Transdisciplinarity in Action: An Ethnographic Study of ...€¦ · 11/17/11 Transdisciplinarity in Action: An Ethnographic Study of MIT SENSEable City Labʼs Organizational Culture

11/17/11 Transdisciplinarity in Action: An Ethnographic Study of MIT SENSEable City Labʼs Organizational Culture

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November 17, 2011

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October 2011

Integral Leadership Review

The Premier Publication of Integrally Informed Approaches to Leadership

Transdisciplinarity in Action: An EthnographicStudy of MIT SENSEable City Lab’sOrganizational CultureLuca Simeone and Carlo Ratti

Luca Simeone



Carlo Ratti

SENSEable City Lab (SCL) is a research initiative at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)

aimed at investigating and anticipating the ways digital technologies are changing the way people live and

their implications at the urban scale (1). The SCL is nested within the City Design and Development group

at the Department of Urban Studies and Planning and has had an ongoing collaboration with the MIT

Media Lab. Over the past 7 years roughly 350 collaborators, representing more than 60 different scientific

disciplines (from architecture, urban studies and planning, civil and mechanical engineering to theology,

game programming, Russian studies, medieval studies, sport, music, space science, Asian arts, economy of

culture and many others) have collaborated on SCL’s projects. With its transdisciplinary, context-driven,

problem-focused approach, the lab truly embodies what has been defined as ‘Mode 2! knowledgeproduction practice (Gibbons et al. 1994). A practice that involves multi-disciplinary teams brought together

for short periods of time to work on specific, complex problems in the real world, thus exploring new ways

of developing the competency of transdisciplinary collaboration.

This article is an account of an ethnographic study conducted at SENSEable City Lab over a period of four

months from February to May 2011. The study was particularly focused on SENSEable City Lab’s

organizational culture of transciplinarity.

This short paper is the result of a dialogic interpretation of the results of the full study, a conversational

process between Luca Simeone – the cultural anthropologist who led the ethnographic analysis – and Carlo

Ratti – SENSEable City Lab’s founder and director.

Overview of the Research Project

SENSEable City Lab acts as an initiative that coagulates multiple creative streams and productive energies

coming from in-house transdisciplinary researchers and external collaborations with other institutions,

laboratories, companies. Along these reactive and agile joints, SENSEable City Lab generates disruptive

work that spans from architectural interventions, such as The Cloud, an architectural system for the city ofLondon, to innovative product design, such as The Copenhagen Wheel, a responsive system that transformsordinary bicycles into hybrid sensors/actuators that provide feedback on pollution, traffic congestion and

road conditions in real-time, or to future sensing technologies, such as TrashTrack, an initiative that usedhundreds of small location-aware tags to track different types of trash to reveal the final destination of our

everyday objects (and the waste management practices behind the removal process).

As students, scholars and practitioners are a part of these projects they weave their own personalized

trajectories, patrolling the frontiers of different disciplines, pioneering new methods and practices and

building learning structures in a sort of mathetics in action (2).



SENSEable City Lab therefore represents a unique observation landscape and we decided to carry out anethnographic study in order to trace the key components of SENSEable City Lab’s organizational culturethat favor its transdisciplinary.

Scientific literature on trasdisciplinarity has followed different approaches: while some authors have insistedon the idea of transdisciplinarity as a continuous and enriching transit among different disciplines in order tograsp the multiple dislocations of contemporary life (Gibbons, Limoges, et al. 1994; Nowotny, Scott, andGibbons 2001), others have adopted a more integrated perspective (Nicolescu 2002; Max-Neef 2005)grounded on new science paradigms (Wheatley 2006). Max-Neef synthesizes this approach by stating:“Transdisciplinarity, more than a new discipline or super-discipline is, actually, a different manner of seeingthe world, more systemic and more holistic” (Max-Neef 2005, 15).

For the purpose of this study, we decided to focus on the operational dimension of transdisciplinarity in thedesign field: an intersectional meander located at the crossroads of theory and practice. Several studies –such as the recent collection edited by Doucet and Janssens (2011) – have reported on the important relationbetween transdisciplinarity and design: knowledge production in design, architecture and urbanism isstrictly tied to the integration of discipline and profession that follows a designerly mode of inquiry.Transdisciplinarity seems to be a productive approach for designers who want to tackle perplexing andcomplex real-world problems.

Within this context our main interest was to explore SENSEable City Lab’s organizational culture behindtransdisciplinarity. From a relational perspective, organizational culture is a set of assembled codes andartifacts temporarily objectified but always susceptible to critical and creative recombination by individualsand their social life (Weick 1979). Therefore a research approach based on organizational culture theorieshas to take into consideration this variety of interpretations studying how stakeholders create meanings inorganizations through their understanding of events, actions, interactions within physical spaces andorganizational realities (Gioia, Schultz, and Corley 2000). In this sense, SENSEable City Lab’s physicalcomponents (geographic location, buildings, furnishings), organizational dimensions (relationships amongstakeholders, rules, policies, processes and practices, management system) and cultural narratives (valuesand assumptions behind the organization, personal biographies) shape (and are shaped by) the laboratory’sorganizational culture.

Key Elements of SENSEable City Lab’s Organizational Culture



1. The front door of the lab is almost always open during the day. Lab members and collaborators

constantly flow in and out. The lab follows extremely flexible engagement processes: hundreds of

people have collaborated with SENSEable City Lab’s projects over time, some of them for longer

periods while others only for a limited period of time (even for merely a few weeks); some of the

members live in Cambridge and have a specific (or exclusive) engagement with the lab, some others

collaborate on a part-time basis, maintaining their affiliations with other MIT departments, other

universities, other research centers or come from the industry or government bodies. The lab also

relies on a widely distributed network of collaborators scattered across several countries.

2. In organizational terms, SENSEable City Lab is not structured as a bureaucratic pyramid with a

traditional vertical reporting system. Small teams are the key elements of a more flexible

organizational order. Each team is in charge of one or more projects. Some of the projects have a pre-

set outcome and a clearly specified deadline. Others start as ideas that get shaped along the way and

therefore are initially oriented towards less defined outcomes. Projects’ lifetimes span from few

weeks (e.g. the preparation for a TED talk) to several months or years (e.g. The Copenhagen Wheel,Live Singapore!).

3. The number of members per team varies from few people for smaller projects (e.g. The wireless city,Spacebook, GEOblog) to several dozens (e.g. the Digital Water Pavilion, TrashTrack). In the pastfive years, more than 300 people have worked with one of these teams on SENSEable City Lab’s

projects.

4. Although there are some management roles (Carlo Ratti, Assaf Biderman, Kristian Kloeckl) that are

transversal to the entire group, teams are usually the key units for managing all these projects. A

network of authority and control based on knowledge of the task replaces the traditional hierarchical

structure. Within the team, tasks and responsibilities are distributed depending on the available

personal expertise and the operational context. Mutual adjustment and redefinition of tasks are

common within and across teams.



5. The organizational structure literally emerges from the interweaving of processes carried out by these

distributed teams. A complex horizontal and vertical integration is constantly reshaped as a relational

configuration drawn together by internal connectedness and emergent behaviors. Order is not

imposed from the top down but appears as teams work together responding to internal and external

inputs and changes.

6. Teams are usually managed by a team leader. This is not a rule that applies to all projects, though

bigger projects tend to have a project leader. Team leaders are generally not professionals specifically

trained in project management techniques but members of the lab who have knowledge and

competencies for the task. Since some projects have a longer lifespan, there are cases where different

project leaders have been in charge during different phases of the project. Teams are usually started

and initially shaped by the lab’s senior members but the distribution of roles is flexible: during my

stay several new projects were introduced to the lab’s members at the Tuesday lunch meetings and

people were invited to nominate themselves if they thought that they could contribute to them.

7. Membership within the lab and among the teams is extremely fluid. Short and part-time engagements

with flexible roles over time are rather common. The lab’s current members reflect a combination of

academic and professional competences. Some people collaborate at a distance, while others from the

lab in Cambridge.

8. The organizational culture is also very effective in creating an environment where people think that

they can give a significant contribution. The flexible structure of the lab and the subsequent

decentralization of power across horizontal connections create a sort of ‘distributed ownership’:

people know that they are contributing to influencing the lab in a significant way.

9. Ownership and trust mechanisms are also built through some important organizational rituals, such as

the pecha-kucha meetings (3) held every Tuesday, frequent brainstorming sessions, a yearly retreat

for all the lab’s members in a special location to collectively discuss and reshape the lab’s vision.

10. Inquiry- and discovery-based learning: students, researchers, professors work together with external

partners on real world projects thus carrying out research activity in a ‘Mode-2! knowledgeproduction way. SENSEable City Lab’s directors and members are also involved in a prolific

scientific production (with an average of 50 scientific papers published every year) and teaching

activities. Their course (Digital City Design Workshop) is in-line with the underlying philosophy ofthe lab: the students work on real-life projects mixing theory and practice. In April 2011 all the

students of the Digital City Design Workshop were flown to either Thessaloniki or Copenhagen tomeet city representatives and receive a briefing on the real projects to be developed during the course.



Further information

The cultural organization of space, the organizational patterns and the cultural artifacts analyzed in theprevious paragraph form a sort of underlying grammar that seems to influence transdisciplinarity.

True transdisciplinarity should cross the boundaries of academia and industry and operate in complexenvironments, constantly referring to the stakeholders’ dynamically and historically situated imaginings thatshape the sphere of social legitimacy. In this sense, transdisciplinarity can be considered a crucial buildingblock to restructure those fields of higher education still organized in traditional silos and to extend theirown spectrum of activity towards more significant interventions in real-life problems.

This article was a short report of the first phase of a multi-year research project. In the next phases otherdesign research labs in the USA, Europe and Asia will be investigated in order to evaluate theorganizational culture behind their transdisciplinarity with a particular focus on their different contextualconditions. Some key components of organizational culture may be effective in one laboratory while inanother may not work at all, as the laboratories live and perform within different economic, social, cutural,contextual conditions. What really works for SENSEable City Lab in terms of organizational culture maynot be suitable for other laboratories.

The study is still at an early stage and any recommendation from the community of authors and readers ofIntegral Leadership Review is more than welcome.



Acknowledgment

The entire SENSEable City Lab team significantly contributed to the study, giving insightful andproductive comments. The full list of credits and additional information on the final results can be found atthe following url: http://senseable.mit.edu/sos/.

Notes

(1) Extract from the description on Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIT_Senseable_City_Lab),accessed March 15, 2011.

(2) Seymour Papert defines mathetics as following: “Why is there no word in English for the art oflearning? Webster says that the word pedagogy means the art of teaching. What is missing is the parallelword for learning”, and he continues saying “I would use the noun mathetics for a course on the art oflearning” (Papert 1994, 82).

(3) Pecha-kucha is a presentation format where 20 images are shown each for 20 seconds. The imagesforward automatically and presenters talk along to the images (http://www.pecha-kucha.org/).

References

Doucet, Isabelle, and Nel Janssens, eds. 2011. Transdisciplinary Knowledge Production in Architectureand Urbanism. Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands.

Gibbons, Michael, Camille Limoges, Helga Nowotny, Simon Schwartzman, Peter Scott, and Martin Trow.1994. The New Production of Knowledge: The Dynamics of Science and Research in ContemporarySocieties. London: Sage Publications Ltd.

Gioia, Dennis A., Majken Schultz, and Kevin G. Corley. 2000. “Organizational Identity, Image, andAdaptive Instability.” The Academy of Management Review 25 (1) (January): 63-81.

Nicolescu, Basarab. 2002. Manifesto of Transdisciplinarity. New York: State University of New York(SUNY) Press.

Nowotny, Helga, Peter Scott, and Michael Gibbons. 2001. Re-thinking science: knowledge and the publicin an age of uncertainty. Oxford-Malden: Wiley-Blackwell.

Papert, Seymour. 1994. The Children’s Machine. New York: Basic Books.

Weick, Karl E. 1979. The social psychology of organizing. Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley Pub. Co.

Wheatley, Margaret J. 2006. Leadership and the New Science: Discovering Order in a Chaotic World. SanFrancisco: Berrett-Koehler Publishers.

About the Authors



Luca Simeone is a design anthropologist and entrepreneur. He teaches at the University of Rome, Italy andis a PhD candidate at MEDEA Malmö University in Sweden.In 2011 he was a research affiliate with the Senseable City Lab at Massachusetts Institute of Technology inCambridge MA.

Carlo Ratti teaches at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s department of urban studies andplanning, where he directs the Senseable City Laboratory. He also practices architecture and urban designin Turin, Italy.

Filed Under: Feature Articles, October 2011

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Transdisciplinarity in Action: An Ethnographic Study of ...€¦ · 11/17/11 Transdisciplinarity in Action: An Ethnographic Study of MIT SENSEable City Labʼs Organizational Culture