https://dorian.substack.com/p/at-any-given-moment-in-a-process
Nuggets
Re: a new design concern = effortful
I spent a lot of time with this book, with the math, and with the work of Alexander’s contemporaries (notably Herbert Simon and Horst Rittel). I even tried to implement it, thinking it would be a great methodology for cost-estimating software projects. What I found—and I was warned, as the book says as much—was that adding a new design concern to the network has the potential to dramatically alter the optimal decomposition pattern. Also, the sheer effort of gathering and structuring these design concerns is significant and irreducible, and there is always the possibility that any new design concern added to the network would yield yet another new design concern.
Improving a living structure (I’m thinking of CEEALAR here)
The process of creating living structure involves using these properties as structure-preserving transformations. At each iteration of what Alexander called the fundamental differentiating process, you pick one and apply it. I quote said process here:
- At any given moment in a process, we have a certain partially evolved state of a structure. This state is described by the wholeness: the system of centers, and their relative nesting and degrees of life.
- We pay attention as profoundly as possible to this wholeness—its global, large-scale order, both actual and latent.
- We try to identify the sense in which this structure is weakest as a whole, weakest in its coherence as a whole, most deeply lacking in feeling.
- We look for the latent centers in the whole. These are not those centers which are robust and exist strongly already; rather, they are centers which are dimly present in a weak form, but which seem to us to contribute to or cause the current absence of life in the whole.
- We then choose one of these latent centers to work on. It may be a large center, or middle-sized, or small.
- We use one or more of the fifteen structure-preserving transformations, singly or in combination, to differentiate and strengthen the structure in its wholeness.
- As a result of the differentiation which occurs, new centers are born. The extent of the fifteen properties which accompany creation of new centers will also take place.
- In particular we shall have increased the strength of certain larger centers; we shall also have increased the strength of parallel centers; and we shall also have increased the strength of smaller centers. As a whole, the structure will now, as a result of this differentiation, be stronger and have more coherence and definition as a living structure.
- We test to make sure that this is actually so, and that the presumed increase of life has actually taken place.
- We also test that what we have done is the simplest differentiation possible, to accomplish this goal in respect of the center that is under development.
- When complete, we go back to the beginning of the cycle, and apply the same process again.
The acceptance criterion for determining the success of the application of these transformations is, for some, particularly difficult to swallow, especially against a backdrop of postmodernism, where values are supposed to be a matter of personal opinion. Alexander called it the ==mirror-of-the-self test==. It reduces, roughly, to comparing one configuration to another, and asking yourself, not “do I prefer” one or the other, but “which of these is a better representation of myself?” This formulation, according to Alexander, gets overwhelming agreement among those who ask, and is the basis for guidance by what he called deep feeling.
Software people who study Alexander should, in my opinion, really be studying this work, and leave patterns behind, as he did.