The work of the architect Christopher Alexander has spawned a remarkable revolution in technology, producing a set of innovations ranging from Wikipedia to The Sims. Notably he influenced people like Ward Cunningham, inventor of the wiki concept or some people behind the innovative webdesign company that produced Basecamp: 37signals.
Alexander didn’t only influence the world of software but many other fields, including biology, ecology, organization theory, business management, and manufacturing.
Here are some notes and links on his remarkable work.
What you may not know is that Alexander’s work has spawned a remarkable revolution in technology, producing a set of innovations ranging from Wikipedia to The Sims. If you have an iPhone, you may be surprised to know that you have Alexander’s technology in your pocket. The software that runs the apps is built on a pattern language programming system.
How did an architect come to have such influence in the world of software — and as it turns out, a lot of other fields? (To name a few: biology, ecology, organization theory, business management, and manufacturing.)
Christopher Alexander was always concerned with the processes by which parts transform into wholes. He wanted to know how we are implementing this part-whole synthesis; how nature does it; and especially, where we, in our own human version, might be getting it wrong.
As it happens, an earlier generation of computer programmers, organization theorists, design theorists and many others, were struggling then to figure out how to generate and manage the large new design structures of that era — computer software being one prominent example. Alexander gave them some very helpful conceptual tools to do that.
In essence, the tools were patterns: not things, but relations of things, which could be identified and re-combined and re-used, in a language-like way.
We’re substituting an oversimplified model of structure-making — one more closely related to our peculiar hierarchically limited way of conceiving abstract relationships — in place of the kinds of transformations that actually occur regularly in the universe, and in biological systems especially. Ours is a much more limited, fragmentary form of this larger kind of transformation. The result of this problem is nothing less than a slow unfolding technological disaster. We know it as the sustainability crisis.
What Alexander argues is that we have to make some very fundamental reforms — not only in our specific technologies, but in our very way of thinking about technology. We have been isolating things, as mechanical sub-entities, and manipulating them. That works quite well, but only up to a point. As any systems theorist or ecologist will tell you, the context, not the thing, is the key.
So it seems that we have ignored an incredibly important aspect of natural systems — namely, the fact that every structure is embedded in a larger structural context, and ultimately, in the entire structure of the cosmos itself.
What Alexander offered was not just the recognition of this truth, but the basis of a new technology that could incorporate it.
- Christopher Alexander – Wikipedia
- Pattern Language – Wikipedia
- The Pattern Technology of Christopher Alexander
- The Radical Technology of Christopher Alexander
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