From simplicity to chaos: Towards an ultradisciplinary stance for designing organizational buildings.

Technology opens up new possibilities for designing and constructing increasingly phygital, digital and physical buildings made of “bits and atoms” (Gaggioli 2017). Phygital buildings can: capture people while they inhabit the place; automate processes and decrease the amount of people mediation required; empower human behaviours, making human-machine interaction natural and multimodal. Designing phygital buildings is a challenging path that requires the skills of different practitioners: as discussed in this paper, not only architects, building engineers, and ICT experts but also the client –who is co-creator–, UX designers, business designers, and social psychologists. This contribution – part of the TECVAL-InterPhy research project– argues that to realise a phygital building, it is not enough for the project team to be multidisciplinary –simplicity–, i.e., to bring together practitioners with different skills. The team should go beyond disciplines, becoming ultradisciplinary –chaos– (Leoni, 2020), opening a breach to explore outside and between the disciplines involved, and sensemaking in the chaos. Ultra means going beyond, out or more than (Merriam-Webster, n.d.). Consequently, an ultradisciplinary perspective “cares not at all where knowledge comes from” (Clarke 2011). The practitioners of an ultrateam master their disciplines and navigate freely and are curious about other disciplines. They are not know-it-alls. Instead, they master nano degrees, which are bits of knowledge for experimenting with innovation. How is such freedom possible? Only through an orientation to the intercomprehension on the communicative level and the intersubjectivity on the level of the professional interactions, project teams will be able to assume an ‘ultradisciplinary stance’ (Batty 2017). The paper supports this point of view with theoretical reflections emerging from literature review and practice-centred considerations from direct observation and desk analysis of concepts and realisations of phygital buildings in Italy, which are examples of ultraluoghi –ultraplaces– (Galimberti et al. 2019).