Listen to the episode:

You can find the transcript through this link.

---

Are you interested in how the concept of stigmergy applies to human cooperation?

---

Summary of the article titled Stigmergy in human practice: Coordination in construction work from 2012 by Lars Rune Christensen published in the Cognitive Systems Research journal.

Since we are investigating the future of cities, I thought it would be interesting to see how the concept of stigmergy, the concept of coordination coming from the study of bugs translates to the study of humans. This article compares bug and human coordination and explores the utility of stigmergy for human practice through the example of construction work.

As the most important things, I would like to highlight 3 aspects:

1. Stigmergy is a concept of cooperation from entomology, but it can be translated to human context.
2. In the human context, stigmergy means the distributed cooperative work tasks that are integrated by individual actions based on previous individuals’ actions.
3. The complex collaboration of construction work can be seen and interpreted as human stigmergy with the addition of forward-looking mindfulness to improve connected tasks.

You can find the article through this link.

Abstract: Stigmergy is a concept of coordination that may be employed to analyse human practice in complex work settings such as the building process. However, the concept of stigmergy was not originally developed in order to describe human practice, rather it was developed within the field of entomology i.e. the study of social insects. Transposing the concept of stigmergy from the field of entomology to the study of human practice raises a central question: Does the concept of stigmergy add anything to our ability to account for the coordination of human cooperative work? We will argue that it does. We will (1) explicitly compare and delimit the concept of stigmergy to well-established concept describing human coordinative practices and show that it differs from these concepts, and we will (2) apply the concept of stigmergy to an analysis of the coordination of construction work in order to explore the utility of the concept in the analysis of human practice.

Connecting episodes you might be interested in:

• No.009I – Interview with Andrew Lizzio about swarm intelligence and stigmergy;
• No.018I – Interview with María Yanez about a different approach to development industry;
• No.057I – Interview with Amélie Uhrig about individual actions around climate change;
• No.073R – Smart communities initiatives about community involvement;
• No.083R – Operationalising a concept: The systematic review of composite indiator building for measuring community disaster resilience about the need for individuals’ participation;

---