Book: Notes on the Synthesis of Form
I am currently reading "Notes on the Synthesis of Form" by Christopher Alexander - a most remarkable book. Since first learning about design patterns and software architecture, I have been vaguely aware of Alexander's influence on the field of software engineering. I have never, however, tried to read any of his books - save a few, brief stints into "The Timeless Way of Building".
In comparison, "Notes on…" is a much more accessible book.
As has been noted by many others before me, this book is a wealth of information about design processes and the structures of designed artifacts. I will not attempt to list Alexander's many significant observations here, but I will try to give a brief overview of the fundamental idea of the book…
The book is divided into two parts - in the first part, Alexander:
- Argues for the necessity of rational design approaches.
- Explains how a design problem can be viewed as a cybernetic system of interdependant variables of potential misfits.
- Analyses why current (1964) design approaches cannot achieve good fitness for a such system.
Detailed description of the first part of the book:
Design used to be carried out within a tradition, which would guide the decisions of the designer, but
…what once took many generations of gradual development is now attempted by a single individual. (pp. 5)
Add to this the fact, that we live in a modern world and have great ambitions:
At the same time that the problems increase in quantity, complexity, and difficulty, they also change faster than before. New materials are developed all the time, social patterns alter quickly, the culture itself is changing faster than it has ever changed before. (pp. 4)
Despite this lack of innocence in the modern world, many designers insist on innoncence - design must be a purely intuitive process. This is not good, we need rational approaches, since
A logical picture is easier to critize than a vague picture since the assumptions it is based on are brought out into the open. (pp. 8)
Alexander then proceedes to outline a such, rational approach,
…based on the idea that every design problem begins with an effort to achieve fitness between two entities: the form in question and its context. In other words, when we speak of design, the real object of discussion is not the form alone, but the ensemble comprising the form and its context. Good fit is a desired property of the ensemble which relates to some particular division of the ensemble into form and context. (pp. 15-16)
The fitness relation between form and context can be expressed as a system of binary varaibles, where each variable describe a potential misfit. The system is decomposed through interdependencies between variables. The nature of the decomposition can be established by examining the system's response to change:
As form-making proceeds, so the system of variables changes state. One misfit is eradicated, another misfit occurs, and these changes in turn set off reations within the system that affect the states of other variables. (pp. 38)
Alexander distinguishes between design processes in unselfconscious and selfconscious cultures.
I shall call a culture unselfconscious if its form-making is learned informally, through imitation and correction. And I shall call a culture selfconscious if its form-making is taught academically, according to explicit rules. (pp. 36)
Designprocesses of unselfconscious cultures are suited to achieve fitness for a system of potential misfit, because
…the directness of the response to misfit ensures that each failure is corrected as soon as it occurs, and thereby restricts the change to one subsystem at a time. And on the other hand the force of tradition, by resisting needless change, holds steady all the variables not in the relevant subsystem, and prevents those minor disturbances outside the subsystem from taking hold. (pp. 52)
While the design processes of selfconscious cultures are unable to achieve fitness for the proposed systems of potential misfits, due to modernity plus the selfconscious design approach's attempt to grasp large and complex design problems by conceptualizing requirements based on function [functional decomposition?]:
…the viscosity which brought the unselfconscious process to rest when there were no failures left, is thinned by the high temperature of selfconsciousness. (pp. 56)
The form-maker's assertion of his individuality… (pp. 57)
In the selfconscious situation, …, the designer is faced with all the variables simultaneously. …he tries to break the problem down, and so invents concepts to help himself decide which subsets of requirements to deal with independently…These concepts will not help the designer in finding a well-adapted solution unless they happen to correspond to the system's subsystems. (pp. 65)
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