Christopher Alexander’s architectural thoughts about working communities and interaction design, which seem to be unrelated majors, are actually closely related. Christopher Alexander’s concept of working community is in accordance with slack’s design.
Alexander wrote in # 82 Office Connection, “Trips need to be short enough so they are not felt a nuisance.” In Slack, we can form or connect several workspaces. This allows users to make ‘short trips’ in Slack. They can establish office contact within the same application.
Alexander wrote in # 41 Work Community, “Each one a collection of smaller clusters of workplaces which have their own courtyards, gathered round a larger common square or common courtyard.” Each workspace in Slack has a channels with different themes. Users can obtain a smaller places in the same workspace. This also improves the working efficiency and convenience.
I also feel that Mural is very relevant to the work community-a platform that has a very high usage rate this semester. The square page design of frescoes allows users to find their own workspace quickly. Users can also freely organize the content and set privacy in their personal workspaces. This is also from what Alexander said in #36 Degrees of Publicness, “People are different from each other, and they want to be placed in different ways. People have different requirements for isolation.” Overlapping concepts. Likewise, Facebook can also set privacy. From this, we can see that Christopher Alexander’s thought has a deep connection with the foundation of interaction design.
I really appreciate that you mention the short trip between workspaces in Slack. I didn’t realize that can be a connection between channels as well.