Christopher Alexander encourages workspaces to be broken down into smaller groups, indicating that most people would feel oppressed to work with undifferentiated groups of people. This doesn’t just remain true, but is actually more embraced with better technologies and the progressive utilization of internet-based services like Slack nowadays.
The philosophy that Alexander proposes would break institutions into smaller work groups with identifiable missions. The different work groups would need easy access to each other’s work and resources as well to form a sense of communication and collaboration despite being in charge of different tasks. It is pretty astonishing that even though technologies had completely changed our lives and how we work and collaborate throughout the years, this philosophy still holds up incredibly today. Slack as a service for example is not suited for super large channels with more than hundreds of people trying to talk at the same time, which is by design. Instead, having sub channels within a large one and breaking down groups of people to form tighter communications is clearly how it is intended to be used, and works wonders. The smaller channels being grouped as a whole within a server also helps with collaboration, it is very easy to access other channels and their public conversations, keeping everyone up to date when needed. All of which are perfectly in line with the Work Group philosophy that Alexander brings up. Particularly interesting to me to see how tech has affected the way we think and work so drastically and yet many of the psychological aspects of collaborative work still holds true.
