8/17

Self Organised Workplace

Since the beginning of the new millennium, evolution of the workplace has been under an inspection through expansive number of subject areas, most of which are concentrated in its spatial effects on the human body and mind. One can comment that these researches are in many cases attuned to the major political and economic events of our times but somehow methodologically unsettled in terms of an anthropological discipline which links society and culture in its intertwined progress.

Reflecting the social and behavioural symptoms of our age, we see that the hierarchal centre is becoming more and more blurred due to new modes of advanced communication technologies and digital platforms. Edward Said examines this social impact through his definition on how cultures really work;

“… But cultures are not the same, there is an official culture, a culture of priests, academics, and the state, it provides definitions of patriotism, loyalty, boundaries and what I call belonging. It is this official culture that speaks in the name of the whole.

In addition to the mainstream or official culture, there are descending or alternative, unorthodox, heterodox strands that contain many anti-authoritarian themes in them that are in competition with official culture, that should be called the counter culture. An ensemble of practices associated with various kinds of outsiders; the poor, immigrants, artistic bohemians, workers, rebels, artists, etc.

From the counter culture comes the critique of authority and attacks on what is official and orthodox. No culture is understandable without sub-sense of its ever present source of creative provocation from the unofficial to the official.

To disregard this sense of restlessness, within each culture and to assume that there is complete homogeneity between culture and identity, is to miss what is vital and fertile in culture.”

A new reading of culture and identity would lead us to alternative methods of governance as well as the ways in which societies and cities and eventually the world is organized. On one hand a deeply rooted centralized thought still reigns as the main cause of many social problems, primarily income inequality, and on the other hand, decentralized structures emerge as a reaction.

These structures replace “the leader” or “a prominent chief” with models that organize themselves and support the management through representatives.

Umberto Eco in his Poetics of Open Work emphasizes the term, “Serial Thought” when analyzing the development of this process. In this context, he describes the basic differences between classical structural thought forms and the thought process of open work.

In structural thought, the addresser and the addressee have pre-established codes and rules between them, and the whole communication model revolves around this assumption. Based on this presupposition, all codes may only be derived from pre-established codes, from the underlying code of all linguistic and cultural communication: the Primary Code, “Ur Code”.

On the other hand, in Serial Thought, “Open Work”; The “primary code” that underlies the main structure is questioned in each single message and each work, each task creates its own causes and poetic excuses.

Thus, going beyond the borders of previous systems or borders defined by such systems becomes possible. This style of thought acts as a platform of probabilities and creates a form that is open to possibilities of multiple outcomes.

Serial thought cares about creating the new and encountering the unexpected, rather than facing the same outdated structures at each step. As a result, it appears that the structuralist approach, which derives its codes systematically from the “primary code”, Ur Code, cannot find its correspondence in this new system.

This structural analysis is vital to understand the language of the age we live in. When we perceive the theoretical differences of the new structure, it will be also possible to understand all expressions of our times; be it music, literature, art, architecture and design. We can better foresee the organizational possibilities in social structures and recognize the new organizational dynamics of the cities.

In light of all these views, it is of great importance to evaluate the workplaces of the future and model different opportunities laid out in front of us with a totally new perspective. Therefore, if we evaluate the setup of workplaces within a framework, that does not merely approach them as a decorative element but rather as an attempt to understand the age, we might be able to ask the unorthodox questions. The questions we would like to pose in order to initiate dialogue in this direction is as follows:

Should the workplace of the future be designed by the “master planner” in a centric approach as in the cities of 18th and 19th centuries or can we plan it in an open structure that can be reorganized by the active participation of employees or at least their selected representatives?

How absolute should a setup or a solution be, or should it be modelled in a way that is open to eventual development?

Is it possible to design accessible systems that are open to the dynamics of time, that are malleable in time, that can evolve through the experiences, thoughts and even dreams of people, that can transform in time?

These questions aim to trigger a multiplicity of approaches to tackle the problems at the modern workplace, and invite all the addressed to be actively participant in the solution process in a collaborative way. A co-creative method would encourage us to ask all relevant questions that would lead us towards more interesting journeys to unquestioned territories of the human mind and soul at the workplace.