MIT Building 20 — The Vision of Technology WeWork was Missing
This post is a little bit about WeWork, and a lot about the relation between communities & spaces and the creativity of the people occupying them.
WeWork, the office-sharing startup, which intended to be “a community company”, has lost more than 80% of the $47B it was once valued by Softbank. Criticism on its corporate governance has been discussed widely, though it seems that the misvaluation was mainly due to WeWork not being a technology company, but a real estate one. This can lead to a different valuation, essentially because the costs of scalability — tech company’s expenses tend to fall when creating growth, but when a real estate company grows, its expenses will not change, due to buildings’ rent and operational expenses, here’s a good explanation: WeWork’s claim, beyond technology enablement, was that they were selling community memberships since the market provides even more of a premium (the excess in value that a buyer estimates for a company compared to its peers in the same industry) to high-margin member subscription services. It’s hard to say whether they were building a community, or rather simply being a real-estate desk subscription.
The Behavioral Angle
What type of technology could a real estate company have? In behavioral terms, potentially one of the most interesting and challenging out there, technology that can answer valuable questions: Could a space increase creativity? Does a sense of community contribute to innovation? Can open-space settings increase collaboration? Originality?
Despite some acquisitions of startups focusing on spatial design, it’s unclear whether WeWork had the technology to measure and collect data to answer these questions and design accordingly to increase these desired capabilities in the people who occupied the space. This technology could have led to the creation of a different product, independent from WeWork’s business, or at least allow its own members to benefit from it.
MIT’s Building 20 has the reputation of a “magical incubator” as it gave home to some of the most fundamental breakthroughs in fields like nuclear science, engineering, and linguistics. Erected hastily during World War II, it was a temporary wooden structure, initially designed to house the Radiation Laboratory, where the single antenna radar, which became important to the Allies in World War II, was invented. After the war ended, the building served many small MIT programs, research, and student activities. At one point it was home to the first anechoic chamber, a particle accelerator, a piano repair facility, and a cell-culture lab. It is where Noam Chomsky pioneered modern linguistics and generative grammar. It was the home of the Tech Model Railroad Club, where many aspects of what later became the hacker culture developed. (Balloon-lifted packages to measure the cosmic microwave background, and the Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) satellite’s FIRAS instrument and its analysis had homes there, as many more groundbreaking inventions. )
Building 20 gave home to almost 4,000 researchers in 20 disciplines. As described by the New Yorker, “Building 20 became a strange, chaotic domain, full of groups who had been thrown together by chance and who knew little about one another’s work. And yet, by the time it was finally demolished, in 1998, Building 20 had become a legend of innovation, widely regarded as one of the most creative spaces in the world.”
In contrast to today’s efficient and minimalistic design trends, what made Building 20 so great was its flexibility and the “permission” to adjust and modify the space as its users pleased. As described by MIT professor Paul Penfield, “Its ‘temporary nature’ permitted its occupants to abuse it in ways that would not be tolerated in a permanent building.” Stewart Brand refers to Building 20 in his study “How Buildings Learn”, as a “low road” structure that, similar to the Silicon Valley garage, was a type of space that is so unwanted and under-designed that it’s unusually creative. Scientists in Building 20 were free to remake their rooms, customizing the structure to fit their needs, as there was no permission needed to tear down walls and equipment was stored everywhere.
Apart from being the “Plywood Palace”, an even more elusive and unique aspect was the combination of the interdisciplinarity of the building’s occupants and the complexity of its layout. The building’s occupants would often bump into other researchers from different fields, familiarizing themselves with their research. This kind of incidental conversation was described by the urban theorist Jane Jacobs as “knowledge spillovers”. Spillovers which could never have happened under any other traditional building layout aiming for logical order.
Flexibility, both in the physical and organizational structures of the building, had led to exceptional spillovers. One example is Dr. Lettvin, who was a psychiatric interested in the electrical properties of neurons in the ’50s, ended up in the department of electrical engineering. Dr. Lettvin wrote one of the more famous papers among those at the root of the new cognitive sciences, ‘’What the frog’s eye tells the frog’s brain’’, with two other leaders of cognitive neuroscience of the time, also residents of Building 20.
It seems that the temporary sense of the building and the unexpected inspiring endeavors that took place behind its walls created some sort of intellectual “affordance” that was the perfect setting for creative and eager minds. But how can one know for sure? After all, Building 20’s objectives and residents were unique in many ways, what if the circumstances and residents had changed? A profit company instead of a non-profit institute, industrial setting instead of an academic one. Could there be a systematic and methodological way to measure and evaluate the effect different surroundings and communities have on creativity and innovation? This is where technology comes in.
Recreating The Magic
If we wanted to rebuild Building 20 today, and use technology to increase the likelihood of understanding and creating that magic, here is some inspiring research and approaches to creativity and collaboration that could contribute:
In-line with its Building 20 tradition, and enhanced by contemporary technology, MIT still houses some of the most interesting research and labs, focusing on behavioral aspects of spaces, communities, networks, and innovation. The Collective Intelligence Lab, for example, studies both physical and virtual spaces and collaborations between humans, and computers. One project focused on designing collaborative intelligent networks and systems is Climate coLab, which aims to reach climate change goals by global collaboration. Another project is the Nonlinear Negotiation, investigating ways to help large numbers of individuals come to agreements about complex problems. Both could be relevant as products when used in an organizational setting for example.
Part of the City Science Group at MIT’s Media Lab, Proxymix is focused on understanding how space influences collaboration by understanding how people behave in it, this method actually visualizes the type of interactions and collaborations happening between the people working in the space, as well as how the space around them is built. This method for space design ingeniously takes the human behavioral component into account in the design process.
The Human Dynamics Lab essentially aims to understand human behavior using methods originally developed in statistical physics. Focused on exploring how social networks and communities, virtual and real, develop, operate and influence all aspects of our lives, they try to tackle innovation by developing a device that monitors interactions between founders and their teams, which then, allows to break the dynamics down to their components. For instance, the level of shared knowledge and matching expectations, to optimize creative innovative group dynamics. Appropriately, the research is called Hacking Innovation.
Collective Wisdom, inspiring research on collaboration and creativity happening in the art field, takes place in the Open Documentary Lab and is a field study called that aims to co-create media across communities and disciplines using systems, and AI algorithms.
One of the biggest challenges in exploring collaboration and dynamics in spaces and networks is developing the measurement tools and methods, and indeed, this is the focus of many of the projects across the different fields. The ability to measure and understand collaboration and innovation, in terms of physical space or virtual settings, could enable new approaches to problem-solving, as well as elicit creativity and collaboration in communities.
This brief example of research demonstrates an interdisciplinary approach to innovation and collaboration. Yet, unlike Building 20’s many inventions, a significant portion of the research mentioned here is in virtual form — it would be interesting to understand how the intellectual affordance can come into shape in a virtual setting.
It goes without saying that there’s a more significant body of research on the topic, as well as communities who create and work together, which weren’t covered in this post — this is just a teaser. Yet, it shows how WeWork could have built the technology to create the innovative community it claimed to have had, and suggests how academic research could come in handy for curios entrepreneurs seeking innovation.
In a way, the ability to measure relations and take the behavioral factor into account when designing a network, spaces or a real-estate “community company”, could make every working environment feel and behave as if it is Building 20.
