David Malouf wrote: > At the heart of Alexander's work is that Patterns ARE. They are > primarily a > description of what already exists, but then through conversion of > being > described as a pattern is canonized. They are not rules for what > you have to > do, but rather suggestions for how previously similar "problems" > have been > solved "with success".
I agree that they're not at all rules, but I disagree with your characterization of his purpose: it's not that Alexander's patterns ARE existent in architecture, it's that they're what he thinks architecture SHOULD BE based on. He was citing examples of patterns that were consistent with his particular social and political world view, things that he thought were good. They're very idiosyncratic: they're incredibly poetic and spiritual, very socialist (even in many cases communist), and almost never based on any sort of empirical argument. Many of them are even, in my opinion, dead wrong. And they are far from comprehensive -- he doesn't describe lots of very common architectural patterns, such as how to house a prisoner, where a CEO should sit with respect to his employees, how to structure a sales floor to move lots of merchandise, or how to instill fear in religious worshippers. I don't even think of them as "suggestions". Alexander's pattern language is a very particular cultural manifesto, which taken as a whole comprises a way of building that he and his followers think results in great architecture and shiny happy people. > Patterns further can be innovated, they can be nested and scaled. > > To answer Christian. I "believe" in patterns, but am uncertain to > how to > best make them work in a living real workspace given my experience. > I fall > between the line academic who loves "pattern recognition" and a > "gotta get > it done" person. My take on patterns is this: They should usually be thought of as a "language", not as a "reference library" or even worse as a "solution locator". You don't take a problem you have (say, "I need to present the user with a small number of multiple mutually exclusive selections") and then look up the pattern that best matches the problem (in this case, a "radio button"). This just isn't how most people work. Instead, you immerse yourself in the language of your field and then when you face a problem the solution can be found in your head, in your learned vocabulary, accessible in the same way that a word might be accessible when you are forming a sentence. The advantage of assembling a collection of patterns into a book like Alexander's is that in a single sitting a reader can imbibe the full breadth of his language, and can later look back to the book when they need inspiration. When a pattern is put into a library for reference, it becomes, functionally, a style guide. I think of Yahoo's library as a style guide when I go there for an answer to a particular problem, but I see it as a pattern language when I go there simply to read through it and absorb the holistic view of interaction design it embodies. It's also something of a dictionary or thesaurus so you can see proper usage within a given style idiom. But the overarching language of interactive design should be seen as something fluid and hard to pin down, much like a real language. The whole world is a pattern language. But it's great when people like Alexander, and organizations like Yahoo, attempt to carve out a set of it as a good and consistent way of doing things. Just keep in mind that it's just one way of doing things. -Cf Christopher Fahey ____________________________ Behavior biz: http://www.behaviordesign.com me: http://www.graphpaper.com ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe ................ http://gamma.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://gamma.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://gamma.ixda.org/help
