Forget the cubicles!

Whenever the word “workplace” pops up, the first image that comes to your mind might be a company with many square identical cubicles. But the modern workplace can be totally different as many organizations turn to mainly run on digital platforms. Stack is an instant messaging platform that combines chat and emails. According to Christopher Alexander’s “work community” patterns, Stack is perfect for building a strong community in the workplace. “Workplaces must not be too scattered, nor too agglomerated.” Slack allows people to create a public channel that allows all members to share the same interest. It’s easy to find channels dedicated to any kind of community that people care for. In this way, Slack follows Alexander’s “office connection” pattern since the work community from your company is just one click away from your hobby community. People are no longer be separated by architectural obstacles like walls or floors. When you need to get in touch with one person, or a smaller group of people, you have the option to direct message them and not the entire team. This is ideal when working with a smaller group and a person. This lack of corporate size was also a benefit. Slack was small enough to be responsive. The pattern of “small meeting room” encourages people to put more attention and effort into the relationships they built.


But Slack has its own problems. Christopher Alexander realized the importance of privacy when he wrote about “intimacy gradient” and “degrees of publicness”. “Workplaces should be decentralized” Slack’s decentralization gives users control over which channels are created, which is great until you realize it feeds into your FOMO (fear of missing out) The constant notifications make us feel valued and informed, but it also makes us fearful that we’ll be ill-informed if we don’t check a message immediately, even though very few truly need our instant attention. It’s scary because messenger-based systems directly tap into how humans seek to reward themselves, and the long term result is unhealthy. This is the reason why some people are finding Slack to be a time-sucker rather than a productive tool.

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3 thoughts on “Forget the cubicles!

  1. I agree with your analysis of Slack and space. The convenient conversion between large group and small team will help people reduce a lot of inconvenience in their work. It can also save time.

  2. I like how you went over the potential problems of slack. Agree with you saying that he values privacy when talking about the topic in his book.

  3. I am not as experienced with slack but I do know Discord and it’s my understanding that they are very similar. I think it’s interesting that there is a professional way to keep tabs on projects or subjects you might be interested in at the workplace. I feel like this is an awesome opportunity to have non-work related channels as well, to deepen the community aspect at work.

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