randomosity

Bill Turkel pos­ted another great thought piece today on the Import­ance of Infra­struc­ture. This post is, as his oth­ers always are, very eru­dite, well phrased and pro­voke one to think. In this case, his fram­ing ques­tion seems to be whether one can really envir­on­ment­ally engin­eer innov­a­tion. His post sug­gests that let­ting the right people play in the right sand­box, with the right toys can yield aston­ish­ing res­ults. He addresses the nature of how we con­struct per­sonal space in order to bol­ster pro­ductiv­ity, cre­ativ­ity and all those good things.

Iron­ic­ally, I just fin­ished brows­ing past an RSS feeds sug­gest­ing the close con­nec­tion between clut­ter and depres­sion. Turkel’s art­icle is a raises the ques­tion of sur­round­ings to a higher level though. He invokes Chris­topher Alex­an­der, the guru of envir­on­mental design reas­on­ing, and con­cludes that “the right infra­struc­ture attracts the right people and then some­thing really cool hap­pens. But it isn’t pos­sible to pre­dict in more detail than that.” Thus, the Alex­an­der prin­ciple of tak­ing pat­terns and iter­at­ively explod­ing pat­terns into smal­ler pat­terns, stops at some level of gran­u­lar­ity. The chal­lenge that he iden­ti­fies is that cre­ation of theses spaces often demands some pre­dic­tion of the out­come to cap­ture the appro­pri­ate resources.

One thing that struck me about this dis­cus­sion was that my phys­ical envir­on­ment is very heav­ily depend­ent upon and increas­ingly aug­men­ted today by a vir­tual envir­on­ment. Moreover, many of the folk try­ing to use pat­terns to cre­ate the best work envir­on­ment have to be aware of these ties to the vir­tual worlds when cre­at­ing the phys­ical sand­box. Moreover, there is an intriguing con­nec­tion between how one trans­lates the ideal real world envir­on­ment into a com­pel­ling and use­ful online exist­ence. There’s a neces­sary trans­la­tion between the phys­ical and the vir­tual, but there is a clear con­nec­tion, that if we can bet­ter appre­ci­ate, might also cata­lyze results.

The second arise from the fact that I am one of those that Turkel iden­ti­fies as find­ing the cof­fee shop the most appro­pri­ate envir­on­ment for work. I blogged on this earlier and attemp­ted to get to this concept of the tech­no­lo­gic­ally aug­men­ted work­space in a pub­lic place. When I star­ted using cof­fee shops to work in I was still drawn back to the home office for things like net access and other wired media. Increas­ingly what I can do in a pub­lic space has become more per­vas­ive. This how­ever has changed the nature of the cafe envir­on­ment itself. Inad­vert­ently it was a refuge from the net — now it is invaded by the net and it takes dis­cip­line to tear one­self away. Everything is fluid and work­spaces have to be too.

I recall when we were work­ing with a designer on our space for Ardesic, we were attempt­ing to cre­ate an adapt­able and acci­dental space that people were able to turn into one that suited their needs and the needs of the com­pany. We tried to provide ver­sat­ile func­tion with white­boards on odd sur­faces and white­boards on wheels and walls that moved and desk areas based on a meta­phor­ical hug. None of this really worked. I test drove fur­niture at Her­man Miller’s lus­cious show­room in Toronto and came away con­vinced that much of this stuff would work, but when it was trans­lated into another space and tried to ful­fill oth­ers demand, there was a mixed bag of suc­cess and abso­lute fail­ure. Ulti­mately, although we recog­nize the need for per­sonal and per­son­al­ized space, its tough to har­mon­ize this with semi-public space.

I guess I am start­ing to stray from Bill’s point about infra­struc­ture before innov­a­tion, but decided that a tan­gent about the trans­la­tion between the phys­ical and the vir­tual envir­on­ment is worth con­sider, given that pro­ject infra­struc­tures are increas­ingly try­ing to blend the phys­ical with the vir­tual to reach their objectives.