blog.frederique.harmsze.nl my world of work and user experiences

I’ve recently given a talk at our Macaw conference, which was held in Side. Nowadays Side is on the south-west coast of Turkey. But in antiquity, Side was founded by the Greeks, thoroughly Hellenised by Alexander the Great, and then absorbed into the Roman empire. And that is still very visible. Side and the other cities in the region of Pamphylia are full of Greek and especially Roman ruins. So I thought I should take a look at what the Romans have done for us and what we can learn from them in our current work with SharePoint and the digital workplace.

Side was very clearly a part of the Roman empire: a lot of the buildings and stuctures are typically Roman, as the Romans were very good at standardisation. But were Side and the other cities of Pamphylia just copies of all the other Roman towns? No. Let’s see some examples and the lessons we can learn from them.

Learn from others

The temples in Side, for example, look a lot like the Roman temples elsewhere in the Mediterranean area and in Western Europe. But they also look a lot like the Greek temples. And that makes perfect sense: The Romans took over a lot from the Greeks, including many elements of their temples.

The Roman temple of Apollo in Side. Roman temples look rather like Greek temples, and Apollo himself was also taken over from the Greeks.

A Greek temple of Zeus, chief god of the Greek pantheon and god of thunder. Built in the 6th century BC (and restored) in Cyrene, Lybia.

And they also took over the gods living in those temples. The Greeks for example had the god Apollo and the Romans have exactly the same Apollo. And while the Greeks had Zeus as their main god, the god of thunder. the Roman had Jupiter: exactly the same guy, with just a different name. And why not? If it suits you, why invent something else if you can re-use what somebody else invented. The Romans did not have to worry about copyright infringement…

So: Learn from others. Get inspired by and re-use their patterns and practices if they suit you.

In my work, I alway love sightseeing other intranets and digital workplaces, for example in the NN/g intranet annual and the Digital Workplace 24 session. To get inspired by other people’s great solutions. Especially when I learn what really works in real life, at least for their users.

Re-use great solutions, patterns and practices

The Romans built aqueducts all over their empire. There is an interesting aqueduct at Aspendos in Pamphylia, but you also see them in France. For example, the Pont du Gard.

The aqueduct in Aspendos

An aqueduct is a great way to bring water from the mountains, for example, into a populous city. Drinking water, but also water for the Baths. Romans loved their baths. Not just for getting clean, but also for socializing. We have Facebook, they had their communal bath complexes.

Again, we find those baths all over the Roman empire, and they all have basically the same structure. They include cold baths, warm baths and hot baths, and associated rooms like a changing room. To get the required heat in especially the hot baths, a system of floor heating was used: a hypocaustum. The floor was raised on stacks of brick tiles, so that hot air could circulate under the floor from a nearby oven. During the conference we saw the impressive ruins of a bath complex in Perge, but I have seen exactly the same system in North-England for example. And why not? If it works, just use the solution wherever it is applicable.

The raised floor in the warm baths allow hot air to circulate. The floor is held up by stacks of brick tiles. (South baths, Perge)

Floor heating is especially handy in cold places like the north of England, at Hadrian’s wall (Chesters). The same hypocaust system is used here.

So: re-use great solutions, patterns and practices.

In my work, I sometimes re-use the same app for clients that have the same needs. Within the same organisation, we create site templates for teams that have similar needs, like project teams or a departments. And often, I create a solution that is inspired by another one, but implemented differently. For example, I have several clients who have confidential dossiers that need to go through a process. So in both cases we have set up SharePoint Document Sets that will get a workflow and item level security. Re-using what works.

Standardise structures to allow the users to recognize easily where they are

The street plan of a Roman city is a grid: there is a straight main street running north-south (the cardo), another straight main street running east-west (the decumanus) and the other streets nearly fill out the grid pattern. And the main buildings can be found in the city center where the main streets cross each other. By the way, the Romans also took over this street plan from the Greeks: the father of urban planning was Hippodamus of Miletus (which is also located on the coast of present-day Turkey).

I have never been to the city of Timgad, in Algeria. But you immediately recognize the standard Roman street plan. (from InStoria)

The map of a standardised Roman military camp (from CPAT)

The Romans then put the idea of this street plan into practice, because it was handy. Not only in cities, but also and especially in military camps. The soldiers in the Roman army came from all over the empire. For example, in the north of England, at Hadrian’s wall, we saw that a regiment of Syrian archers had been based there. Those guys were far from home, but they could easily find their barracks right from the start, because the layout of the camps was completely standard.

So: help the people know where they are and find what they are looking for by adhering to the standards in your structures.

In my work, I often create sites where the users do not want to be surprised but they want to get to business quickly and easily. Then it helps to put the main navigation at the top, the navigation in the context of the team site on the left, the main content in the center, and the ‘see also’ links on the right-hand side. That is what the people are used to, so they don’t have to spend any energy in trying to figure out what is where.

Adapt to the situation

Even though the Romans followed standard patterns, they did not push everything into a standard mould. For example, a typical Roman city has a straight street grid. But in the city of Perge in Pamphilia, the cardo, the main street running north-south, is not straight at all; it has a bend. We see such bends occur in streets where the terrain does not allow the street to run straight. In Perge there is no cliff  in the way, so my hypothesis is that the Romans adopted an existing street that already had a bend, as Perge existed already in Greek times, and the Romans did not try to straighten it out.

In Timgad, the Streets are perfectly straight. This is exactly by the book.

In Perge, the cardo has a bend, instead of running perfectly straight. (from waterhistory)

Another example is the floor-heating hypocaust in the baths. Normally the floor is raised on stack of brick tiles. But in Perge there is a hot bath where the floor is raised on arches. Perge is in an earth quake area, and arches are a lot stronger than mere stacks…

Normally, the floor in a hypocaust is held up by stacks of brick tiles. (Tepidarium, South baths, Perge)

This hypocaust floor in the hot baths is not raised on stacks but on arches (Caldarium, South baths, Perge).

So: adapt your standard solution to the specific situation

In my work, I often help clients put together a SharePoint site, using standard SharePoint only and based on a standard site template. But we always check what this particular team needs in their situation and tweak accordingly: change a view to display the data differently, add a web part / app part to the homepage to make what is important to them more prominent. Tweak the standard solution to make it fit the users’ needs instead of pushing the users to fit into the standard solution. Especially when standard SharePoint allows you to implement these tweaks by configuring the front-end. No need for a developer in these cases.

Allow for the local language

What struck me in Pamphylia (but also in Jordan and Syria the eastern part of the Mediterranean), is that so many inscriptions are in Greek. Not in Latin, the standard language of the Romans. For example, a lot of statues in Perge were dedicated to Plancia Magna, a priestess and important benefactress of the city.  These statues had an inscription explaining who she was and what she did. And none of the inscriptions I saw was just in Latin. They were in Greek or bilingual Greek and Latin. And this makes sense, because culturally the people in these regions still felt Greek, even though they were Roman politically and economically. That was good enough for the Romans.

Priestess and benefactress Plancia Magna from Perge (more about her). The statue now lives in the Antalya museum.

This statue base for Plancia Magna is inscribed both in Greek and Latin

So: allow for the local language.

In my work, I often see corporate intranets of big international organisations with language issues. The organisation states that the corporate language is English (that is what it usually is in practice) and that the intranet should be in English. And then employees in The Netherlands, France, Germany, Spain, Poland etc etc are very unhappy that they have to try to understand all that English, and they feel unconfortable participating in a language they do not quite master. It helps if at the very least the local content and the local discussions are in the local language. Yammer has a ‘Translate’ link that should help users deal with international conversations in their own language. In any case, we cannot ignore the language issue.

Allow for local style

Columns are a normal sight in the Greek and Roman world, like the columns lining the collonaded streets. But in Perge, they put pictures on some columns lining the cardo. I have never seen this anywhere else. This is a Perge idioynchrasy. And this was not a problem at all for the Romans.

The cardo in Perge is a collonaded street. Perfectly normal for a Roman city.

On this column in the cardo in Perge, we see a picture. I have only seen this in Perge. This picture is Artemis Pergaia.

So: allow for local style.

In my work, I often see that teams want some specific styling elements in their team sites. For example, a dfferent logo or image. Or select their colour scheme from a set of three different colour schemes. They want to make the site their own in a visual way, and we should allow them to do so. Within limits, because we generally prefer the sites to feel like they are part of the same digital workplace of the organiation (to avoid users feeling lost…) and usually there is also a corporate communication department that wants to make sure that all sites still conform to the corporate branding style.

Respect the local convictions

The question of local style is not just selecting about your own colour or putting a picture on a column.It goes deeper. For example, a picture on a column in Perge depicts Artemis. The Perge version of Artemis Pergaia, which looks quite different from the standard Greek Artemis or the Roman equivalent called Diana: the godess of the hunt. And the Artemis as she was worshipped in Ephese (also in preseent-day Turkey) looks even more different from the original one. The Artemis of Ephese is a fertility godess who shares a name and a connection with animals with the original Artemis, but little else.

The classical Artemis is the godess of the hunt (Museum of Messene, Greece)

Artemis of Ephese is a fertility godess (Museum Tripoli, Libya)

But as far as the Romans were concerned, everybody could worship their own gods, worship their own versions of the Greco-Roman gods, or whatever they liked. As long as they respected the Romans’ power and the Romans’ gods (including the emperors) and did not try to wiggle out of the Romans political and economic grasp.

So what I like to take over from the Romans is the idea that we don’t want an ad hoc mess, but we also don’t want a restrictive straightjacket, but we want a systematic solution that meets the people’s needs.