A problem often seen when making publications is the communication of the phases of production. The goal of the SYNAPSE staff is to create a newspaper in an efficient manner by the given deadline. The SYNAPSE staff can be viewed as a cognitive system.
Representations used to carry out the task of meeting the deadline schedule is displayed on a large white board. The whiteboard represents the phase of production each pages in the SYNAPSE is in by indicating what page elements –articles, photos, art, etc. are found on each page and their phase of production. Each page is represented by a giant box which contains the different page elements needed for the page. There is a color scheme on the white board to indicate the page elements status. This scheme is transformed by staff members to indicate the position of page elements overtime. Black means that the page elements are not submitted. Green means that the page elements are submitted. Orange means that the page elements are being edited. Blue indicates that the page elements are complete and ready to be placed on the actual newspaper page. When a giant “X” is covered over the box then that means the entire page is finished. Finishing includes the lay out and page elements. The white board is also electronic; and is updated by the editor. This is an example of an internal representation whereas the editor has to use memory to update the whiteboard so that staff members can transform the symbols represented on the whiteboard.
Group members can process the symbols shown the whiteboard and transform them into information useful to meeting the deadline schedule. If they process the colors they will know the position of the specific page in terms of time. If the page is not passed the submission phase indicated by the color green) and the deadline is within a week, then more action needs to be taken to make sure the page is complete.
The task of completing the newspaper is better when it is tightly coupled. There is a very high level of interdependency and reciprocal tasks. For example, if the layout editor does not receive the appropriate artwork or photos for his or her page then he cannot finish his job. He or she is dependent on the photo editor, copy editor, writer, etc. Also, a lot of FtF is necessary in the pre-production phase when section editors, photographers and writers need to collaborate on specific pages. However, over the course of production task uncertainty declines and the production becomes loosely coupled. Communication becomes more grounded through representations in the physical whiteboard and the electronic whiteboard; unless a page is failing to meet the deadline. In this case production of that page becomes more tightly coupled because section editors, photographers, writers, etc. need to meet FtF to decide what measures to take.
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You did a very nice job explaining how your group decides on the layout of the newspaper. However, I would have appreciated a bit more description about the newspaper itself before talking about representations. It was somewhat confusing reading the first paragraph. I think it was also fairly obvious, but the whiteboard is acting as an external representation here. While the board is transformed through the development process, it is really serving to transform the staff’s internal representations into an external form viewable by everyone.
ReplyDeleteI wasn't sure what Synapse was for a while, a description in the beginning would have been helpful. Can you think of a way to display the representations that you were talking about electronically? It would be interesting to design an application that could keep track of these things for you and display them on a big screen. I'm also not sure the whiteboard itself is transforming, but rather it's just containing other people's transformations of their internal representations.
ReplyDeleteHow are you not sure what the synapse is? The post explicitly says so in the first two sentences. The whiteboard is an external representation that does contain everyones internal represntations but everyones internal representations becomes external so that other staff members can process them. For example, a writer finished an article and externally represents it using a color so that the layout designer can process the color and know whether he or she can layout the article on the respective page. There is an electronic whiteboard.
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