same plant was converted into a mixed use building in 2013 by EM2N. The program includes an art school, an university of applied sciences, a museum, event spaces, restaurants, shops, and 100 apartments. The contraction of design representation was key to the project, since the architects decided to allocate space only after making a data-rich representation with Building Information Modeling.

The building was planned to be experienced as a small city, with many possible routes and functional diversity. The coexistence of educational and cultural institutions in the same building was expected to promote the co-creation of knowledge between the inhabitants. The spatialization of the workflow that gave shape to the original building was dismantled, not without leaving its mark. Many changes had to be made to improve the flexibility in using the building.

These examples suggest that the spatialization of the workflow is in contradiction with the flexibilization of the workspace since the former aims for a perfect fit whereas the later dissociates form from function.

In my PhD research, I have been tracking how designers resolved this contradiction in the design of a medical imaging center. The medical imaging center had to support some standardized procedures for scanning patient bodies, but the managers and designers were underequipped with instruments to represent  space in relation to the workflow. The workflow was visualized as a simple list of steps.

Together with my fellows at VISICO, I developed some representation instruments that could assist the spatialization of the workflow. After the project was done, I continued developing these instruments and came up with an addition to Autodesk Revit: the Walking Paths family. This tool allowed for visualizing the workflow while designing workspaces. As a proof-of-concept, I retraced the spatialization of the workflow that happened in the medical imaging center project. I did so by watching the video recordings of the managers explaining the workflow and mapping the paths into Revit.

The result of this analysis is an animation containing all the four plans produced by the designers, arranged in the chronological order. The animation shows the evolution of the design while dealing with the aforementioned contradiction.

The initial plan had a very strict spatialization of the workflow. There was almost no choice for patients (green lines) and nurses (blue lines) when they entered the flow. They had to step into a room, do what they were supposed to do and step into another room. When finished with the scanning procedure, the patient was supposed to retrace the same steps and leave. In the fourth plan, the patients and nurses could chose different paths in the corridors. There were also some additional spaces for relaxation and casual encounters.

The spatialization of the workflow was decreased in favor of the flexibilization of workspaces with the aim of promoting the co-creation of knowledge. This was no simple adjustment, but a participatory deliberation that raised some conflicts. Some people wanted to spatialize the workflow, whereas others wanted to make it more flexible. The fourth plan still preserves the contradiction, but in a lower level of tension. This is in part due to the resolution of conflicts done through the participatory design.

From this experience, I learnt that participatory design is the best way to deal with the contradiction between the spatialization of the workflow and the flexibilization of workspaces.

I assisted Julieta Matos-Castaño in designing a collaborative low-tech visualization for the project’s dilemmas. At the top of a cube the strategies are laid upon and the achievements at the bottom. Green and red lines represent positive and negative effects of strategies over achievements. If a strategy has both of them, this is related to a planning dilemma the stakeholders must figure out.

The history of the office provides clear examples on how workspaces are becoming more flexible in general. The Wainwright Building was one of first generation commercial office buildings, designed by Louis Sullivan in 1890. It is based on enclosed cells with two or three desks each, providing quite some privacy and auditory isolation.

Under the influence of Taylorist approaches for work optimization, Frank Lloyd Wright designed the Larkin Administration Building in 1904. This was one of the first office buildings based on the open plan, borrowed from factories. The open plan allows for the managers to oversee a large number of specialized workers, with the drawback of diminishing their privacy and concentration.

In reaction to the rationalization at office work introduced by open plans, the Quickborner team developed the alternative office landscape in the 1960s, in which desks are scattered all over the plan without following a grid pattern. The goal is to create some degree of differentiation and privacy for workers, breaking the visibility lines used by management for overseeing. In fact, the underlying message of this layout is the affirmation of equality and diversity between the workers.

With the intent to increase worker’s privacy and reduce noise, Robert Propst devised the Action Office modular furniture in 1964. The varied possibilities of arrangements was expected to support an active office worker, which would move here and there while doing his job. This concept did not pick up steam, nevertheless. The copycats of the action furniture have thrown away the worker’s flexibility in favor of reduced costs and increased privacy. There was born the office cubicle.

Thanks to worker’s complaints about alienation, cubicles are no longer popular. The open plan is still common, but the trend now is to draw curved shapes circulation areas across the plan. The spaces are fit for teams working in temporary projects, including not only collaborative technologies but also integrated spaces for recreation and relaxation. Googleplex by Clive Wilkinson and DEGW serves as a showcase for the casual office.

In the last years, organizations are exploring even more flexible workspaces, where workers and furniture do not have fixed spots. Everything is moving at the office, in the attempt to follow the outbursts of team creativity. Since workers are able to work from home or from other remote locations, the reason for going to the office is to make use of such teamwork facilities.

I have observed in my PhD study how the principles of flexibility were gradually applied in designing workspaces for a medical imaging center. The animation below has four steps, each corresponding to one developmental stage of the floor plan. The first plan has segregated spaces for separate activities and the last has integrated spaces for overlapping activities. With the creation of the second corridor at the bottom of the layout, the scanning rooms could be connected to the dressing rooms of both sides. Previously, each scanning room had their own dedicated dressing room.

These layout transformations were achieved through the participation of users in the design. Although the users recognized that the initial plan was streamlined to their work processes, they demanded connections between the spaces to help team coordination and provide opportunities for casual encounters. This was in line with the center’s goal to promote the co-creation of knowledge.

However, implementing those changes meant creating more generic spaces, multiple paths from one to another room, and eventual points of distraction. These changes undermined the design strategy to make a perfect fit between the workflow and the spatial layout. In the next post, I’ll talk about the spatialization of the workflow and how the users and designers overcame the contradiction with the flexibilization of workspaces.

In the past, the worker and the process were indistinguishable. Since the worker was responsible for executing the whole process on his own, it was not possible to detach process from labor. Even if the worker was part of a collective association, there would be no division of tasks between the workers. In fact, the workers would do the same tasks together or in alternation.

The industrial revolution brought a different organization of work. Each worker had to specialize in a handful of tasks to be performed with the maximum efficiency. As factories grew in size and complexity, the tasks were broken down and workers had to become more and more specialized. At some point, workers lost the awareness for the entire work process and a new kind of specialized worker arose to take care of it: the manager.

The manager was a white-collar who oversee the blue-collar workers and also defined their way of working. He was freed out from the heavy duty of manual labor in order to keep the process going on. With the help of engineering, the manager could create new machines to improve the process, either by increasing control over the specialized workers or by automating certain tasks. The manager created and used knowledge to optimize work processes.

At the beginning of the XX century, Frederick Taylor publishes an influential paper criticizing the managerial knowledge for its basis on rudimentary rules-of-thumb and gut feelings. Taylor proposed that managerial knowledge could be based on scientific laws derived from the observation of workers on duty. At Bethlehem Steel company, Taylor observed pig iron workers with a stopwatch and introduced changes in their work process so that enough time was given to rest between the heavy loaded tasks. By following a fixed schedule of work and rest, the pig iron workers could achieve the maximum productivity at work.

A step further in scientific management was undertaken by Frank Gilbreth, who employed video cameras to record and analyze work, what became known as motion studies. One of the studies done by Gilbreth aimed to find the “one best way to lay a brick”.

In a different but similar approach to management, Henry Ford introduces the assembly line to produce cars in 1913. Instead of workers moving around the factory, the product to be assembled was the one being moved. The physicality of the assembly line assured that the work tasks were well divided and streamlined accordingly. Strangely enough, Henry Ford got this idea from meat packing factories.

In the 1950s, Taiichi Ohno developed a more advanced version of the assembly line with the principle of just in time. Just in time means keeping the inventory low and replenishing only when there are requests by the next step of the production chain. The goal is to avoid the waste of resources as much as possible. In practice, this is accomplished by attaching and detaching identification cards (known as Kanban) to supply packages, which stands in place for new orders as well.

When brought to the United States in the 1980s, the Toyota production system was named lean manufacturing. A major breakthrough of lean was the formation of multi-purpose teams in which members would rotate tasks with one another. These teams are also empowered by the manager to make improvements to the work process by their own, what represents a major challenge to the industrial revolution split between worker and process and the consequent worker’s specialization.

The optimization of work processes in lean manufacturing takes into account the availability of highly-developed automation such as mechanical arms that can take over manual labor. The worker is expected to stay flexible to the constant inflow of new technologies and fluctuating market demands. In order to do so, the worker has to create and use knowledge as much as managers did in the past.

The principles of lean manufacturing has been adapted to industries beyond automobile factories. Perhaps the currently most interested industry in lean principles is software development. They are seen as a means to shorten the time to market, a crucial matter for startups.

The Kanban board is a popular technique derived from Lean and used by startups. There the workers define their own tasks and attach to the designed status area, indicating where they are in the process. The publicity of the board builds up process awareness between the workers, not just for the management. Everybody is supposed to be constantly watching for opportunities to optimize the work process.

The optimization of work processes seems to be the next competitive edge in the nascent knowledge economy. However, time to market is just one of the factors for competition. More important than that is to produce remarkable innovations. Streamlining and distributing knowledge among the workers do not necessarily lead to remarkable innovations. For that, it is necessary to co-create new knowledge. A contradiction arises then since the co-creation of knowledge goes in the opposite direction of the optimization of work processes.

As explained in another post, knowledge cannot be mass produced like information. Knowledge requires going through long periods of sense making and relating, processes that cannot be optimized due to their subjective and inter-subjective nature. The creation of new knowledge is even less suitable for optimization since it is impossible to know what is being created and how it is being created before it starts.

This contradiction is perhaps being better dealt by the service industry. Service companies are improving their work processes through the co-creation of knowledge, as part of broader efforts to increase worker’s participation. Optimization is just one of the aspects considered. Next to it there is customer satisfaction, worker’s resilience, and organizational culture. The directions for the development of work are much more diverse than in other industries.

As an example, lean in healthcare is applied not only to process management but also to redesign the whole workplace. The workers achieve more self-determination than in lean manufacturing when co-creating knowledge about their own work. This socialization of the design space is motivated by the expansion of the design object, which can no longer be grasped by product-oriented design.

I have studied a project like that in my PhD, yet it was not successful in dealing with the contradiction mentioned above. We helped to organize a workshop with the healthcare professionals who are going to work in a future medical imaging center. The managers wanted them on board to optimize the work processes before the building is built as a means to raise motivation to sign up for the project. Our researchers from VISICO setup two instruments to optimize work processes: a healthcare simulator and a low-tech visualization.

Despite the moderate success of the workshops, the project failed to build up commitment with the participants. The healthcare professionals were more concerned about why and how the co-creation of knowledge would take place in the new center. Since they already had similar machines in the own hospitals, the motivation to join the center was completely other than what the project managers expected. Instead of organizing a workshop about the optimization of work processes, the project managers should have organized a workshop about the co-creation of knowledge to raise motivation.

One thing does not replace the other; however, trying to do them together fall back to the most equipped side, currently occupied by the optimization of work processes. Working towards the co-creation of knowledge requires courage to work without a guidance and accept the multiple directions that work can follow. With this courage it is possible to overcome the imperative of improving collective productivity and realize other means of being a better human through work.

Since the Renaissance, this divide is progressively being reduced in Western societies. The printing press enabled the mass production of information in the shape of books, making it more widely available. This development was followed by the opening of schools for everybody. Libraries were also opened to support schools and curious people. The encyclopedia and the libraries were the first attempts to concentrate information in a single spot.

Today we have a whole range of different devices to convey information, up to the point of causing information overload. Information can be mass produced, but not knowledge. Knowledge is achieved only after making sense of all these information, after going through the previously acquired information and relating the new with some degree of reflection.

There is little to be done about information overload at the individual level. The max a person can do is to consume less information. However, if the person is part of a group of people receiving similar information it is possible to manage information overload at the collective level. That is what organizations are striving to do: connecting individuals by their information acquisition and production patterns.

This is very important for companies once the economic competition became tied to the production of knowledge. However, knowledge is not the same as information, as previously stated. The existence of a medium to share information does not guarantee sharing knowledge. This is because information hardly provides any knowledge when it is out of context.

The competition for the production of knowledge sets out innovation as the pursued advantage. From that, the creation of new knowledge becomes more important than sharing the existing knowledge across the organization.

Organizations which in the past failed to implement systems of knowledge transfer and knowledge sharing are now trying something different: the co-creation of new knowledge. That means people from different departments, backgrounds, and disciplines join efforts to learn something new, something that is not yet there to be learnt, something that has in fact to be created while learning.

In my PhD, I studied a medical imaging center which had this objective of promoting the co-creation of knowledge among technology companies, educational institutions, and care providers.

In my intervention, I suggested that the co-creation of knowledge could start even before the center was built by involving the stakeholders in the design of the center. They came and evaluated the floor plans for the building according to their previous knowledge in similar facilities.

The floor plan was collaboratively redesigned with the stakeholders while co-creating knowledge about the center activities. This resulted in a new corridor of 156m² for staff circulation. Staff could now encounter each other casually and discuss the daily happenings, something that could perhaps end up in the co-creation of new knowledge.

The collaborative redesign was not only informed by the co-creation of knowledge, though. There was also the issue of optimizing the work procedures so that the expensive scanning machines would be kept busy all the time. This was necessary to make the center financially viable. Dealing with these opposing demands has proven difficult since they would lead to completely different designs on their own.

The floor plan above could be considered more balanced than before, yet this was not enough to convince the care providers to sign up for the project. The medical imaging center project as shown above ended up being cancelled, a major failure in setting up the partnership. In the next post, I’ll talk about the optimization of work procedures mindset that hampered the project.