My IXD peers and I joke around a lot, saying things like, “Once you become an design major, nothing ever looks the same again.” Design problems everywhere! Design patterns everywhere, too. More often than not, to recognize the former you must first recognize the latter. How do things work? What defines them not working? How can we consistently get them working again?
Many a design theorist has taken on these questions, including Christopher Alexander, who wrote A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction in 1977. In this architecture-based book, Alexander breaks down the ways (or patterns) with which we can create interactive and intuitive living spaces for people. The term “living” comes into question in the discussion of one pattern called Work Community. Alexander writes:
The people of our culture believe that they are less alive when they are working than when they are at home; and we make this distinction subtly clear, by choosing to keep the word “live” only for those places in our lives where we are not working.
— Christopher Alexander, p223
Alexander posits that the key to creating a healthy workplace is to make it the office a neighborhood, the desk a home, and communication as smooth as if it were traveling across a dinner table. Of course, his book was published more than fifty years ago. Workplaces have changed, and already we can see Alexander’s Work Community pattern in practice.
Take Slack for instance. Alexander writes that there are five “relationships” necessary for workplaces to function as communities, and we can apply almost all of them to Slack:
1) Workplaces must not be too scattered, nor too agglomerated, but clustered in groups of about 15. I’ve known a GREAT many Slack channels with more than 15 members, but the point still stands. Slack isn’t some lump of people swimming past each other and exchanging pleasantries. It’s a system, both efficient and social, divided into smaller sections specific to a certain role, interest, or task.
2) The workplace community contains a mix of manual jobs, desk jobs, craft jobs, selling, and so forth. As noted before, Slack channels are extremely diverse. Teams from opposite sides of the business operate side-by-side, always a ping away. Though there may or may not be any “selling” going on (hopefully not of the MLM kind, especially) there ARE channels devoted to things outside of work duties, like pets, books, recipes, and events.
3) There is a common piece of land within the work community, which ties the individual workshops and offices together. Slack’s entire mission seems to encapsulate this point. No more endless email threads. No more post-it notes left stuck to your screen or mug. Slack is a common ground for almost all employees (to varying levels of course) to make announcements, ask questions, and otherwise interact.
4) The work community is interlaced with the larger community in which it is located. This point is especially important, and something that most companies using Slack are well aware of. In almost all of the Slack workspaces I’ve been a part of, I’ve seen channels specifically for women, POCs, LGBTQ+ individuals, and more.
5) That the common land, or courtyards, exist at two distinct and separate levels. What Alexander means by this is that each “team” or sub-group should have access to the central common ground but also have their own space, which remains connected. Again, with Slack’s channel system, this falls into line pretty naturally. You may be part of the UX channel but also have access to the Announcements channel, which unites the entire company.
Christopher Alexander’s A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction is clearly still relevant, and it’s remarkable seeing how many of these patterns apply to fields outside of architecture—especially to this day!
