Organisations need knowledge to travel.

An observation made in the field has to become something that can be discussed with others. Patterns are named, interpretations compared, and provisional themes become maps, personas, dashboards, repositories or strategic propositions. What began in the particular circumstances of one encounter gradually acquires a form that can participate in work elsewhere.

Something is gained in this movement, and something is inevitably left behind. This is a tension at the heart of organisational knowledge work: situated experience has to become stable enough to coordinate around without becoming so settled that the complexity from which it arose disappears.

Formalisation is part of how this happens. Categories, models and other representations make knowledge more shareable, but they do not simply transport what was already there. As Anna Rylander argues in her account of design as knowledge work, differentiating, naming, labelling and classifying each participate in constructing the organisational reality they appear merely to describe.

This makes design interesting as knowledge work. Designing frequently involves developing and negotiating representations of what a situation is, what matters within it and what it might become. These representations can make relationships visible and possibilities actionable, but they can also privilege one interpretation over another.

Those interpretations also needn't converge immediately. Different participants may project different understandings onto the same situation: different accounts of what matters, where the problem lies and which futures are worth pursuing. In their 1997 article Is Design Hermeneutical?' Adrian Snodgrass and Richard Coyne describe the vitality of design as depending partly on an openness to such rival projections, allowing alternatives to develop alongside one another until they coalesce or one falls away.

The question is therefore not simply how knowledge becomes clearer, but how partial, provisional and sometimes competing understandings can remain available to one another long enough for meaningful work to happen without pretending that their differences have disappeared. Susan Leigh Star gives us a particularly useful way of thinking about this.

Boundary objects are not reducible to interpretive flexibility

In her 2010 article, This is Not a Boundary Object: Reflections on the Origin of a Concept, Star returns to the idea of the boundary object that she developed with James Griesemer more than twenty years earlier. The article is partly a correction. Boundary objects had increasingly become associated with interpretive flexibility: the idea that an artefact can mean somewhat different things to different groups while remaining sufficiently recognisable for them to coordinate around it.

Interpretive flexibility is only part of Star’s model. Boundary objects are also connected to the information and work requirements of the groups involved, and their usefulness depends on scale. Most importantly, they participate in movement between relatively ill-structured shared forms and more well-structured local forms, allowing groups to work together without requiring consensus first.

An object may remain comparatively loose where social worlds meet while becoming much more specific when a group takes it into its own practice. People then “tack back and forth” between shared and locally tailored forms as the work requires. The differences are therefore not simply differences of interpretation; they are embedded in different practices, purposes and projects.

A persona, for example, is not a boundary object merely because marketing, product, research and leadership understand it differently. The more revealing questions concern the work around it. What does the representation allow different groups to do? How is it adapted locally? What needs to remain unresolved for cooperation to continue? And how does the shared representation change as local knowledge returns to it?

For Star, then, boundary objects are not simply things with multiple meanings. They are part of arrangements through which people get work done.

Boundary work begins in synthesis

This complicates the assumption that boundary objects only become relevant once research is complete and findings need to “travel”, moving beyond the immediate research context and becoming usable by other people, teams and forms of work. The movement begins earlier.

Researchers already work through partial representations while trying to understand a situation. Field notes are clustered, observations compared, themes named and disputed, and diagrams revised. A theme is already a proposition about what matters. A cluster brings certain observations together while separating others, while a framework makes some relationships easier to perceive and others less so. Synthesis does not simply compress evidence; it creates a situation in which interpretations can encounter one another.

Under the right conditions, provisional artefacts can therefore already participate in boundary work. A thematic map may remain loose enough to hold several interpretations while becoming more specific as researchers, designers, strategists or domain specialists work with it. Those local uses may then alter the shared representation when people return to it.

The movement is, notably, iterative rather than linear. Star makes this explicit in her discussion of repositories, which can preserve heterogeneous particulars rather than immediately dropping them in favour of a generalised account. Premature synthesis, by contrast, can make one projection of a situation appear settled before alternatives have had sufficient opportunity to develop. What looks like clarity can sometimes be the closure of a contest that should have remained open for longer.

An insight, then, need not be imagined as a completed substance that researchers produce and package for organisational consumption. It may emerge through repeated cycles of representation, interpretation, contestation and revision. A resilient insight practice may need the capacity to return.

Insight has infrastructure

Once knowledge begins moving between people and forms of work, the unit of analysis expands. Through what material and organisational arrangements do different forms of knowledge become capable of participating in shared work?

Modern organisations may contain customer data, behavioural analytics, interview findings, personas, service blueprints, segmentation systems, dashboards and repositories. The temptation is to evaluate each principally in terms of whether it is accurate. Accuracy alone is not enough. Star directs attention towards the wider system of relations through which representations become usable.

Multiple boundary objects and systems of boundary objects can grow into what Star and Geoffrey Bowker call boundary infrastructures. At this scale, the concern shifts from whether an individual artefact communicates effectively to the relationships, work practices, classifications and standards through which many representations participate in organisational activity.

An organisation’s insight capability may therefore depend less on finding the perfect representation of a customer than on creating an infrastructure through which different, inevitably partial representations can coexist, connect and remain revisable. Insight does not simply flow from research into decisions; it is repeatedly worked on as it travels.

What an ethnographer needs from an observation may not be what a product team needs from it. What helps a service designer reason about a situation may be inappropriate for an executive decision. Local forms may, in turn, reveal something that requires the shared understanding to change again. The danger begins when translation is mistaken for the progressive elimination of ambiguity.

Keeping things open requires trust

Star’s distinction between ill-structured and well-structured arrangements resonates with a familiar problem in design: how to work with situations that resist stable definition. Different participants may disagree not only about suitable responses, but about what the problem is, which evidence matters and what an acceptable outcome would look like.

Boundary objects allow cooperation without requiring consensus first. Some degree of vagueness can be productive. A shared object can remain relatively ill structured while becoming specific enough to support situated work.

Design’s professional instinct is often to clarify: to turn ambiguity into definition, observations into findings, findings into requirements and messy situations into frameworks from which decisions can proceed. Sometimes that is exactly the work required, but, as suggested above, clarification can also become premature closure. A representation may become cleaner while the situation it describes becomes less visible.

A sophisticated insight infrastructure may therefore need to preserve some things in an unresolved state, not because the research has failed, but because the situation itself remains plural. It may also need to reopen what has become too settled.

Richard Coyne’s (1995:96) account of trust helps sharpen what this requires. Participation in an open design situation depends on some confidence that others will engage in good faith, that competing interpretations can be taken seriously and that the shared situation remains capable of being changed through the encounter.

A participant who believes the preferred interpretation has already been decided has little reason to expose uncertainty. A researcher whose inconvenient findings repeatedly disappear during synthesis learns what kinds of evidence are safe to surface. A team invited to “challenge assumptions” while organisational authority itself remains beyond challenge quickly discovers the real boundaries of the exercise. The openness of a design situation can be performed without being real.

Trust therefore concerns more than interpersonal goodwill. It concerns whether participants have reasonable grounds for believing that plurality can genuinely affect what happens next. Trust becomes an infrastructural question too.

What falls off the form

Star repeatedly draws attention to what formal representations fail to contain. One particularly striking example concerns standardised “fits sheets” used to document epileptic seizures. Families filled in the requested categories, but also wrote observations around the edges: details about food, weather and everyday events they believed might matter, but for which the official structure provided no place.

The formal system collected what it had been designed to know. Other knowledge remained in the margins.

Star asks how forms can “shape and squeeze out what can be known and collected”. Once representations become embedded in organisational systems, their distinctions acquire durability. What began as one way of interpreting a situation may gradually become part of the infrastructure through which that situation is known.

This connects with what we have previously called strategic vulgarity: the mundane coordination, improvisation, repair and adaptation through which organisations actually operate, much of which may remain absent from formal accounts of strategy and process. Every classification, metric, dashboard and synthesis framework makes some things easier to see. In doing so, it also creates limits around what can readily be represented. Formal representations leave residuals: the “other”, the “not elsewhere classified”, the experiences and people that do not fit. These residuals can become places from which rival accounts of the situation emerge.

The scribble in the margin is not necessarily missing data waiting to be incorporated into the existing schema. Sometimes the scribble in the margin is the insight. Sometimes it is the beginning of a rival project.

Breakdown and the visibility of trust

One of Star’s most useful observations about infrastructure is that, while functioning, it tends to disappear into the background. Infrastructure becomes visible upon breakdown.

The same may be true of the arrangements through which organisational knowledge becomes trustworthy. Someone asks where an insight came from. A customer does not recognise themselves in the organisation’s representation of them. A repository contains years of research, but nobody knows what remains valid.

What initially looks like the failure of an artefact may reveal something more consequential: the infrastructure on which its credibility depended. How was the evidence produced? Whose experiences were included? What disappeared during synthesis? Which interpretation became authoritative? Who is able to challenge it?

Trust, from this perspective, is an achievement distributed across the arrangements through which information is produced, translated, contested, maintained and acted upon. It includes trust that knowledge has a traceable provenance, but also trust that participation can make a difference.

Breakdown can therefore be more than failure. It can be an invitation to inquiry.

Infrastructure does not stay still

Star’s model is not a progression from ambiguity towards ever greater clarity. It is cyclical.

Flexible arrangements may stabilise into standards. Standards make coordination possible, but what has been formalised will not accommodate everything. The residual spaces that result can, in turn, give rise to new forms of coordination and new boundary objects.

What once helped organise a situation can therefore become part of what later needs to be questioned. Stability and revisability have to coexist. Infrastructure capable of supporting knowledge over time must also remain capable of recognising when what has become settled needs to be reopened.

Following infrastructure beyond the organisation

Nor does that infrastructure stop neatly at the organisation’s boundary. What appears internally as “our system”, “our taxonomy” or “our customer model” may depend on technologies, standards, professional conventions and regulatory categories produced elsewhere.

A category in a customer database may inherit assumptions from a technology platform. A healthcare service may rely on diagnostic classifications developed across institutions. A public service may encounter people through administrative categories that long predate the service itself.

The unit of inquiry consequently expands: from artefact to work, from work to organisational arrangements, and from the organisation to the wider infrastructures in which those arrangements participate.

Star’s discussion of standardisation eventually turns towards the residual categories that standards generate and their implications for social justice. The residual is not always an innocent remainder. It can reveal where infrastructure has made particular forms of knowledge or lived experience difficult to recognise on their own terms.

At this scale, the question becomes whose account of the world is allowed to become infrastructural.

Information, lived experience and infrastructure

Star closes by calling for a more sophisticated way of understanding “information, lived experience, and infrastructure” together. Putting the three together expands what has to be examined.

Information is shaped by the forms through which it is represented. Lived experience changes as it is translated into those forms. Infrastructure gives particular representations durability by embedding them in standards, conventions and organisational practice.

For design research, producing an insight is therefore only part of the work. We also need to ask what happens to it as it travels. What must be simplified? What must remain open? Which representations acquire authority? What becomes residual? Who can challenge what has become settled? And when should an established representation be reopened?

These are not only questions about research quality. They are questions about the infrastructure of knowing.

Designing without becoming the centre

There is a final implication for design. Designers are often encouraged to demonstrate design’s value, increase its organisational influence and persuade others to work in more designerly ways. Read through Star, another orientation becomes possible.

Much of the work required to keep organisations and wider systems workable may already involve forms of designing outside professional design: translating between incompatible systems, adapting categories that do not quite fit, repairing breakdowns and negotiating across competing interpretations.

The people doing this work may not call it design. A designer may not have initiated it. Formalising it as design does not automatically improve it. If interpretive plurality is to remain consequential, design expertise also cannot assume that the designer’s own projection is the one around which others should eventually converge. Sometimes expertise lies in helping sustain the conditions through which different interpretations can continue to shape the situation.

The task may therefore begin with attention: noticing where this designing is already happening, what enables it, and where existing infrastructures constrain it. To follow that designing is also to follow the infrastructure through which it becomes possible, invisible or difficult to sustain.

Rather than asking how design can become more central to organisations, we might ask how the designing already embedded in organisational life can be recognised, supported and sustained without placing either the profession or the designer at the centre.

If classifications, measurements and formal representations render necessary work or lived experience illegible, the challenge is not primarily to persuade organisations to adopt more design. It is to challenge the frames and infrastructures through which particular forms of work, knowledge and experience become visible, legitimate and possible, and to help keep those infrastructures open enough to change.

That may be a less comfortable role for design. It may also be a more necessary one.

References

Coyne, R. 1995. Designing Information Technology in the Postmodern Age: From Method to Metaphor. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Rylander, A. 2009. ‘Design Thinking as Knowledge Work: Epistemological Foundations and Practical Implications’. Design Management Journal.

Snodgrass, A. & Coyne, R. 1997. ‘Is Designing Hermeneutical?’ Architectural Theory Review, 2(1): 65–97.

Star, S.L. 2010. ‘This is Not a Boundary Object: Reflections on the Origin of a Concept’. Science, Technology, & Human Values, 35(5): 601–617.