Joseph Grinnell used two tricks to make taxonomic specimens into Boundary Objects that made Berkeley's Museum of Vertebrate Zoology succeed.
1. He focused on what people should *do* – on how they should write things down – rather than on what they should care about. The Grinnell System for collecting and documenting specimens balanced ease of use and thoroughness so effectively that it’s still used today.
2. How people worked with specimens was *negotiated* in the process of doing the work. It was *not* predefined. A workable compromise had to be *discovered*. Humans can’t reliably think about “doing” in the future tense. They have to observe the results of *actually* *doing* something, preferably in a tight feedback loop.