WEEK 10: PERSONAL KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT

Exploring Knowledge Management in Practice of Architecture: Pilot Study in the Turkish Capital: Subject readings

Tacit knowledge: personal and context-specific. Hard to share Explicit knowledge: Quantifiable, words and numbers format that is easy to distribute and share. Architecture is best resigned as a tacit type of knowledge, that holds many different factors that affect the architectural process. The schema involves a myriad of sequences of analysis to synthesis, to appraisal and decision forming.

My thoughts on this extract is that while the reading is interesting, the internet, while it is a ‘place’ that contains basically an infinite amount of information that is more readily acquired, it is not necessarily easy to acquire ‘useful’ knowledge. The knowledge given by the web is explicit, but often times requires a lot of mental filtering in order to either gain tacit knowledge from the distributor, or one gains their own knowledge through this experience of constant filtration. A lot of the information is required to be processed as we find that not every piece of information is either true (the info could be madeup or a hoax), mislabelled (misleading users), or has some worth in them.

Printed materials used to be categorised under a similar label, however now that it is less efficient to obtain books, magazines etc, sources that undergo a professional editing service, I personally think these printed materials can be more exact in their information provided. This is because they have to undergo editing before printing, unlike on the internet, where everyone can share disorganised mashes of tacit and explicit knowledge, combined, separate or in packs as they so please. There is no order to this disorder and as such, filtering information is a valuable skill to have in today’s society; the ability to perceive which is information that can or cannot be held accountable for.

Algorithms and AI are actually rather nasty to deal with. On a personal level, a lot of it is based on opportunity arrival, which is ultimately dependent on luck. It is a factor that is completely out of a users’ control and thus the knowledge acquired from dealing with these is more toward the ‘tacit’ side, however, even if you distribute that same anecdotal set of knowledge, AI is constantly evolving and learning with every users’ input, and adapts to it constantly. Therefore the same set of knowledge acquired may not be applicable to a future similar circumstance, even with the experience. This hurts in particular, businesses looking to grow, as many social media algorithm ‘opportunities’ are now locked behind a paywall, or the ‘rich only get richer’ situation tends to occur. Understandably, if you have the money, of course the systems will be designed to serve the source of income.

Furthermore from the reading, there are internal and external factors that affect the quality and also rate of gaining of knowledge to increase ‘success’, including productivity, decreased re-work, problem solving, etc, heading toward client satisfaction, profit and sharing. Architecture requires strong team collaboration in order to minimise the injury obtained from negligence of these influential factors. Cooperation is ultimately the aspect with the most damage-control potential and should be encouraged despite all the competitive natures that happen within our educational path.

Tools & Technologies for Architecture - Peng Liang, Paris Avgeriou

I agree more with the Codification strategy, simply due to past experience regarding the process of filtering and intaking information that is not actually useless over a long-term consideration.

This reading was actually very confusing. Based on the triangle diagram above that they briefly expanded on, I didn’t find much value in the rest of the information given-- it feels almost like ‘explicit’ information because I vaguely recall reading a similar excerpt, except, it wasn’t very memorable because I could not apply any of the strategies written into any practice I did, even outside of architecture, it wasn’t used. However, the parts that explain about stakeholders contributing to the architectural process links back to the previous reading in that these are external factors whose influences cannot be controlled by the operating individual. The quantity makes less of an impact than the quality of information given.

Overall, this week’s readings were decent. I was hoping to learn more than what was already experienced, from these readings, and perhaps come across some ‘tools’ that maybe allow us students to gain an insight into entrepreneurship, rather than working in a large team of individuals (eg a studio). This is because with the current market and economy, it doesn’t seem as viable to create an ‘indie’ collaborative, because the currently larger studios and services... it will be hard to steal their audience. Without an audience, you can’t even have the work and will not even be able to apply this information given to us. I believe this is useful, but more for the people who have already learnt ‘how to float before they swim’. Some of us have yet to learn how to ‘float’. I think this week’s content of topics could still include this but it could also be more useful for future students taking this subject to also have readings on knowledge management to build a ‘future’ (business or studio) if they are looking to progress on their own, as sometimes not all of us already have immediate social circles who are keen to dive into similar careers or projects.