Boundary Objects.
What makes some tools bridge understanding across cultures while others reinforce division? Why do certain objects enable genuine collaboration while others just facilitate surface-level coordination? This article explores boundary objects as translation mechanisms, examining how curriculum guides, leadership structures, and student work evolved over years of partnership with Tanzanian educators. It’s about the objects that make cross-cultural work possible, and the limits and tensions they can’t resolve.
Task
How do we create connection points that honor different expertise and perspectives while enabling genuine collaboration?
These are the connection points, how two disparate sources find common understanding, shared motivation, and learn to enter one another’s world in the most meaningful way. It’s not about attending and observing from the sidelines. It’s about meaningfully contributing, being an expert in your own domain with genuine application to an otherwise foreign context.
In tech, this might be a project roadmap or a training document that helps developers and clients speak the same language. In construction, it could be a blueprint that translates between engineers and laborers on site. In healthcare, it’s the treatment protocol that bridges clinical researchers, physicians, and community health workers. In nonprofit work, it’s the logic model that allows funders, staff, and community members to align around shared goals while understanding them differently. In academia, it’s the research framework that shows how theories cross disciplinary boundaries, creating shared meaning across sociology, education, design, and psychology.
Many people don’t realize that what’s often missing in a successful collaborative project is a purposeful and clear boundary object.
Boundary objects are “objects which are both plastic enough to adapt to local needs and constraints of the several parties employing them, yet robust enough to maintain a common identity across sites” (Star & Griesemer, 1989, p. 393). They inhabit multiple social worlds and enable cooperation without requiring consensus. In cross-cultural work, they serve as translation mechanisms that allow different communities to collaborate while maintaining their distinct perspectives and expertise.
My understanding of boundary objects used as a tool in cross-cultural collaborations didn’t come from reading theory first. It emerged through years of partnership with educators in Tanzania, where what began as an assigned task evolved into something far more generative.
It started straightforward enough: create a design thinking course. Both the teachers in Tanzania and I had an assignment. We had some basic constraints and realities of the context, but we needed to figure out the shared purpose ourselves. What did this course actually mean? Why did it matter? How would it work in practice?
The course outline became our first boundary object. It was flexible enough to hold both Western design methodology and Tanzanian educational practice, but specific enough to guide actual teaching. The outline was robust enough to hold both interpretations without breaking.
Then something unexpected happened. We lost the person who had been assigned to lead the project. This could have ended everything. Instead, it revealed what the real foundation was.
One teacher found profound purpose and connection to the course. Not because someone told him to, but because something about it resonated with his vision for what education could be and felt personal and professional purpose in its potential. His commitment completely transformed my own. Suddenly we weren’t just completing an assignment. We were building something together that mattered.
The boundary object shifted. It wasn’t the formal curriculum mandate anymore. It was the shared vision this teacher articulated, the possibilities he saw for his students. This is what research on boundary objects shows: they’re not static. They evolve as relationships deepen (Carlile, 2004). What started as a standardized form became something more organic, more relationally embedded.
Once this teacher took the lead, our boundary object changed again. It became less about the curriculum materials themselves and more about trust. We had to make that trust visible and actionable.
I needed to communicate clearly: You know your students. You know your context. You are the expert here. I can provide support, training when you need it, materials you can adapt. But this is your course.
That explicit acknowledgment became a different kind of boundary object. Not a document, but a practice. Regular communication. Responsive adaptation. Recognition that her understanding of student needs and cultural context was knowledge that shaped the course as much as any design thinking theory I brought.
Wenger (1998) talks about how boundary objects require “boundary practices,” the ongoing work of translation and negotiation. That’s what this was. Not just creating a thing once, but maintaining the relationship that allowed the thing to keep working.
Years later, we’re still connected. Not through the original curriculum outline or even our day-to-day communication, but through student final project presentations.
These presentations have become our renewed touchpoint. Students demonstrate what they’ve internalized. Teachers see their pedagogical impact. I understand how design thinking has been translated in ways I never could have imagined at the start. The students’ work shows me what the methodology became in this specific context, not what I hoped it would become.
This is what Akkerman and Bakker (2011) call “perspective making and taking.” Boundary objects let you see your own perspective more clearly while also understanding how others see things. The student presentations do that. They hold multiple meanings at once.
Creating Boundary Objects in Your Own Work
If you’re navigating cross-cultural or interdisciplinary collaboration, here are principles that might help:
Start with relationship, not object. The most effective boundary objects emerge from genuine connection and shared purpose. Don’t begin by designing the perfect tool. Begin by understanding what different people need and value.
Expect evolution. What serves as a boundary object will change as collaboration deepens. Be prepared to let go of initial structures when they no longer serve the work.
Make power visible. Explicitly discuss who has authority to modify the boundary object, whose interpretation carries more weight, how conflicts will be resolved. If you don’t talk about power, it still operates. It just operates invisibly.
Build in flexibility. Create objects that can accommodate multiple interpretations without losing coherence. This often means more structure than you might initially think, but with explicit space for local adaptation.
Make it tangible. Abstract concepts rarely bridge effectively. Create something people can point to, modify, share.
Plan for maintenance. Who will do the ongoing work of keeping the boundary object functional? Don’t assume it will sustain itself.
Foundational Works on Boundary Objects
Star, S. L., & Griesemer, J. R. (1989). Institutional ecology, ‘translations’ and boundary objects: Amateurs and professionals in Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, 1907-39. Social Studies of Science, 19(3), 387-420.
https://doi.org/10.1177/030631289019003004
The original article introducing boundary objects through museum work
Star, S. L. (2010). This is not a boundary object: Reflections on the origin of a concept. Science, Technology, & Human Values, 35(5), 601-617.
https://doi.org/10.1177/0162243910377624
Star reflects on how the concept has been used and sometimes misunderstood
Bowker, G. C., & Star, S. L. (1999). Sorting things out: Classification and its consequences. MIT Press.
https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262522953/sorting-things-out/
Broader work on classification systems and how objects organize social worlds
Boundary Objects in Practice
Carlile, P. R. (2002). A pragmatic view of knowledge and boundaries: Boundary objects in new product development. Organization Science, 13(4), 442-455.
https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.13.4.442.2953
Application to product development and organizational knowledge
Carlile, P. R. (2004). Transferring, translating, and transforming: An integrative framework for managing knowledge across boundaries. Organization Science, 15(5), 555-568.
https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.1040.0094
The three types of boundary work: syntactic, semantic, pragmatic
Henderson, K. (1991). Flexible sketches and inflexible data bases: Visual communication, conscription devices, and boundary objects in design engineering. Science, Technology, & Human Values, 16(4), 448-473.
https://doi.org/10.1177/016224399101600402
How sketches and drawings function as boundary objects in engineering