Rochester Institute of Technology | xanthe.matychak@rit.edu
[ 1] Hugo, Victor. "This Will Kill That." In The Hunchback of Notre-Dame. Ballantine Books, 2004.
July + August 2008
[ 2] Hawken, Paul. Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Movement in the World Came Into Being and Why No One Saw it Coming. New York: Viking Press, 2007.
With every new technology comes fascinating discussions about how technology shapes human relationships. Socrates took issue with one of the basic building blocks of all technology—written language—because he felt it negatively affected public perception of truth. Victor Hugo [ 1] wrote extensively about how Gutenberg’s printing press shifted the ownership of knowledge from the powerful few, whose repository for power was stone architecture (think hieroglyphs in the pyramids or frescos in the Sistine Chapel), to those who could read and write (think Martin Luther’s 95 theses). More recently, there have been similar discussions around the invention of the photograph, the moving picture, and radio and television broadcast.
The technology that is creating the revolution in communication today has been deemed Web 2.0; it focuses on user-generated content. Some critics of this technology fear that sites such as Wikipedia represent the end of truth as we know it, arguing that if anyone can contribute content, then we’ve lost the traditional measures of truth. Supporters of Wikipedia are excited about the end of truth as we know it—why were
we relying on elitist knowledge purveyors to begin with?
How knowledge is constructed and by whom has a direct impact on how we understand the world. Despite Hugo’s claims about the democratizing effects of the printed page, we are still bound by architecture. Books have architecture. This magazine has an architecture. And even though the architecture of the Web is more malleable than that of brick and mortar or the printed page, it’s still there, and it is shaping the way we communicate and relate to one another.
As someone who teaches industrial design and conducts sustainability research, I am concerned with how technology and architecture affect the quality of human relationships, specifically producer/consumer relationships. These relationships are apparently failing. Thousands of online organizations have sprung up that are centered around the social, environmental, and economic problems caused by our current models of production and consumption [ 2]. These models were, and still are, literally created by an elite few in architectures of glass and steel, that is, in office buildings, and they have been advantageous for big
business precisely because big business can afford those buildings. These models have been self-serving, creating their own barriers to entry to smaller businesses and consumers who want to participate in market activity.
The flexible architecture and wide distribution of the Web remove that barrier. If you have a mobile phone or access to a public computer, you are well on your way to entering the market. But something is still missing in this new architecture: Producers and consumers need a system to foster trust and collaboration, which are essential to business success. We need lots of creativity in order to rethink the architectures that shape human relationships.
In this article I will refer to constructions of knowledge as knowledge architecture and will argue that an architecture that facilitates collaboration among large groups will yield profound social and economic benefits for millions of people who were previously locked out of markets. I will briefly examine creative approaches to rethinking the architecture of an office building, as an office building is not just a space to work, but also a place where producer/consumer relationships are formed. Then
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