serial consign

Given the past examination of topics such as large-scale conversations and corporate anthropology here at Serial Consign, I thought I'd share a few videos related to community and the mapping of networks. These two videos serendipitously arrived in my news reader at approximately the same time today and provide an infrastructural and aesthetic window into collaboration, communication and connectivity.

First up is an interview with Anton Kast conducted by Kevin Rose. Anton is the lead scientist behind Digg, the "often imitated and never duplicated" community news portal. In this ten-minute conversation he provides a fascinating window into the logistics of information management at Digg, the site is currently in the process of launching a new recommendation engine in a (needed) effort to provide users with the most relevant content given their past interactions with the service. Kast is quite articulate and it is very interesting to hear his descriptions of the "correlation coefficients" that connect and quantify the interests of various users. In listening to his explanations of this new feature, I couldn't help but smile and think of the several hours I've wasted over the last two years staring blankly at stamen design's brilliant Swarm visualization at digg labs. [via david cohn]

Thankfully, this second video is far removed from the noise of the commercial web world and comes to us by way of the Netherlands-based interactive designer Jori de Goede. As evidenced by the video above (and his Vimeo channel), Goede has a keen interest in the visualization of conversations and speech. This particular video is an elegant representation of the types of social geometries that can emerge from a relatively small group of participants. I'd be curious to see the results if Goede applied this methedology to a larger group of "conversation participants" in the future. [via processing blogs]

This most recent edition of Metropolis has an interesting piece on the intersection of the practices of anthropologist and researcher Karen Stephenson and Mark Cavagnero Associates Architects. Stephenson was hired by Chronicle Books as a "organizational consultant" to assist in the spatial design of their new office. The size of the publisher's staff had doubled over the past decade, and the company had simply made do with the limitations and layout of their previous location. In planning the conversion of their new space (a four-story former ironworks), Chronicle creative director Michael Carabetta brought Stephenson on board to help schematize an idealized office workflow as the basis for a programme for Mark Cavagnero Associates to work with. Stephenson is a Harvard-educated anthropologist turned management guru who has enjoyed widespread recognition ever since being profiled in Designs for Working, a 2000 New Yorker article by Malcolm Gladwell.

The diagram above illustrates the departmental breakdown of Chronicle Books and maps the connectivity between various teams. It is worth noting that the editorial department (marked "second floor") only comprises about 20% of the Chronicle labour force, and the crux of "tuning" the organization is in streamlining relationships between semi-related support activities such as design and marketing or publicity and contracts. A number of key relationships have been identified with arrows and we can assume that the connection between design and editorial, design and sales and sales and accounting have been selected as primary factors in the architectural interpretation of the programme.

It is always interesting to see how an elaborate network diagram is translated into architecture. While cross sections are seldom as sexy as complex social maps, the essence of the original study is implicit in the above section of the new Chronicle Books facility. We can see quite clearly how the original mapping of social interactions has resulted in the vertical and horizontal distribution of the Chronicle departments and even how this has informed the location of circulation. All in all, the project is a concise little case study on the relationship between social mapping and architectural design.

If you're interested in learning more about this project be sure to take a look at this month's Metropolis. You can learn a little more about Karen Stephenson through a CNN piece on her from 2006 and her list of publications also features several PDFs for download.