Deepika Gulati wants to blur the line between work and play. She thinks that for the first time we have at our hands the ideas that will make work more fun. Deepika joined metalayer as a Software Engineer in June, 2000. Throughout these years, she has worked on Features and Initiatives for Product Development. She is very passionate about simplicity as a defining philosophy behind collaboration solutions. She is a portal manager and core team developer, responsible for feature development. Interview

LEGO BLOCKS AND JIGSAW PUZZLES

A wonderful metaphoric comparison between structural collaboration spaces and an open environment like metalayer can be found in Lego Blocks and Jigsaw Puzzles.

We all remember the thrill of Lego Blocks, creating those innovative structures out of blocks. Somewhere down the line we have lost that thrill and work became like assembling the pieces of Jigsaw Puzzles. Structured processes lead us to one result. There is of course some creativity involved, mainly in identifying the right pieces, but ultimately it is just fitting the pieces together to make a pre-decided picture. The joy of creativity is lost when the result is known, or rather when you know what structure the pieces have to be fitted into.

Has work then become just fitting the pieces together? Of course there is an idea involved, but where is the evolution?

It is important that a collaboration environment be more than a collection of pieces with fixed places. It should be more than a structure, more than a process and much more than just a tool. A collaboration environment should be a space, a space with pieces that can be used in creative ways to make concoctions that will give us the thrill of creativity.

Coming back to Lego blocks, the game that had no processes, no structure. Just some blocks that could be joined to make anything that fancies the mind. Building blocks that can be joined into any structure was probably the most intelligent game idea ever. It's strange that the inspiration for a collaborative environment comes from a simple game. Imagine an environment, which just gives you some basic blocks and leaves everything else to your imagination. Stimulation of mind can only be achieved if there is newness in things. We all have experienced the problems of monotony. Only open structures can solve this problem by giving us enough room to manoeuvre and co-create. Rigid structures bound people together by default, and open spaces allow people to come together by choice.

It is time that work becomes exciting and open enough to stir our imagination, and environments become spaces, open enough to enable creativity, just like the simple game of Logo Blocks.