Thomas Allen – författare

The environmental and political crises humanity faces today have given rise to influential new theories of life, matter, and time. Vitalism, a controversial term describing the ideas of philosophers from Lucretius to Bergson, provides a common intellectual foundation linking many of the contemporary efforts to reconstruct our understanding of nonhuman agency and the place of humanity in the world. Vital Moments argues that it is time to critically assess neovitalism's potential as a discourse of hope in light of the specific ways in which this potential has been shaped by the genealogy of vitalist perspectives. The emergence of modern vitalist representational forms in the nineteenth century was closely tied to colonialist projects of resource extraction and bioprospecting. Literary narratives linked political liberalism to a temporal structure in which life could be defined and controlled for the benefit of a privileged class. Romances of nonhuman agency idealized the democratic promise of life's plenitude even as chattel slavery and industrialization consigned many human beings to the status of things. Meanwhile, more subversive forms of vitalist narrative unsettled the hierarchy of animate and inanimate being. These errant vitalisms envision other modes of human being--or being human--that lend themselves to more just and equitable possibilities of existence within the world's matrix of matter and time. By tracing the transformations of vitalist representational forms from the early nineteenth century to the present, Vital Moments seeks to recuperate the potential of this important perspective to help us imagine more truly democratic practices of life.

Building on his pioneering work on the management of technology and innovation in his first book, Managing the Flow of Technology, Thomas J. Allen of MIT has joined with award-winning German architect Gunter Henn of HENN Architekten to produce a book that explores the combined use of two management tools to make the innovation process most effective: organizational structure and physical space. They present research demonstrating how organizational structure and physical space each affect communication among people—in this case, engineers, scientists, and others in technical organizations—and they illustrate how organizations can transform both to increase the transfer of technical knowledge and maximize the “communication for inspiration” that is central to the innovation process. Allen and Henn illustrate their points with discussions of well-known buildings around the world, including Audi’s corporate headquarters, Steelcase’s corporate design center, and the Corning Glass Becker building, as well as several of Gunter Henn’s own projects, including the Skoda automotive factory in the Czech Republic and the Faculty for Mechanical Engineering at the Technical University of Munich. Allen and Henn then demonstrate the principles developed in their work by discussing in detail one example in which organizational structure and physical space were combined successfully to promote innovation with impressive results: HENN Architekten’s Project House for the BMW Group Research and Innovation Centre in Munich, cited by Business Week (April 24, 2006) in naming BMW one of the world’s most innovative companies.Professor Thomas Allen is the originator of the Allen curve. In the late 1970s, Tom Allen undertook a project to determine how the distance between engineers’ offices coincided with the level of regular technical communication between them. The results of that research, now known as the Allen Curve, revealed a distinct correlation between distance and frequency of communication (i.e. the more distance there is between people — 50 meters or more to be exact — the less they will communicate). This principle has been incorporated into forward-thinking commercial design ever since, in, for example, The Decker Engineering Building in New York, the Steelcase Corporate Development Center in Michigan, and BMW’s Research Center in Germany.