Things you do over and over

Christopher Alexanders ideas on Work Community resonate with how the app Slack works. Alexander writes, “Workplaces must not be too scattered, nor too agglomerated, but clustered in groups of about 15.” With slack companies are able to create open networks of communication between all employees while still offering specific communication spaces when they are needed. This function of Slack allows workers to not be too scattered as well as clusters them based on the company needs. The implementation of Slack also addresses another of Alexander’s points which is, “The work community is interlaced with the larger community in which it is located.”

Alexander’s Degree of Publicness makes the distinction between community-loving and privacy-loving people. He explains that community loving people enjoy living near services, or shops and enjoy people walking by their house whereas privacy-loving people prefer to live further away from public amenities and don’t like people walking by their home. There are also those who are in between but the point is that there is a diverse set of environments people like to be in, not one fits all. The nature of Facebook is controversial in this aspect. Those who are extroverted or community-loving, are those who benefit from facebook’s active feed and large community base. Those who are introverted would probably benefit from the direct messaging feature of Facebook but are put off by the inability to stay private, especially with your data, even with certain profile restrictions set by the user.

Mosaic Subcultures looks into how homogeneity instills stillness, staleness, or the inability to grow individual character. Having communities filled with all of the same kind of people prevents those communities from evolving their way of life and is intolerant of those who live a different lifestyle. This made me think of News channels like Fox News. Fox News is notorious for having a 1-sided right-wing viewpoint that often doesn’t tell the full story. Although this is known some people choose to only use this source for information and this reinforces their inability to diversify their portfolio of information sources.

Structure Follows Social points out that spaces or rooms should complement the activities that will happen in them. I think this can be applied to all sorts of services or products. For example, Google Maps is a space for people to find directions to where they need to go. Within this space, users are able to search for places and get instructions. The google map can also be moved and scaled so that the user can view all the information they made need at any time. If google maps were a space for finding directions but did not include a way for people to move the map around then people will not be able to use this space for its other main purpose, to replace a physical map. Thus the space and activity are mismatched and cannot work.