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Are you interested in how the concept of stigmergy applies to human cooperation? Our summary today works with 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.

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Welcome to today’s What is The Future For Cities podcast and its Research episode; my name is Fanni, and today I will introduce a research paper by summarising it. The episode really is just a short summary of the original paper, and, in case it is interesting enough, I would encourage everyone to check out the whole paper. Stay tuned until because I will give you the 3 most important things and some questions which would be interesting to discuss.

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Before we jump into the article, I would like to give stigmergy an easy understanding. Stigmergy is a mechanism of indirect coordination through the environment, between agents or actions. An individual agent’s action can influence the whole system’s behaviour, like in a bee hive. The individual bee goes to discover new food sources and if it finds something, it emits pheromones to let the other bees know that here is some food! With this action from an individual bee, the hive will follow this path to gather more food – thus the individual agent’s action influenced the whole system’s behaviour. Therefore, stigmergy is also a form of self-organisation. It produces complex seemingly intelligent structures without direct central control. It is the efficient collaboration between extremely simple agents. So now that we know what stigmergy is, let’s get back to the article.

Stigmergy was first discovered in 1959 in entomology – the study of insects, such as bees, termites and ants. It has been well understood in biology but its application to human cooperation has been questionable. The author presents stigmergy as coordination and want to investigate whether this collaboration can be understood as stigmergy. They ask whether the concept of stigmergy differs from other human collaborative efforts. However, they highlighted that they must be careful not to transpose the insects’ stimuli-response mode of collaboration to humans because people don’t have such signals like pheromone traces. Stigmery in this approach needs to be a collaboration stimulated by any signs human create.

In their understanding, stigmergy is always part of a cooperative work – the integration of interdependent but individual tasks prompted by previous interdependent and individual tasks. Building design is a cooperative effort involving architects, construction engineers, specialists, electrical engineers and many others. They partly coordinate their efforts to create a building by the end of their collaboration. Each makes a distinct contribution based on their expertise, but building on each other’s work. The architect creates the outline of the building, and the construction engineer creates the geometry of the concrete structures based on that, and so on. Of course, they have meetings to clear things up and ensure progress, but the progress is not done purely by the meetings but by the actions of the individuals. The design work is primarily coordinated through the work itself, through practices of stigmergy, rather than through meetings about it.

However, the human collaboration is not characterised by the stimuli-response mode of action. Then what is the basis for practices of stigmergy in a human context? How do the individuals cooperate and coordinate? The ability to work in a complex collaboration, such as a building process, can be based on the individual’s expertise, skills and previous experiences. On the other hand, the individual’s expertise will influence the others, even possibly improve. The individuals don’t act in isolation, they are part of community of competent practitioners who expect expertise from each other – thus creating a community of practice.

So, stigmergy is a cooperative work coordinated by individuals action on evidence which was produced by previous individuals. In human context, stigmergy, meaning collaborative practice is boosted with previously acquired skills and techniques of the individuals. To really establish their point, the author applied their concepts to several building sites in the course of 14 months with interviews and observations. Constructing a large building is a highly complex cooperative work put together by numerous distributed and interdependent tasks carried out by a diverse network of actors over the period of several years.

So let’s see the practices of stigmergy in construction work. As in building design, interdependent tasks may be partly integrated on the basis of previously done tasks as stigmergy, and it can be easily seen through the example of constructing interior partition walls. Partition walls are what divide the building into units of office spaces for example. The construction of these walls is a cooperative work process involving different trades, such as carpenters, electricians and painters. First, the building has to have its floors and ceilings which involves the partition walls. Then the carpenter creates a frame from light weight steel and puts on the plasterboards. Afterwards, the electrician comes and wires the interior walls according to the plans to allow the electrical installations. The carpenter returns and closes the walls where the electrician created some wholes – so the carpenter needs to notice the previous work by the electrician. Finally, the painter comes and does their job over the others’ work.

In this manner, all actors made significant contributions based on their expertise to do their allotted works, which becomes the basis for another’s work. Interestingly, there is no strict rule that the actors should work as they did, the plans are for the finished product not to state the tasks’ order or lengths, and the plans are not assembly manuals like from IKEA. The actors have to fill in the blanks for themselves, and acting on the evidence of work previously accomplished by others. Additionally, these actors also help the others by making signs of their works – for example the electrician will leave a longer cable for the carpenter to see where allow the cable to come through the wall. Even though the strict stigmery does not depend on such forward looking mindfulness, but it can be part of the larger set of practices. Therefore, construction work with its cooperative tasks is integrated through stigmergic practices.

Even though stigmergy was not originally developed for human practice but for entomology, this research proved that it can be used for human context. Stigmergy refers to the phenomenon that distributed cooperative work tasks are partly integrated by individuals’ actions based on previous actions of other individuals.

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What was the most interesting part for you? What questions did arise for you? Do you have any follow up question? Let me know on Twitter at WTF4Cities or on the wtf4cities.com website where the transcripts and show notes are available! Additionally, I will highly appreciate if you consider subscribing to the podcast or on the website. I hope this was an interesting paper for you as well, and thanks for tuning in!

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Finally, 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.

Additionally, it would be great to talk about the following questions:

1. What other examples can you interpret as human stigmergy?
2. How can you use the concept of stigmergy? If your actions are part of a bigger system, let’s say a city, and those actions matter based on stigmergy, how can you individually influence the whole system better?

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