Jane Jacobs
quoted here
-- a similar comment here
in The Exploding Metropolis
by Jane Jacobs. Ch 6
"A Pattern Language was originally expected to enable every citizen to design and construct their own home.
While that ambitious objective was not entirely realized, it did result in a liberation from empty architectural dogma. Armed with this book, a client can evolve and express his or her own desires for a building. An architect is no longer the absolute and sole source of design ideas and solutions. On a larger scale, mistakes in urban design and planning can be detected and corrected.
I believe that this remarkable shift in power, which enables ordinary people to understand their environment -- often better than the professionals -- is responsible for the harsh suppression of this monumental work by certain short-sighted members of the architectural profession."
"We CAN have a world of cities which is beautiful, useful, good to live in, and where children, animals, plants, flowers, trees, insects, and men and women can live in harmony."
"The Gate
To reach the quality without a name we must then build a living pattern language as a gate.
This quality in buildings and in towns cannot be made, but only generated, indirectly, by the ordinary actions of the people, just as a flower cannot be made, but only generated from the seed.
The people can shape buildings for themselves, and done it for centuries, by using languages I call pattern languages. A pattern language gives each person who uses it the power to create an infinite variety of new and unique buildings, just as his ordinary language gives him the power to create an infinite variety of sentences.
The Way
Once we have built the gate, we can pass through it to the practice of the timeless way.
Now we shall begin to see in detail how the rich and complex order of a town can grow from thousands of creative acts. For once we have a common pattern language in our town, we shall all have the power to make our streets and buildings live, through our most ordinary acts. The language, like a seed, is the genetic system which gives our millions of small acts the power to form a whole.
The Quality
I was no longer willing to start looking at any pattern unless it presented itself to me as having the capacity to connect up the some part of this quality (the quality without a name). Unless a particular pattern actually was capable of generating the kind of life and spirit that we are now discussing, and that it had this quality itself, my tendency was to dismiss it, even though we explored many, many patterns.
The first place I think of when I try to tell someone about this quality is a corner of an English country garden where a peach tree grows against a wall.
The wall runs east to west, the peach tree grows flat against the southern tide. The sun shines on the tree and, as it warms the bricks behind the tree, the warm bricks themselves warm the peaches on the tree. It has a slightly dozy quality. The tree, carefully tied to grow flat against the wall; warming the bricks; the peaches growing in the sun; the wild grass growing around the roots of the tree, in the angle where the earth and roots and wall all meet.
This quality is the most fundamental quality there is in anything.
It is a subtle kind of freedom from inner contradictions."
The original Pattern Language, by Alexander et al, was an attempt toconstruct a grammar for producing a humane built environment -- towns, buildings, construction. In recent years computer programmers have enthusiastically adopted the idea.
"The right tools for 'community architecture' are beginning to be recognised. 'Pattern Language' by architect Christopher Alexander (published by OUP, New York) allows any group of people to take an informed part in the design of their own houses or neighbourhood.
It is as simple as painting by numbers ..."
"A survey of hundreds of corporate software development projects indicated that five out of six software projects are considered unsuccessful. About a third of software projects are canceled. The remaining projects delivered software that was typically twice the expected budget and took twice as long to developed as originally planned [Johnson 95]. These repeated failures, or "negative solutions", are highly valuable, however in that they provide us with useful knowledge of what does not work, and through study: why. Such study, in the vernacular of Design Patterns can be classified as the study of AntiPatterns."I haven't readthe book.I can't figure out from the site exactly what the authors are trying to say. The site itself, IMHO, is a demonstration of AntiPatterns for site design.
"The biggest victory for the Alertbox may be that almost everything I have written in 105 columns over five years remains relevant today. For example, the guidelines in my column on Web-based multi-media from 1995 are still correct. Very few people who write about the Internet can say the same; no big companies dare put their five-year-old reports on the Web for potential customers to check the sustainability of their predictions and advice.
The reason old Alertboxes continue to offer valid advice is that they are based on human characteristics and not on the details of the technology or the latest tradeshow buzzwords. People change slowly."
(Nielsen's emphasis -- ed.)
"Anyone may freely use and distribute the Ogg and Vorbis specifications, whether in a private, public or corporate capacity. The specification is fully open to the public to be used for any purpose. However, Xiphophorus and the Ogg project (xiph.org) reserve the right to set the Ogg/Vorbis specification and certify specification compliance."The specifications. The Standards. You aren't charged for using them. Anyone is free to use and modify,
"The human-centered approach puts people's needs first, technology second. It focuses upon human activities. It makes the technology invisible, embedded within activity-specific information appliances. Simple, powerful, enjoyable."
"Human-centered products emphasize user experience over factors like technology, features, or marketing points. 'User experience' encompasses all aspects of the end-user's interaction with your company, your services, and your products. Human-centered products meet the exact needs of your customer, without fuss or bother. They are simple and elegant, a joy to own, a joy to use."
-- Link is NN/g's
"In The Clock of the Long Now (Basic Books, 1999), Stewart Brand sorts civilization into six layers that change at different rates over time"
"WE ARE TRYING TO DO WHAT WE CAN, IN OUR LIMITED WAY, TO HELP ALL PEOPLE ON EARTH BECOME FREE
WE ARE TRYING TO FIGHT AGAINST THE ENSLAVEMENT OF PEOPLE BY MONEY, BY POWER, AND BY BUILDINGS AND BY DEADLY LANDSCAPES AND CITY NEIGHBORHOODS
IT WILL TAKE ALL OUR ENERGY TO FIND WAYS OF REPLACING DEAD CITIES AND ENVIRONMENTS, WITH THOSE IN WHICH WE CAN MORE EASILY BE FREE
HUMAN FREEDOM IS NOT ONLY IN OUR MINDS: IT IS A STATE OF GRACE, NATURAL TO US, BUT TOO OFTEN PREVENTED BY THE PHYSICAL ENVIRONMENT IN WHICH WE LIVE
THIS IS OUR FIGHT TO GIVE BACK THE WORLD TO ITS PEOPLE: YOU AND ME"
WHAT IS PATTERNLANGUAGE.COM ALL ABOUT?
6,000,000,000 of us are shaping our world, every day.
You are one of these 6,000,000,000 people.
This website has been created to allow all people: homeowners, architects, builders, planners, and others, to design their own houses, to design large buildings, streets, neighborhoods, and gardens, in a way that will enhance the earth. On the pages of this website, starting on the site map, which follows, you will find the tools to do these things.
WE SEEK TO HELP PEOPLE DESIGN THINGS, CREATE THINGS, TO MAKE THEM USEFUL AND BEAUTIFUL, IN WHATEVER WE ARE DOING, SO THAT WE MAY ALL TAKE PART IN THE DAILY WORK OF BUILDING A LIVING EARTH
PATTERNLANGUAGE.COM is a new internet company, formed as an outgrowth of thirty years of work at THE CENTER FOR ENVIRONMENTAL STRUCTURE a non-profit organization dedicated to the shaping of our built environment so that it becomes deeply comfortable, beautiful and supportive for all human beings. This website and this new company are dedicated to reaching people of all walks of life who share our concern. In small ways (the design of a garden, the refurbishing of an attic into an extra room), or in larger ways(the revamping of a neighborhood, planning for a new office building), we all play our part in shaping our environment, which in turn shapes us.
"We have been used to thinking of architecture -- cities, streets, houses, apartments, gardens, classrooms -- as being functional or not.The much deeper connection to our own freedom, is the most basic issue. Each us struggles; and we hold precious our freedom. Hard to define, it is nevertheless the most precious aspect of our social existence, and the most vital obligation of society – to provide us with this freedom. It means being free to think as we wish, to act as we wish, to educate our children as we wish, to dream of improvements, to be free to love our families, freedom to work, freedom to learn, freedom to have health, and education, freedom to worship, freedom to BE , to exist spiritually as we are, freedom to become better."
"Once upon a time, we wrote a book called A Pattern Language and that is how we got our name.
Now, a pattern is an old idea. The new idea in the book was to organize implicit knowledge about how people solve recurring problems when they go about building things. ...
The book gave 253 patterns about solutions that are known to work. ...
The 253 patterns are now on the website, you can browse through them, use them, think about them. ...
Then more books. One book. It grew to two. It grew to three. It grew to four. And then we all said "stop". That's enough.
So we have four. The quartet of books is called The Nature of Order."