Knowledge Architecture
That Facilitates Trust
and Collaboration
Xanthe Matychak
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
