Coordinating Collaboration
Posted on April 6, 2011 | posted by:
The TransDesign program is constructed on the foundation of collaboration as a strategy for teams to address complex problems. However, students have focused on a narrow strategy of collaboration thus far – assembling a group in which every student is wed to the final output of that group. However, myriad examples exist both in the physical and virtual worlds to foster and leverage collective intelligence. Consider open-source software development, where programmers collaborate on a global platform, but at any point one individual might ‘fork the code’ and pursue an interesting tangent built on the collective foundation of group work. This space, which is fostered by collaboration, is ultimately liberated by an understanding of simple table manners – fork first, then chew on a new problem. As Steven Johnston identifies in his book titled, ‘Where Good Ideas Come From,’ the environments that support innovation are fluid and dynamic. One such environment is the liquid network, which cultivates the ideal context for ideas to flow freely, contrasting the chaotic patterns of gas and structural nature of solids. The question is whether or not this liquid state can be designed and implemented as a strategy for collaboration.
To contemplate the future of collaborative work, we must as a collective studio actively imagine and design platforms to create the ideal environment to support good ideas. In today’s studio, a simple game and social construct provided a degree of order and coordination. The results will emerge over the next week through, but the exercise was well received. To ponder how management theory, swarms, emergent behavior, systems thinking, and collaboration merge as a cohesive strategy to produce ideas might be what we are actually engaged in…