You may recall us talking about The Battery Park Design Competition that happened in the Fall of 2012. A small team of design collaborators at CO:WORK submitted a concept to the competition, which happened to come due in the wake of the Battery Conservancy’s offices in New York City being washed away in Hurricane Sandy.

Recently we received word that the competition received over 650 final designs. Wow! What an amazing effort to be a part of. The next stage will be judging and exhibiting 50 selected design works.

The jurors will be announcing the 50 finalists in April 2013 and the exhibition is expected to carry on until Fall 2013. This will be followed by Prototyping and Fabrication into next year.

We are happy to contribute to the Battery Park Revitalization Project through this competition. It gave us a great opportunity to flex our creative collaboration muscles as a new group of CO:WORKERS. We are very much looking forward to the results and wish all participants good luck in the selection process.

CO:WORK VISION

To build an active, dynamic and vibrant community of CO:WORKERS who use the CO:WORK space in flexible ways.

To encourage collaboration, in small unstructured and informal structured ways, amongst multidisciplinary and intersciplinary people.

To coordinate as a community, to bring multi-­disciplinary skill sets and a collaborative, creative approach to societal and commercial projects.

CO:WORK PRINCIPLES

Space has a psychology. A clean, uncluttered, open-­concept, and bright workspace inspires imagination and creativity.

Human proximity fuels us.  CO:WORK is for those people who know that they feel better, and that their work is better, when people are nearby.

Flexibility is freeing. The CO:WORK space is flexible and membership is flexible.

Open-­ness is the foundation to collaboration, to multidisciplinarity, to innovation.  To build our community of CO:WORKERS, we rely on the theory of natural attraction.

Community forges connections. CO:WORKERS are part of a professional community, and communities tend to help one another.

CO:WORK INTEREST AREAS

While interest areas will naturally evolve as a community builds and forms, CO:WORK has some focused areas of interest:

Creativity: Any and all applications of creativity to commercial work, especially for impacts of innovation.

Design: Design as a term is broadening to include a way of thinking, with a particular applicability now to problem solving for complex problems involving wide multi-stakeholder systems.

Entrepreneurialism: Capturing the entrepreneurial personality of vision and proactivity, and entrepreneurial models that can achieve commercial economic sustainability, with a particular interest in supporting small business.

Knowledge: Continued understanding for what constitutes knowledge work and how an economy of knowledge workers will unfold is of interest.

Education: A sphere ripe for innovation, where educational needs and modes of delivery for a myriad of users are being examined at the same time as need and value for the sharing of knowledge intensifies.

With more than 200 participating spaces, including more than 100 in our nearby neighbour U.S., the Coworking Visa is an amazing program working to meet the needs of a new work force.  Terms of use vary from space to space so be sure to check the terms for the space you want to visit.

CO:WORK’s participation in the Coworking Visa extends active members of any other participating space access to the CO:WORK space for up to three days.

Have you been nurturing a concept for a workshop you’d like to lead or facilitate? Just haven’t gotten around to it? We’re looking to build partnerships with some select CO:WORK ‘Faculty’ willing to conceive of and to host workshops in the CO:WORK space. We are looking for innovative, creative and entrepreneurial topics of all shapes and sizes.

Thought starter topics:

• Productivity Tips and Tools
• Intro to Mind-mapping
• Storytelling at Work
• Mindfulness Practice

If you are interested, please reach out to us at info@coworkonbloor.ca

We are hosting our first design collaboration session of 2013 as part of the Metropolis Magazine Next Generation Competition.

The Challenge
(From this competition site) This year the challenge is to develop solutions that empower, advance, and include groups often overlooked in the design process (including but not limited to, our rapidly increasing aging population and citizens with disabilities).

The Collaboration
We are assembling a team to meet the deadline of February 18th, 2012. The first meeting is on Monday, January 21st from 2-4pm at CO:WORK.  The project will require approximately 4-6 hours of dedicated time. Any expressed interest to join our current team can be sent to info@coworkonbloor.ca.

Prepared for the Canadian Marketing Association, February 2012.

In On Collaboration: Part One, I introduced some personal perspectives on the concept of Collaboration. And while I noted the infancy of our academic understanding of the concept, I mentioned my discovery of one journal article in particular that had captured my attention.
Authors Fiore, Rosen, Smith-Jentsch, Letsky & Warner (2010) wrote Toward an Understanding of Macrocognition in Teams: Predicting Processes in Complex Collaborative Contexts. The authors of this article put some science around the murky concept of Collaboration. And they share some validated guidance for how to help make Collaboration happen productively. They identify five keys to collaboration, keys which you might want to apply to your own collaborations:

Collaboration Key #1: Externalized Cognition
A fancy term, yes. But externalized cognition simply refers to the degree that knowledge is made external beyond each individual within a team and hence shared amongst a team. Examples of externalized cognition could be as simple as white-board mapping of thinking for other team members, or note-taking that then is shared amongst them. The degree with which this happens – that cognition is externalized – is a contributor to productive outcomes from collaboration. So, next time you are bringing a group together, be sure to fill that white board up with the fruits of the conversation. Take notes, and share them. Consider what ways you can bring physical form to the group’s cognitive work.

Collaboration Key #2: Team Cognition
Team cognition occurs when the team has been able to establish individual roles for each member, so that unique skills can be applied to a problem in a coordinated way. In outcome, the team comes to operate like an “information processing unit”. The best example I can think of to illustrate this is the way players on a football team play. The quarterback calls the play, and is responsible to make the throw, while the defense-men work to clear the path for the forwards trying to make the catch and get across the line. The team players operate as a coordinated unit. When you build a team, are you conscious about bringing together a skill set of people, with individual and diverse strengths that together can form a unit? And is it clear that each ‘player on the team’ has a specific role to play as a part of that team?

Collaboration Key #3: Group Communication Orientation
The authors note that performance improves when group communication is clearly oriented to the task-at-hand. You can all imagine the times when groups get sidelined by personal differences, opining, or even debating formatting of documents. Improved team performance outcomes come from focusing group communication on the problem to be solved. Even more specifically, improved outcomes come from a majority of time allotted to defining the problem at hand. Poor outcomes resulted when groups spent time working on solutions before giving adequate attention to problem definition. And perhaps counter-intuitively, spending time considering negative possible outcomes contributes to improved performance as well. The next time you pull a team together, remember this: ensure communication is focused on the task explicitly. Carve off diligent time to consider the problem before any consideration is given to possible solutions. And be proactive about considering all potential outcomes, including, importantly, the negative ones.

Collaboration Key #4: Collaborative Learning
A fourth key to collaboration is collaborative learning, which refers to how well groups “share, store and retrieve” learning. This is quite straightforward to explain though not necessarily to achieve. It requires an efficient means around which learning is shared and leveraged across the team. There are many collaboration tools: think Skype, Google Groups or Google Docs and of course the ever-reliable collaboration tool of face-to-face time. And do note that there is a difference between sharing data or information or documents and sharing ‘learning’. While data, information and documents matter, it is key is to facilitate the sharing, storing and retrieval of the group’s learning. When putting together your next team, seek to define the collaboration tools and the face-to-face touch points that will serve the sharing, storing and retrieving of the group’s learning. And then use them diligently.

Collaboration Key #5: Knowledge Building
The final collaboration key is knowledge building. This is a more detailed idea that requires a deeper understanding of the differences between data vs. information vs. knowledge. Very briefly, data transforms into information when it becomes contextualized and information then becomes knowledge once connections are made between pieces of information. A key to successful collaboration is in the team’s ability to achieve this process of Knowledge Building: to take data, transform it into information and then to transform that information into knowledge.

My goal here was to provide some academic understanding about the science of collaboration in a way that you might be able to apply it to your immediate team-work activities.

RSVP HERE

We tend to power-down once the holidays arrive.  And we at CO:WORK note that this may put your productivity at risk!  So we’re offering a sign-up special for those who don’t delay.  Dive right into a new part-time or full-time membership in December or January and we’ll give you 50% off the membership price for December and January.  Essentially we give you membership for half-price because we suspect you may be working half-hours! Full pricing kicks back in come February when we know you’ll be getting back into full gear. Part-time membership for access up to 3 days per week at 50% off is just $87.50 + HST. Full-time membership for access 5 days per week at 50% off is just $140 + HST.

Written by Heidi McCulloch

I saw Broken Social Scene in concert recently; it was a private concert and I was one of only about 30 people in attendance. I was up close and personal with the band, and able to closely observe the way they interact with each other: their words, their body language, and their facial expressions.

They are known to be a collaborative band, often referred to as a collective. They bring in new members on a regular basis, and experiment with alternative musical styles. This situation was no different. They had two opera singers on stage with them from the local opera company essentially delivering a rock opera experience.

Broken Social Scene does some things differently. They exhibit behaviours which I believe are hallmarks of Collaboration. And the key thing is that these behaviors all appear to happen fluidly as though it’s just the way it goes on a regular basis.

1) Their actual physical positions occupied on stage change throughout the show.
The lead singer moves from middle to side, to back of stage, from song to song. Guitarists move from left stage to right stage. Everyone moves around. There doesn’t appear to be a rigid physical position for each or any band member.

2) There is no hierarchy of role.
The lead vocal in one song becomes the back-up vocal in the next song, and vice versa. At one point, the “back-up” singer sang vocal lead and the “lead singer” was not even on stage. The hierarchy of “a lead singer” and “a back-up singer” does not appear to exist. A singer is a singer.

3) New members are always coming in.
This is probably a crucial part to nurturing the collaborative culture they have. Bringing in new members fosters the embracing of new perspectives within the group, regularly. But it also would foster that interpersonal culture they seem to have, of working together, abandoning hierarchy and the rigidity of role.

4) Members have the technical skill to play multiple roles.
Not only do physical positions occupied move around, not only does hierarchical role move around, but also the members actually technically have the skill and ability to play multiple roles. The guitarist sings vocals, and plays keyboard and jumps on the drum set. And same for other members, who, at best, are able to technically step in and fill different roles in the band, and at the very least, are able to ‘understand’ more deeply roles other than their own primary one.

5) Leadership is actually ‘modeling’ Collaboration.
The last observation may actually seem counter to collaboration but I don’t think it is. Kevin Drew and Brendan Canning have “led” the band since its inception. When they are on stage, you may deduce that Kevin has some leadership but you might not pick that up about Brendan. But if you look a little closer, you will see a style with both of them that signals a respectful, even relaxed kind of leadership that isn’t about giving direction, its about setting an example for the qualities of collaboration detailed here. These two model the tenets of collaboration outlined above and hence likely have “led” the band in securing its place as a band with a culture of collaboration at its core.

Implications for Fostering Collaboration in the Workplace:

- Change Physical Position: At work, do you find you often use the same meeting room, sit in a similar position within that meeting room, sit yourself close to the same people, have people come to your office for meetings versus going to theirs? Do you or others gravitate to similar recurring physical places at work? Mix that up. A change in physical position changes perspective, often only in little ways, but it contributes to keeping us open-minded, sharp and fresh in reacting to new situations.

- Erase Hierarchy of Role: This to me is the future of work. Just as a singer is a singer, it’ll be important in work that a writer is a writer. Sure, each writer has different levels of experience and likely different natural areas of strength. But a writer must be a writer. Hierarchy is redundant in this day and age. It slows us down and keeps us working in old, stuck ways. Consider your office workers as a pool of talent, and learn to apply that talent where it’s best suited. That will be the difference between leadership and management. Management needs hierarchy. Leadership doesn’t.

- Bring New Members In: This is such an immediate opportunity for growth of collaboration in the workplace. Bring new members into projects. This will require collaboration within the team while also bringing in new perspectives. Here’s the trick on bringing in new members: Keep the majority of the team consistent, so that the new member is a ‘spice’ in the recipe not the flour. And for this to work, no hierarchy and strong leadership works best.

- Technical Capability across Multiple Roles: Teams might be able to work more collaboratively with members who, while they may be specialists, have a generalist understanding. Collaboration works best when the writer has an understanding of art direction, and the ability to think strategically, is technologically current and has a good client service attitude. While the primary specialty may be in writing, it works better when members have some ability in the functions of the other team members as well.

- Leadership means Fostering Collaboration: And lastly, if collaboration really matters, and is the key to the future of work, then leadership must be about fostering that collaboration. Leadership becomes less about directing, and definitely much less about managing and much more about modeling. Modeling the tenets of good collaboration and building the infrastructure to foster that.

FINAL DESIGN

LATE-STAGE PROTOTYPE

For the last few months, a small group of designers came together at CO:WORK to participate in the Battery Conservancy’s Americas Design Competition. The project brief asked us to propose “iconic movable seating” that can produced up to 300 times for the Battery Green site in lower Manhattan. This would be a part of the expected 18 million dollar revitalization plan for slated for completion in 2014.

The official design considerations were as follows: 

• Movable seats that are suitable for outdoor use and a range of activities
• Stackable seats that can be easily stored and locked
• Seats to be suitable for people of different ages, sizes, and abilities
• Seats that incorporate sustainable practices
• Seats that are friendly to the grass-lawn surface of the Park
• Seats that fit in the Park as a whole
• A Radio Frequency ID tag (RFID security) on each seat
• A discreet place for a donor/sponsor recognition on each seat
• Beautiful, comfortable, and durable seats that are economical to manufacture
• Seats that work well alone or in groups; modular seats are acceptable.

 Some of the things we felt were in important considerations in a needs assessment were discussed in early meetings: 

• Manhattan population/demographics
• History of the park
• Needs assessment–What do we know about the local population/visitors
• What is the existing site right now/other projected projects?
• What is missing in the park?
• Concepts
• Materials
• Affordability
• Mobility/Flexibility

We drew some interesting conclusions in our first few meetings in regards to the site context and our historical research of the site.

On Lower-Manhattan: Typical New-Yorkers can tend to be auto-independent. Individuality is highly valued in the dense urban areas of New York. It is an epicenter of world culture, intellectuals and creative pursuits.

Some case studies for development in New York we looked at:

NY High Line
Atlantic Yards Revitalization
Silicon Alley (as a social model)

On the Site History:

Nearby: Staten Island Ferry Docks, the site is framed by a semi-circle of water in the NY Harbour and East River Esplanade, a surrounding walkway and many bike-paths. The other side is the Financial District. The whole park is 25 acres and contains an Urban Farm, Castle Clinton (aka Castle Garden, originally an off-shore island unto itself and the first immigration site in America). The foundation below ground has a lot of archaeological interest, part of the transportation-construction history of the city.
Castle Clinton contains an aquarium, a beer garden, an exhibition center, and theater. It is opposite the Battery Green and the Green is somewhat of a lead up to the castle.
The Statue of Liberty is visible from site.

On Parks:

Who goes to parks?

People with kids, people with animals, young people to hang out, older people to stroll, performers, musicians, athletes, cyclists, people seeking refuge from the city, pedestrians, tourists.

What are people seeking?

Quiet space, place to socialize, place to relax with a book, recreation, picnics, dog-walking, sunshine, fresh air, nature, kid-friendly environment, art shows. People will seek “better parks” for certain activities ie: sports, live-events, dog-walking, or kid-friendly.

What does a ‘Park’ Usually consist of?

Unique landscapes, water, bridges, man-made landscapes–flowerbeds, composition–different levels/heights, subtle changes, views, perspectives, transient spaces, green space, wildlife; birds, seagulls, pigeons, rodents, trees, grass, ponds, pathways, dock-side settings, waste bins, benches/seating.

Based on these meetings, we began sketching and ideating and identified key points of interest and inspiration.

Our breakthrough ‘aha moment’ occurred when we decided on using the Oyster as
our primary concept. The history it had played in the waterways of the New York Harbor we found as a source of inspiration and history surrounding the site.
The form of an Oyster bed as well as the oyster’s biological processes became a study for our ultimate concept.

We moved into form and development and remained there for some time as we produced prototypes that went through many iterations.  We used basic 3D modelling programs to do quick modelling and concentrated on the form as being sculptural and able to be arranged in various interesting manners on the green.

We sought a way to show the shell form as iconic and movable without redundancy or being too light. Some of the factors we considered were security and durability. In the wake of Sandy, we considered resilience to all-weather conditions as well.

Our Statement of Intent

The New York Harbor shoreline has changed and grown with the ebb and flow of Manhattan.  It has formed the foundation of the streets, bound together buildings, fortified a city, fed its inhabitants, and is once again breathing new life into its waterways. Expanding out, it eventually absorbed the beloved Castle Clinton into the city limits and sprung from it the new Battery Park.

The revitalization of Battery Park can be considered an homage to one of its oldest and newest inhabitants – the oyster.

As a staple in the diet of the native Lenape and the newly arrived Dutch, the oyster also quickly became the most democratic food due to its abundance. Consumption was so rampant that

discarded shells were eventually incorporated into the building of the city. Their ability to renew the waters that sustained it made it an invaluable but often exploited resource. Then the eventual pollution of the New York waters that rendered them too dangerous to eat any longer is now part of the driving force that is bringing them back.

 Seeking more ecologically focused ways to revitalize the water, the oyster has been given a new life in New York. Oysters represent the new beginnings that had once come through Ellis Island. The fresh starts and life upheavals that continue to influence the landscape of New York. And the many new stories that are nurtured off the back of New York’s history.

 We propose a seat that honors the oyster’s strong and resilient form. The curved form takes its proportions from a section of a whole shell. It allows for an arrangement of chairs to form a full circular bench but encourages park goers to delve into their playful side as they design their own arrangements.

 Made of injection molded plastic, it would not be affected by weather and could become a bright and colorful feature of the park.

To view our full process and project proposal, go here.

Contributors:

Katie Felton
Hobeen Lee
Vanessa Toye