Rethinking the Assembly Line How “Documentspaces” Can Energize Team-Based Technical Writing

The quintessential innovation of the twentieth century was the assembly line. It was a simple enough principle: keep people still, and bring the materials of work to them. Time was money, and independent thought, creativity, or a “big picture” viewpoint were luxuries sacrificed in the pursuit of efficiency. Despite being somewhat joyless, life on the assembly line ushered in a new era of productivity the world had never seen before. Today, with few exceptions, we’re still hard-wired to think along straight lines, our collective mental DNA holding fast to the assembly line as the archetype of work. Even the advent of the computerdriven business environment wasn’t enough to break old habits. Consider how we manage documents these days—we think of them as physical entities, materials of work. So, we do what comes naturally. We keep people still and bring the work to them. No one would expect that a dozen people who need access to a database would each have a copy of the database on their local system. Instead, we would all expect to access a view of the data. Although we understand the notion of a database as a place in which we work to gather insight, we are still stuck on the notion that content is a physical thing to be routed and shared. The result? We play pass-the-document. Sometimes we wait our turn, and sometimes we all pounce at once. Team-based content creators have almost accepted that a life of endless meetings is simply their lot in life— especially when it comes to many-to-many collaboration. We exchange email chains that seem to have no beginning or end. Documents become tangled messes, riddled with trackchanges and comments that are almost impossible to navigate. And in the center of it all is the author, whose unenviable fate is to play the part of air traffic controller. The task of creating content is more art than science; its authors and contributors more akin to craftspeople than assembly line workers. Craftspeople, like technical writers, operate best with a workbench that keeps a complete project in front of them at all times. They may spend a whole day perfecting one small detail and spend the next reconsidering their overall color scheme or technique. They may work in a studio with others and thrive on overthe-shoulder brainstorming. But despite the parallels between craftspeople and technical writers, the workbench of today’s documentation team remains static and linear, preventing them from working as well as they could.