The Dynamics of Design Microstructures in Open Collaboration: A Motif Perspective
1 Pages Posted: 15 Mar 2018
Date Written: March 2, 2018
Abstract
The architecture of a design, and particular its interdependence, may significantly influence its design performance (Baldwin and Clark 2006; Tiwana et al.2010). Design interdependence (Simon 1962), describes the functional coupling between the different parts of the design artifact. In open collaboration communities, temporally and geographically distributed collectives of individuals iteratively change and modify small bits of the overall design (Baldwin and von Hippel 2011; Levine and Prietula 2014). When reprogramming and repurposing a certain design part (e.g. modifying several files ina code base when making a commit), each individual take design actions – such as splitting, augmenting, inverting (also referred to as design operators(Gamba and Fusari 2009)) – which change design interdependences among a small set of files. There is lack of understanding of the micro-level design actions that underpin the evolution of a large design artifact developed in fluid organizational forms like open collaboration: In there, individuals self-select into tasks and make design decisions using simple heuristics (rather than real-option informed design choices). Inspired by research on biological networks, we introduce the notion of design motifs that describe the smallest element of design dependencies (Milo et al. 2002). Using these micro-level concepts, we aim to unpack the underlying dynamics of designing in open collaboration.
Keywords: open collaboration, micro-structures, network motifs, modularity, complex architectures, design operators
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