The previous posts have established a framework: conceptual spaces as geometric vector spaces for representing meaning, state spaces as formal models of possible configurations, and various tools for formalising services through promises, grammars, and statecharts. But there is a gap between these formal structures and the messy reality of design work. How do different stakeholders - with different conceptual spaces, different interests, different expertise - actually coordinate? What role do design artefacts play in this coordination? And what happens when coordination fails? This post explores these questions through Susan Leigh Star's concept of boundary objects and Karl Weick's work on sensemaking, which together illuminate both the potential and the limits of design artefacts as coordination mechanisms.
Coordination Across Difference
Design work, especially in complex organisational settings, involves coordination across difference: different disciplines (designers, engineers, managers, clinicians), different organisations (providers, suppliers, regulators, users), different conceptual spaces, and different interests (cost reduction, quality improvement, professional autonomy). One answer to how coordination happens despite these differences is shared representations - if everyone uses the same diagram, the same model, the same vocabulary, they can coordinate despite having different backgrounds and perspectives. But this answer is too simple. The same artefact can mean different things to different people; a diagram that looks like shared understanding might actually be interpreted differently by each stakeholder; the appearance of coordination might mask fundamental divergence. Carlile (2002) demonstrates that these knowledge boundaries between communities become progressively harder to cross as the novelty of the shared problem increases, moving from simple transfer of established knowledge through the more demanding work of translation between different vocabularies to the most difficult task of transformation, where different interests must be negotiated and existing knowledge may need to be discarded. Star's concept of boundary objects addresses exactly this problem of how coordination happens - and sometimes fails to happen - across such differences.
Boundary Objects
Susan Leigh Star, working with James Griesemer (1989), developed the concept of boundary objects to understand how different social worlds coordinate despite having different practices, assumptions, and purposes. A boundary object is, in their original formulation, an object "both plastic enough to adapt to local needs and constraints of the several parties employing them, yet robust enough to maintain a common identity across sites". The key insight is that boundary objects enable coordination without requiring consensus; different groups can use the same object while understanding it differently, and the object provides enough common ground for interaction while accommodating divergent interpretations. Star (2010), in a later reflection on the concept's widespread adoption, cautioned that boundary objects had often been taken up without the infrastructure of standards and classifications that, in her original formulation, accompanied and enabled them; the concept had become, she argued, something of a boundary object itself.
Star and Griesemer's original example was specimens in a natural history museum. The same specimen served different purposes for different groups: collectors saw specimens as items to gather and prepare; scientists saw them as data points for taxonomic research; museum administrators saw them as assets to be catalogued and preserved; amateur naturalists saw them as examples of species they had observed. The specimen was the same physical object, but it meant different things to different communities, and crucially it did not need to mean the same thing - the different meanings could coexist. In design contexts, the same dynamic operates: a prototype functions simultaneously as a technical demonstration for engineers, a user experience preview for designers, a sales tool for marketers, and a specification for developers; a journey map serves as research synthesis for researchers, design brief for designers, communication tool for stakeholders, and scope definition for project managers. Bergman, Lyytinen, and Mark (2007) extend this analysis to design settings specifically, showing how design artefacts function as boundary objects within an ecological system of interrelated representations, each mediating between different communities of practice. The boundary object's power comes from this productive ambiguity - what the earlier discussion of sacred and profane concepts framed as representations that sustain collective identity precisely through their openness to interpretation.
The Paradox of Precision
Boundary objects reveal a paradox: making things more precise can reduce coordination, not increase it. If a boundary object is too precisely specified, it loses its flexibility; it can no longer accommodate different interpretations, and communities that could work together with an ambiguous shared object may find they cannot agree on a precise one. This explains why some design artefacts work better when they are sketchy, incomplete, suggestive; the incompleteness is not a deficiency but what allows different stakeholders to see their concerns reflected in the artefact. It also explains why attempts to create "single sources of truth" sometimes backfire: a single, authoritative, precisely-specified model may be rejected by communities whose interpretations it does not accommodate, and the ambiguity that was enabling coordination gets eliminated along with the coordination itself.
From Boundary Objects to Exposure Devices
Not all artefacts maintain productive ambiguity. Some force confrontation with differences that had been comfortably obscured. The earlier post on theatrical artefacts explored how design artefacts serve symbolic functions beyond their instrumental content and what happens when those functions are disrupted. The distinction I want to draw here is between boundary objects, which maintain productive ambiguity and enable coordination across difference by being interpretively flexible, and what I am calling exposure devices, which eliminate ambiguity, make differences visible and explicit, and force confrontation with divergent interpretations that had been coexisting peacefully. The same artefact can function as either, depending on how it is used and how much specificity it contains. A vague journey map might function as a boundary object: different stakeholders see their concerns reflected, interpret phases differently, and coordinate without conflict. A detailed concept map that explicitly documents what each term means and where stakeholders disagree functions as an exposure device; it does not enable comfortable coexistence but forces uncomfortable reckoning.
What Happened at SCÖ
This distinction illuminates what happened with the concept mapping at SCÖ, documented empirically in the concept map that revealed stakeholder divergence and a reflection on the limits of making visible. I was trying to create boundary objects - shared representations that would enable coordination between Swedish organisations, UK academics, Icelandic developers, and ESF funders. But the maps became exposure devices instead. By attempting to be precise about what "data science" meant, what capabilities existed and did not, what prerequisites were and were not met, the maps eliminated the productive ambiguity that had allowed the project to proceed.
Different stakeholders had been able to participate because "AI-driven rehabilitation" meant different things to them: for some, it meant a context in which to test their sophisticated algorithms; for others, a context in which to apply their critical theory; for others, innovation funding and the projection of their organisation as innovative; for others still, capacity building and improving the quality of decision-making and efficiency of service delivery. These interpretations were not compatible, but they could coexist as long as they were not forced into direct confrontation. The concept maps forced confrontation: they specified what actually existed, what did not, and what "AI" would actually require in this context. The productive ambiguity collapsed, and with it the coordination that ambiguity had enabled.
Sensemaking and the Limits of Making Visible
Karl Weick's (1995) work on sensemaking helps explain what happens when exposure occurs. Sensemaking, as Weick, Sutcliffe, and Obstfeld (2005) describe it, is an ongoing social retrospective process grounded in identity construction, driven by plausibility rather than accuracy. Several properties of sensemaking are relevant here: it is retrospective, in that we make sense of things after they happen, rationalising actions already taken; it is grounded in identity, so that what things mean depends on who we are, and threats to meaning are threats to identity; it favours plausibility over accuracy, in that we seek stories that make sense rather than necessarily stories that are true, and a plausible interpretation is often preferred over a disturbing accurate one; and it is social, with meaning co-constructed in interaction.
When an exposure device disrupts existing sensemaking - when it reveals that the comfortable shared story is not accurate - organisations do not automatically update their understanding. Instead, they engage in defensive sensemaking: the exposure is reframed as "just one perspective"; the messenger is discredited as not understanding the context; the implications are minimised; the project silently pivots, with goals quietly re-framed so that what was exposed no longer counts as a gap. This is what happened at SCÖ: the concept maps exposed gaps between what the project assumed and what existed, and the response was not "let's update our plans" but rather absorption without engagement - the exposure was acknowledged, filed, reported, and deflected. Argyris (1990) describes these patterns as organisational defensive routines: systematic ways of avoiding threat that, over time, become self-sealing, preventing the organisation from learning precisely what it most needs to learn.
Design theory often assumes that making things visible leads to change - that if stakeholders can see a problem they will understand it, if they understand it they will want to address it, and if they want to address it they will act. This logic underlies much of service design practice: journey mapping, service blueprinting, and data visualisation all proceed from the premise that making the invisible visible will produce change. But each link in that chain can break. People interpret what they see through their existing conceptual spaces and may see something different from what was intended. They may understand a problem perfectly well but have no incentive to address it, because the problem serves their interests. They may want to act but lack the resources, authority, or capability. And organisational inertia, political constraints, and defensive routines (Argyris, 1990) can block action even when it is understood, desired, and possible. Exposure devices assume that visibility is the bottleneck; often it is not, and the real constraints are incentives, power, capacity, and will. More visibility does not help, and may hurt, by destroying the productive ambiguity that enabled coordination.
What This Means for Practice
The practical implications of this analysis are several. Practitioners need to understand what their artefacts are doing - whether they are creating boundary objects that enable coordination through productive ambiguity, or exposure devices that force confrontation with difference; both have their place, but the choice should be intentional. Early in a project, boundary objects may be appropriate, enabling stakeholders to participate without forcing premature precision; later, exposure devices may be necessary, surfacing disagreements that must be resolved. Precision has costs: more detail is not always better, because precision eliminates interpretive flexibility, and sometimes a sketchy diagram enables coordination that a detailed specification would prevent. Exposure requires power: exposing problems does not automatically fix them, and exposure only leads to change if someone has the power and will to act on what has been revealed; before creating exposure, the practitioner must ask who will act on it and whether they have the power and incentive to do so. Organisations defend against exposure, and this should be expected rather than lamented; the framework of sacred and profane concepts helps explain the intensity of the response, since boundary objects can function like sacred representations where productive ambiguity sustains collective identity, and forcing specificity does not merely clarify but profanes. And some ambiguity is productive - not all ambiguity is bad; some enables people with different interests to work together, and eliminating it in the name of clarity may eliminate the collaboration.
This post bridges from the formal apparatus developed in earlier posts - state spaces, grammars, promises - to the messy reality of design work. The formal frameworks describe what we might want: precise specifications, exhaustive state enumeration, explicit transitions. But getting there requires navigating social dynamics that the frameworks do not capture. Boundary objects help explain how coordination happens despite different conceptual spaces; exposure devices help explain why making things visible does not automatically create change; sensemaking helps explain how organisations respond to uncomfortable truths. The next posts turn to planning and design directly: what planning is computationally, how the military distinguished planning from design, and why the planning/design confusion underlies so many transformation failures.
Next: "What is Planning? A Computational View" - PDDL and planning formalisms, and why planning presupposes the design work of state space construction.
References
Argyris, C. (1990). Overcoming Organizational Defenses. Allyn and Bacon.
Bergman, M., Lyytinen, K. and Mark, G. (2007). Boundary Objects in Design: An Ecological View of Design Artifacts. Journal of the Association for Information Systems, 8(11), 546-568.
Carlile, P.R. (2002). A Pragmatic View of Knowledge and Boundaries: Boundary Objects in New Product Development. Organization Science, 13(4), 442-455.
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.
Star, S.L. and Griesemer, J.R. (1989). Institutional Ecology, 'Translations' and Boundary Objects: Amateurs and Professionals in Berkeley's Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, 1907-39. Social Studies of Science, 19(3), 387-420.
Weick, K.E. (1995). Sensemaking in Organizations. Sage.
Weick, K.E., Sutcliffe, K.M. and Obstfeld, D. (2005). Organizing and the Process of Sensemaking. Organization Science, 16(4), 409-421.