Look
around almost any workplace and you'll see texts everywhere:
printouts, forms, sticky notes, receipts, and dozens of others. And
as more of our time is devoted to manipulating symbols and
information, and as digital technologies allow us to connect more
easily and broadly across time, space, organizations, and
disciplines, we do more and more of our work through texts. These
texts form complex ecologies - they are more than the sum of
their parts. Such text ecologies tend to grow organically, through
the layering of individual workers' innovations and more formal
interventions. And they're a big part of what gives knowledge work
its flexibility.
But text ecologies tend not to be designed. They accrete through tactical reactions, but rarely do they represent a coherent strategic stance. That is, they're not planned, and thus they often don't scale well; transfer well; lend themselves to being taught; or lend themselves to directed change. So how do we solve this problem? How do we design text ecologies that are
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