Considered correspondence

Letter to Greg Keeffe

2012-01-19T13:09:00.000Z

Hadn't seen your urbanism blog before. Glad I have now.

There is a terrible thing going on. Life is being squashed, sucked, drained from everything by an essentially inhuman network that is corporatism - machine scale institutions, processes, understandings (this applies equally to 'right' and 'left' - all seem in thrall to / in awe of the insensate power of scale).

Those of us who hate this, who resist this, are nevertheless part of it: as Joe S said - "You have to deal with it/ It is the currency" - 'Hate and War'

But our opposition is fatally fragmented by the reverberations of modernism. Modernism is Janus faced. On the one hand, it celebrates the individual, encourages us to look at tradition with a sceptical and suspicious eye - as the trappings of an outdated feudal system - in this sense it encourages freedom, supports life.

On the other hand, modernism has been the handmaiden and aggressive tool of corporatism as it assiduously dismantles all human solidarity and sense of joint endeavour, of shared values, shared culture - in much the same way that a parasitic wasp turns the inside of its victim into a protein pulp, so that it can feed on an undifferentiated mush - modernism plays the part of the agent that is injected into the victim.

So we have a situation where the only model for anger, for resistance, for scepticism, for proposing new visions, is modernism (however debased the term has become - and I'm not talking about architectural modernism, that isn't even a bad joke any more - I mean the whole cultural mode). And it is useless - worse than useless.

I'm including you as a modernist, in the light of your blog.

But modernism has been recuperated; has been recuperated almost from the moment of its triumph - the period immediately after WWII - the period when the CIA began funding cultural publications, and the USA imported modernists wholesale from the wreckage of europe, rendering them pawns by giving them tenure professorships.

All this angry modern ranting about the state of things, about radical new things, is grist to corporatism's mill - individualism and unique visions can never challenge the grip of mass statistically based culture - they can always be re-assimilated and sold back to us as pictures, as lifestyles.

Only strong communities can resist, and communities can only be real when they consist of groups of people not bigger than a few hundred. This is not fuddy-duddy, or traditionalist, or romantic, or right wing, or left wing - this is hard science (modernism has difficulties with science; on the one hand, it loves the idea of the radicalism of science - that something can just be true, whatever society would prefer; on the other hand, it finds it desperately uncomfortable when science demolishes its own romantic notions of the heroic individual, of free will, of the liberation of humans from the legacy of our evolution).

AND MODERNISM IS ANTI COMMUNITY. It must be - that was its purpose - it was a necessary development whose raison d'etre was to break the remains of feudal society that stifled humanity at the end of the C19th.

WE MUST MOVE BEYOND MODERNISM - we must re-invent community on the basis of what humans actually are - minimally evolved hunter gatherers.

I am afraid that blather about 'software' and a 'post-Superstudio' world (seductive as it might be to a middle class intellectual) belong to science fiction, and not to what is around us, to where we are, to what we can become.

This is not an attack - it is intended as a robust conversational gambit.

I like your blog. It is powerful and says great things in short sharp bursts. It makes me think. But at the same time, it is nearly useless.

As Raoul Vaneigem said;

"Everything has been said, yet few have taken notice of it. Since all our knowledge is essentially banal, it can only be of value to minds that are not."

Without being vain, I consider myself non-banal. This is rare. I consider you non-banal also. We are getting old - I will be 50 this year. We see just how extreme the situation is that humanity has got itself into. We are angry; we have children, we don't want them to live in shit.

We are desperate that others should become non-banal.

Here's the thing. We are weird. For whatever reason (and I credit punk rock for my own enlightenment), we were dissatisfied, smart, exposed at a young age to radical perspectives in the middle of a recession which meant no-one was offering us easy lives that we could stomach.

But it takes more than angry weirdos to change the world. It takes normal, boring, decent, sensible people - some reasonably large minority - to change the world. And these people aren't angry, aren't desperate, aren't intellectuals.

What they need is tools - tools that make sense to them, tools that they can use, tools that go toward building small parts of the world that are resistant to corporatism - places where a human, rather than a non-human, reality holds sway.

Uncomfortably for you, I believe that these places will look and feel rather dull, rather old-fashioned, rather homely, desperately short of wacky imagery, or cool ideas - what they look like will not represent their real radicalism, which will reside in how people relate to each other. The modernist notion of the absolute requirement for visible radicalism as a solution for dissatisfaction is bunk - exciting hokum, and nothing else. It is an intellectual solution to a problem that has little or nothing to do with intellectualism, and everything to do with practical reality (I know, I said a dirty word).

Somewhere toward the beginning of 'Architecture and Utopia. Design and Capitalist Development', Manfredo Tafuri has a superb line that powerfully and convincingly asserts that all avant-gardism is a means of warding off bourgeois anguish. I don't have the book here, so I can't give you the direct quote - it's fantastic.

I am with you in finding almost all of the output of the 'new-urbanists' and their fellow travelers turgid and flabby. I agree that they are massively compromised in their association with reactionary 'traditionalists'. I agree that their reliance in this country on the monarchy is disturbing and bizarre. Nevertheless, this group contains the only glimmerings of work that gropes towards evidence based working, relying on humans as the measure of urbanism. It is distressing to me to have to associate myself with them in many, many ways (and in fact, I hardly do associate in practice). Nevertheless, I cannot see anyone else (excepting completely my teacher, Chris. Alexander) who seems even interested in humans as they really are.

And if the alternative is Rem Koolhaas, then the choice gets even simpler.

If there is to be any effective resistance, it will be nurtured in places that are built around humans, around their physical, emotional, social and psychological realities and needs, places which are inimically resistant to mass culture, mass marketing, mobocracy; places in which community is a natural implication of existence.

To quote Big Flame: "Turn your anger into energy! MAKE yourself think!" Note, they didn't say to turn your anger into radicalism.

I have, of course, set you up as something of an aunt sally in all this. I have undoubtedly ascribed to you positions and opinions which you don't have, and radically over-simplified even those - please accept my apologies and understand my motives. If you are minded to respond at all, I would be overjoyed.

Freiwillige Selbstkontrolle

2011-12-12T23:40:00.000Z

There - that's a catchy title for a blog post, innit? This one'll go viral for sure.....
Actually, I'm being wilfully obscure (me?) - Freiwillige Selbstkontrolle were (are, it seems) a German post-punk band, whereas this post is actually about the implications of suggestions by scientists that free will is an illusion, written in response to this interesting post: The survival value of 'free' will.
In summary, the post rehearses recent suggestions from a number of scientific angles that free will does not exist, and looks at why we might have stuck with (developed?) such an illusion for evolutionary reasons.
I have read quite a bit around this topic - it comes up in New Scientist fairly frequently - and I've frequently come across this sort of statement;

"So why then do we believe in free will?
It’s simple: if we didn’t, we’d all die a lot sooner.

Which has always seemed paradoxical; if we have no free will, then how could we 'choose' to have free will?
This time, for some reason (displacement activity), I actually thought about it, and realised that what is actually being said is that we 'naturally' believe in free will as a successful survival strategy (borne out by evidence that individuals who become convinced that free will is an illusion become fatalistic and don't live as long as they might, while 'believers' tend to live longer, healthier lives). In other words, we don't choose' to have free will - we are genetically programmed to have the illusion of free will.

When I'd figured that out, I wrote a comment. In the spirit of this blog, here it is;

So the suggestion is, that as structures with some (local) persistence in space-time, we believe in free will as a structural pre-condition of our existence/persistence.
In other words, similar structures to ourselves, that did not believe in free will, were less persistent (and thus less likely to give rise to other persistent structures - reproduce), while the ones that did were more persistent.
What is interesting about this is the implication that the fabric of space-time is woven somehow so that the pattern that includes an incorrect belief in free-will is a pattern that sustains itself (think radical multi-dimensional crystallography) - at least locally (200K years on a speck of a planet could be a local perturbation - an anomaly, a flaw in the crystal).

Why would this be? Why would a pattern that works in denial of the real weave of space-time be more persistent than one that does not?

That's it. There is something intuitively strange about a pattern that is at odds with the reality of its substrate being more successful than one which is not.

Letter to Christopher Alexander

2011-11-28T18:54:00.001Z

I wrote this letter after seeing Chris. Alexander speak at the kevin Lynch Memorial lecture, held by the Urban Design Group in London, November 2011:

Dear Chris,

Thank you for the presentation at the UDG event on Wednesday. I was pleased not only to be able to come and hear for myself, but to bring along some others who have long known of my interest in and dependence on your work.

I have been and remain terribly frustrated (in the US sense of the word) by the lack of forums in which intelligent debate and development of the many ideas, possibilities and imperatives implied by your work. I have often attempted to discover others who might be interested in such work and talk via the Internet - only to fail.

I am really seriously concerned that humanity should not miss the point and value of your work. Although I know that you have focused strongly on architecture and the ability of humans to create beauty (as have I), I have a very strong feeling that the tools you have perforce had to create in the attempt to develop reliable approaches to inherently complex and indeterminate (as in not-computable) systems have an enormous potential beyond the world of architecture (filled, as it frankly is, with intellectual duds, mountebanks, egoists clever and stupid, plodders, chancers, cynics, and sweet, deluded mystics of all kinds - plus the odd self-entranced genius of course).

Put simply, I believe that the Pattern Language approach is humanity's best tool so far developed for allowing our poorly adapted fleshly brains to deal with complexity. As we seem to have arrived at a position where the outcome of the short term 'successes' of reductionism is about to severely undermine the potential for human development by changing the ecosystem beyond our ability to adapt, and since the ecosystem is perhaps the second most complex system known to us [universe>ecosytem>brain], it is urgently necessary for humans to get better at managing to think effectively about complexity, in ways that help us get beyond reductionist approaches (and leverage them where required - this is not about throwing the baby out with the bathwater).

To my mind, the only reliable measure of human 'progress' is the increase in the number of ways generally available to us of thinking about things (I use the term metaphysics); so that language is a genuine advance, while the development of the steam engine is not (although the consideration of all sorts of implications of steam engines has led to real advances). We are living in a period where the most powerful metaphysics has been that of reductionism. Reductionism has had a few hundred years of astounding impact, that has led us (as a culture) to believe that it is deeply powerful. Unfortunately, we live on such a short timescale that it is hard for most of us to see that reductionism, practised to the exclusion of practically all else, is like a short cut across a swamp - seems quick, but is doomed to disaster.

The patterning approach to complex systems is a genuine advance in these terms - a genuinely new way of thinking about the world. And it is fantastically simple to get the hang of (although I am always aware of the injunction at the beginning of APL that possession of a language does not guarantee poetry). It is genuinely useful.

I have tried to explain this more fully here, in a letter to Ward Cunningham, who developed the first Wiki software for use in collaborative development of software 'patterns' after being inspired by 'APL'. I wanted him to help me develop a software tool for capturing pattern languages, and we did get somewhere, but couldn't get any software engineers to help on an open-source basis. There are some other relevant posts on that blog, as well.

You see, I firmly believe that patterning approaches can be widely relevant in all sorts of areas of human endeavour - I think that pattern languages need to be as widely used for approaching complex systems as other sorts of analyses are in other realms. Patterning approaches are among the metaphysical tools than can help us think our way out of the mess we are in - and crucially, it is the only approach I have seen which does not depend on an enormous ability with higher mathematics and access to a supercomputer.

In other words, it is the only approach I can think of which has a hope in hell of being useful to the mass of humanity.

This email is getting to be rather long, so I shall come to my point. I believe it is time to be gathering together a body of people that will support and sustain a Pattern Language Institute - one that is firmly connected into the wide world - not solely with architecture. I would suggest it could be associated with something like the Rocky Mountains Institute or a university with an established expertise in complexity - there are scientists writing very interesting and useful books in the area now, but the case needs to be made that broadly useful tools for grappling with complex situations need to be developed alongside the science, and that pattern languages are demonstrably powerful.

For instance, I have developed a strong argument that Pattern Languages are invaluable tools for constructing hard-headed business plans and business systems - both highly lucrative and busy fields that appear to muddle along with antediluvian methodologies. I am convinced that pattering approaches could be highly useful in the analysis and meta-analysis of social and ecological systems, allowing higher-order understandings that are very hard to see without structured representations of insights. I imagine (rather vaguely here...) that development of the mathematics of semi-lattice networks would give rise to other tools. I am aware that pattern recognition is a huge field in the realm of artificial intelligence, and cybernetics, but I am not aware of the use of semi-lattice networks in the synthesis of such recognitions. I wonder strongly whether Bayesian analysis of systems observed and patterned might not be a powerful tool for artificial intelligence; and so forth....

As far as architecture is concerned, I am convinced that the architectural community needs to be bypassed - it is in a hopeless state at the moment, utterly consumed by alternate delusion and despair, and hopelessly in thrall to global consumerism. To coin a US term, an 'end-run' is what is required. The PoW Institute is an example of this - you may know that they have been accredited as one of only three institutions allowed to be appointed for certain government funded community design exercises in the UK. Of course, any Pattern Language Institute would have a strong presence in practical architectural theory, but I personally believe that it will be people from engineering and construction disciplines who will be the people to actually get this as an approach - precisely because they are interested in building successfully without having been poisoned by all the 'design' nonsense.

All this is far beyond my own expertise, but I would certainly wish to help if at all possible. It makes no sense at all to me for your work to be seen as only relevant to architects, who are by and large incapable of and/or unwilling to understand it. There is an enormous depth of insight, of analysis, of beauty, of material which deserves the fullest possible understanding, dissemination and development; not for its own sake, or for the sake of those of us that know and respect you, but for its value to humans.

Please do let me know if this makes any sense at all to you. I wish that I had said it to you before.

A grumpy exchange with a green politician

2009-04-02T10:22:00.006+01:00

Grumpy on my part, that is - Becca is never less than diplomatic.

An introduction: in 2008 Lambeth Council steamrollered through a proposal for the resolution of traffic problems at an awkward junction that entailed destruction of over 1000 sq m of one of the most loved and well-used parks in the Borough. The Friends of Brockwell Park resisted it, and I supported them, but all seemed lost. Until I got a message concerning Lambeth's refusal properly to consider an alternative scheme, that not only saved 400 plus sq m of park, but claimed to improve several road safety issues. I got a little heated, and sent the following message, with others. This one, though, was to a Green Party councillor (the only 'green' in the council chamber). I've posted it here because the exchange of emails (each of which is entered as a 'comment' below) broadens out the debate:

Becca,

I was at the planning meeting which considered Lambeth's disastrous scheme to re-configure the road junction at Herne Hill (necessary), by tarmacing a great swathe of Brockwell Park (verging on criminal).

I was at the time utterly disgusted to discover that your party supported this proposal, and embarrassed by their political ineptitude in seeking to put conditions on that support - at a planning committee meeting, on a politically contentious issue, with the heavyweight [later correction: former] leader of the council fully engaged! (this is politics, not a right-on co-op meeting - get real, or do something else)

If you had continued your policy of asking me for comment on design issues before setting this bizarre course of action, perhaps we could have come up with a more measured approach.

You have a chance to redeem your party's image somewhat. Friends of Brockwell Park have at some expense - and with the help of pro-bono work from transport engineers who were appalled at the ugliness, ineptitude and laziness of Lambeth's in-house scheme (I mean, did you even look at the drawings?) - come up with a proposal which satisfies the traffic issue, uses significantly less of Brockwell Park, and will therefore COST LESS!

But of course, Lambeth have taken their usual 'f**k you' approach, and tried to kill the idea by having it reviewed by their in-house team - who surprisingly prefer their own ideas! Well who'd have thought it?

All FoBP are asking is for an independent review, one which takes into account the costs and benefits of the proposals properly, and for Lambeth to wait until that has been completed, before moving in to rip up the Park.

Could you meet with them, and make up your own mind about the relative benefits of the proposals?

I have no illusions about your ability to actually DO anything about this, but you do have a chance to be SEEN to be in the right place at the right time, saying the right things - for instance in the SLP - 'Why I have changed my mind about the Brockwell Park scheme". Or do you want Steve Reed - and many 'green' types - to continue to find the Green Party's ability to be effective political players laughable?

Lovelock urges ocean climate fix

2007-09-28T10:39:00.000+01:00

This is a very interesting story, not only for the item itself, but that for the first time in a headline news item, the need for systems thinking has come to the fore; that Ken Caldeira's comments on the possible implications of a large scale technological intervention into a complex system which is not fully understood are part of the story.

There is a clear argument that the very reductionist, mechanistic approach which has given us such prowess in technical effectiveness is one of the motors of the climate change crisis. This approach is the dominant model for problem solving in industrialised cultures. There is a huge danger that as the implications of climate change become more starkly obvious, that we will appeal to this dominant model for 'solutions'.

Yet the climate is the clearest example of a complex system system we have - being the context for the only popular reference to complexity that I know of - 'the butterfly effect' ( more technically - "sensitivity to initial conditions"). It seems clear to me that the version of Sod's Law that is the "Law of unintended consequences" is an observable feature of complex systems - a key characteristic of complex systems being that the computational effort required to accurately predict the outcome of any intervention is equal to or greater than the effort of simply seeing what happens - so that any perturbation of a complex system _will_ produce unintended consequences - although not necessarily adverse or significant. The problem being that you can't tell beforehand; with the obvious corollary being that the larger the perturbation, the larger the potential negative effects of unintended consequences.

So any simplistic, mechanistic 'solution' to climate change is rather likely to have problematic outcomes. Any sustainably effective response will need to be many stranded and multi-layered, and humans aren't good at this.

Which is where systems thinking comes in. The Santa Fe Institute, in New Mexico, focuses on engaging with complexity. I would be good to see/hear the BBC talking to them about climate change issues.

Second letter to Dave Pollard

2007-07-22T13:25:00.000+01:00

Sent to Dave Pollard September 2006 - in reply to his response to the inaugural posting on this blog.

With regard to capacity for conceptualising complexity - I agree that indigenous cultures seem to have developed ways of engaging sustainably with complex systems (although I think we need also to be careful of the cultural 'noble savage' stereotype' - there appear to be many examples where indigenous cultures did not live sustainably - the extinction of most of the large mammals is often laid at the door of human hunters - it is perhaps that surviving indigenous cultures live in demanding environments hostile to western industrialised societies, and are extant only because they can manage to live sustainably within these fragile ecosystems. So the lesson I draw is that humans CAN successfully live in this way, but not that ALL indigenous cultures did/do so).

Importantly for us, though, these indigenous cultures are not rationalised cultures - they cannot be translated into logical systems without traducing and transforming them - usually fatally. Equally importantly, rationalism is a one way street - there is no way back to a pre-rational culture (short of the paranoid fantasy of a near total holocaust, the survivors blasted back to the stone age, etc. etc. - exactly what we are here discussing ways to avoid!).
So, as rational beings, rationally discovering that we live in a world that is finally, irreducibly complex, also seeing that some non-rationalised cultures seem able to cope with that complexity, and finally having it forcibly borne in on us that our current methods of brute simplification are rapidly rendering the world less habitable, how ARE we to proceed?

It has to be accepted that complexity is fundamentally non-rationalisable.

At the same time it becomes obviously irrational to refuse to deal with the non-rational.

This irrationality, I believe, is what has led us to the current mess (from our previous mess - there was no golden age) - the Enlightenment was a heroic effort to rationalise a culture which had become too powerful to continue to operate in a non-rational fashion. It was hard enough to drag the pre-Enlightenment world to accept that there were parts of existence where rational behaviour could produce predictably beneficial results, and hard enough to nail those parts down, without dealing with the vast majority of the world which seemed beyond rational analysis. I don't believe that, at the time, there was any intention to ignore the irrational - after all, it encompassed almost all experience - situations where rational thought and behaviour worked were limited and precious. However, the power that flowed to those who took material advantage of the outcomes of certain sorts of rational endeavour (military, economic and industrial applications) was impressive (and not infrequently oppressive), and the idea that 'knowledge is power' was born.

Knowledge defined precisely as rationalised knowledge.

So that, by the late nineteenth century, there was a growing belief that rationality was all-important, and thus that situations which would not submit to rational analysis were, at best, unimportant. This line of thought reached its philosophical culmination with the Logical Positivists and in Wittgenstein's 'Tractactus Logico-Philosphicus', with its contention that "What we cannot speak of, we must pass over in silence" - an explicit call to ignore anything that could not be logically expressed.

Two dangerous, dominating myths arose from this pervasive mode of thought; first, the perfectibility of human society (communism, fascism, eugenics), and second, the dominion of "homo-technologiens" over nature.

These myths, allied to the real, non-rational power of innate human urges (paradoxically less manageable under a rational worldview, being seen as fundamentally irrational, therefore not to be seriously addressed, than under a religious worldview - making understandable the impetus of religious fundamentalism) drove the history of the 20th century.

We cannot address complexity in the same ways that indigenous peoples seem to be able to, and neither can we address it with reductive rationalism.

At the same time we cannot renounce rationality, without simultaneously jettisoning all the accompanying metaphysics which are the fundamentals of what we are pleased to call a civilisation.

It becomes apparent that rational methods will have to be found with which to address irreducible non-rationality, without destructive simplification. The realm of the non-rational is effectively infinite - we can encroach ever deeper into it with rationalising methods, to generally useful effect: as long as we continually remind ourselves that the exploration will never be over, we may manage to retain a safe level of humility (this I believe is where a modern, sustaining spirituality must be located).

We need to develop rational tools to engage with the irrational. They need to offer us the effectiveness that we are used to in dealing with the artificially simplified systems that our culture uses, with the minimum misrepresentation possible. They need to include test, analysis and feedback mechanisms as fundamental parts of their application.

If we are successful , the effectiveness of these new methods will help us live better on the planet, and will engender new and more sustainable myths, which might keep us going until we next realise what a terrible mess we're in.

Thank you for your blog, which is so obviously the result of a heroic and sustained attempt to get to grips with all of this, and which begins to codify what these new methods might be, what they must address, and how they might be incorporated into ways of living.

I do believe that Christopher Alexander, without meaning to, has invented a framework for such a method, but that's another screed.

regards

Dil Green

Good questions elicit useful answers...

2007-07-22T13:03:00.000+01:00

My good friend Ross Ishikawa - I was a fellow student of Chris. Alexander's with him in '89, had some questions about the proposal (see earlier postings), which made me think more clearly - hopefully the answers will be illuminating too:

"I'm curious what you see as the end product of this idea? Is it primarily an educational tool, a proactive tool?"

It's a collaborative pattern language building tool. The idea is, that it is made available to all, so people can start their own patterning project or collaborate on existing ones.
Imagine smaller, more focussed groups building a pattern language in the way that Wikipedia grew. I've realised more and more clearly over the last years that pattern languages are useful for building structured maps/models many sorts of environment - from a business plan to a description of an ecosystem, to a model of the human/environment interface that might help us do sensible things more often than we do at the moment, faced with big, complex issues.
The key will be to get some smart people/groups together to do some interesting work that can serve as examples.

"What does the person do who comes upon this thing?"

When you come across it, you can either explore it - as you would 'A Pattern Language', or get involved as a contributor - as you would with wikipedia, or start your own/adopt it as a tool for your own organisation, as you might , perhaps, use a 'wiki farm'.
It is NOT a 'save the world' tool. Just a tool of the new information age that hopefully is effective in making Chris' innovation accessible and current to more people, so that it becomes more effective.

"I often think that any real solution to climate change will need to be viral in nature, ...
The brick wall that always seems to be standing there is the massive political and corporate players who benefit much more from the status quo..."

I agree, there is a BIG problem with our whole political/economic system, that seems destined to take us via the 'tragedy of the commons' route .
Change will have to come from real action by real people - part of that action will of course be political pressure - there's loads of people doing that. But pressure for what? I don't believe that there is a 'sustainable' version of what we have at present.
Maybe this thing can be part of a new part of our culture's metaphysical toolbox - just like cartesian rationalism is, or relativity, or economic rationalism, or love, or existentialism. We have all these things, but we don't have one for;
"whooa! This thing is just WAAY complex - maybe I should try an XXXX on it!" (you get my drift...)

"Is the idea of the wiki tool that it will connect some of the cause and effect dots of this whole mess? I.e., "you're watching this awful sitcom sponsored by this awful car company that has bought these otherwise right thinking politicians so that they vote against useful legislation that would result in cleaner air and less oil dependency, and that's why your children have asthma and their friends' fathers are being killed in a silly war with no end"

I suppose it could do that, if that's what you want it to do, but I would rather see that thought stood on its head.
The software patterns people have spent some time picking apart the structure of patterns - working from Chris' model almost as if it came on a stone tablet. One of their key observations is that a pattern is always founded on a 'problem'.
Nevertheless, the feeling that one gets from reading 'A Pattern Language' is NOT one of a network of problems, but of a suite of connected good ideas, that give a context for purposeful and optimistic action, with a reduced chance of doing active harm. So the cause and effect dots are captured, but the whole thrust of the thing is to create connected solutions, not beat people over the head with networked misery!

Wikitect exists!

2007-07-20T20:26:00.000+01:00

Wow!

Ward Cunningham emailed me to tell me that he had already built a tool that met many of the important characteristics suggested in my spec.

He calls it wikitect.

Wikitect would seem to meet and even exceed my ambitions - even to the extent of '.dot' coded export!

I am immensely excited to think that it exists already - my best hope was that I could get some sort of open source project started - and as a non-programmer I was unsure that I would be well placed to push such a project along...

I would be very interested indeed to learn more about wikitect.

As the earlier email suggested, the original inspiration for this tool came from the desire to do something equivalent to the 'Oregon Experiment' [http://bookshop.blackwell.co.uk/jsp/id/The_Oregon_Experiment/9780195018240] for the policies and practices of the small, alternative school we are starting - keeping these alive, rationally argued, and open to democratic intervention, rather than in a file cabinet, gathering dust - a 'Living Plan' . This could conceivably be a test-bed for learning how to use wikitect.

However, the real ambition is to have such a tool become accepted on the widest possible basis. This would sound crazy - except that wiki has already done it (I'm not just talking about wikipedia - wiki farms too - our school website is at
www.familyschool.pbwiki.com).

I don't know exactly where forward is, at the moment - is wikitect in a working state? If not, how could it get to be so? I'm sure you have many claims on your time. What resources would be required? There exists the possibility that a charitable/activist foundation might be formed to promote the use and development of such a tool.

the Proposition

2007-07-19T12:30:00.000+01:00

I have been thinking about the ideas here for a while. I'd been aware of Ward Cunningham and the software patterns community for some time, and eventually decided that this was something they might be interested in.

I am not a programmer of any but a rudimentary sort, and am not able to implement the ideas set out here, but I am clear about what is required. I am hoping that you may have some suggestions as to where to take this proposal.

WHERE I'M COMING FROM

I'm an architect. I studied with Chris Alexander in the late '80's, and have used patterns for 20 years or so.

In the last few years I have been thinking about complexity and complex systems, and how poorly humans are equipped to address these in any ways that are not highly reductive.

The pattern language approach is the best tool yet invented, that I am aware of, for helping us to map/model complex systems or environments. If you'll forgive any misapprehension on my part, software, although complicated, is not truly 'complex', in the way that an eco-system is [indeed it would seem to be one aim of good software to avoid such a condition!].

I distinguish between pattern recognition and elucidation (as I see it, this is the mode which the software design community has found most valuable) and 'pattern language' development, which involves mapping a complex system or environment, through the use of linked patterns, arranged hierarchically, but without imposing a 'tree-like' structure. This approach allows us to break down systems into assimilable and recognisable chunks, simple enough to be addressed, while all the time making connections and implications explicit. It is the links between the patterns that address the complexity - Alexander's 'semi-lattice' structure is ultimately irreducible, as are complex systems.

We desperately need such tools to help us to address the fundamentally complex problems of climate change.

THE PROPOSAL

My proposal is for the development of a collaborative tool that supports, in a structured way, the development of pattern languages that address real-world, complex situations. The tool need not be complex. I am not versed in preparing specifications for software, but I have made an attempt at setting out the features of such a tool:
OVERVIEW
This is a proposal for the development of a collaborative tool that supports, in a structured way, the development of pattern languages that address real-world, complex situations.
It is assumed that the reader has some understanding of patterns and pattern languages.

GENERAL OUTLINE

The user environment would be something like a structured wiki/ content management system.
From top down the structure will be:

•Pattern Language - a named project
•Tiers - the broad structure of the pattern language, from large scale to small
•Patterns - each belongs to a tier, but may be linked to any other pattern, regardless
•Pattern elements - following the Alexander format, each pattern page will have a template

•TITLE (referenced)(confidence level)
•picture
•context
•STATEMENT OF PROBLEM
•Discussion
•CONCLUSION - couched in parametric/generic/process based approach
•elements for which this pattern is the context

USAGE

The first stage is to engage with the large scale structure of the system to be modeled - developing the hierarchy of tiers (analogous to the sections in ‘A Pattern Language[APL]’). Once this has settled down, then the work of identifying and refining patterns can begin.
The application needs to support various modes/functions

STATUS - tiers and patterns need to able to be tentative proposals at first, then become firmer or be superseded. Some sort of status indicator is needed (this could be implemented as a version of the 1,2 or 3 star rating given to patterns in APL)
DISCUSSION - as per wikipedia etc to facilitate conversations regarding the development of the pattern or tier.
MODERATION - different status users to allow management if/as necessary
GRAPHICAL REPRESENTATION - an ability to produce output formatted for ’.dot’ graphical output would be highly valuable. Graphical representations of systems are invaluable for communication of complex relationship sets.

Nothing about the proposal is particularly mould-breaking - it could be described as a structured wiki, with page templates and the now usual discussion tab, and some desirable visualisation aids.

It is my ambition that, used collaboratively, this tool could allow us to begin to build world models which can be rational and resolved at the scale of each pattern, empowering us to develop solutions to particular problems, without losing sight of the system wide implications.

If any of the above has connected with you, then the following may be interesting as a limited expansion of the thinking involved.

EXPLICATION

Humanity is in desperate need of tools to help us address complexity in a new, more holistic way. The 'successes' of the human species over the last 2/300 years (a laughably short period on which to base claims of 'dominance') are based on a particular model of design - a highly reductive one. We set ourselves very narrow problems, and solve those in a purposefully blinkered way, with active disregard for wider consequences - the motorcar being a good example.
This model has brought us to a situation in which almost all indicators of anything quantitative relating to humans is tending towards an asymptotal condition . Some sort of crash is indicated - climate change and peak oil being obvious candidates.

Our way of life will change radically, one way or another, over the next century. I would prefer this change to be more of a 'preservative transformation', than a wild ride with the four horsemen of the apocalypse.

Reductive, simplifying modes of action are highly unlikely to be effective in addressing climate change and other similar issues - it is these narrow approaches to problems which have got us into this mess in the first place - knee jerk technological responses to environmental problems will have unintended consequences.

I am confident that we as a species have the intellectual, technological - even the moral resources to rise to this challenge, but that we are desperately ill-equipped on the metaphysical/philosophical axes.

The principal weakness, as I see it, is in our ability to engage constructively with complex environments. During almost all of our evolutionary history we have been at the mercy of our environment. The history of our so-called 'progress' could be viewed as a history of ever-more-sophisticated ability to modify our immediate environment. We apply our new techniques with the same desperate fervour that earlier cultures did theirs. We are still frightened of nature, still keen to exclude its randomness from the sphere of human life.

We have now arrived at a position where (through technological ability married to sheer numbers) we are affecting the overall balance of the global environment, but we're still not in control - we have just applied fairly crude local environmental modification technologies on a mind-boggling scale, without a consideration for the consequences. It's only in the last forty years or so that it has even been possible to imagine that we are perturbing the global system.

Many people have been working on approaches to complexity in the last 25 years. The Santa Fe Institute, chaos theory, Friedrich Hayek, Chris Alexander and many others have done important thinking. The internet and powerful computers form a platform which can allow previously unimaginable tasks to be undertaken.

But there has not been any sign of a paradigm shift in the general culture - responses to climate change and other complex problems tend be to simplistic technological and/or practical 'fixes', from the small scale 'replace your lamps' to the hubristic 'build a giant sunshield in space'. Even highly educated and intelligent individuals live within the mechanistic, reductive world-view - the one which has given us this 'success'.

Collaborative work in assembling patterned understandings of the many systems which interact with the world ecosystem could be a step along the road to the development of a culture which has systems thinking as a normal mode of awareness.

The proposed tool could be a step to support such work.

I would welcome any suggestions as to how to progress these ideas.

Please also see the previous post for another version of this.

First proposal for LetsMakeAPlan tool

2007-07-11T15:48:00.000+01:00

I have been having those slightly crazy - 'this system can actually address ALL problems!" moments about the following ideas - they are also the crystallisation of 10 years or more of thinking, so although the headline is fairly straightforward, the background reasoning is detailed and dense - so please bear with me - you can just read the stuff in bold to get the gist....

Simply, the practical aspect of the project is this:
A working tool, along the lines of a wiki, which supports individuals working together on the development of a 'pattern language'.
[You may have heard of patterns as an approach to computer programming - this was inspired by my teachers' original work, which led indirectly to 'wiki' tools being developed.]

The tool could be used immediately to support the development, management and democratic engagement with the policies - from principles down to opening hours - of our small school startup. This can be a 'test-bed'.

But the real goal is to make something that can be used as a collaborative tool to address the REAL complex issue that confronts us at the moment - climate change. (Greenpeace are trying to something along these lines - called Custard Melt (!) but I'm not sure what it is)

The purpose of the 'pattern languages' I am aiming for is wider than the entry in wikipedia suggests.
The purpose is to allow humans, not capable of addressing complex issues holistically, to engage with them in a non-reductive manner, building a tiered web of patterns, each of which is manageable on its own, but explicitly captures its relationships with the whole.
Article addressing the background to this thinking: here.

The tool, like a wiki, allows creation of new pages - 'patterns' (each of which will be something like a web or XML page). Unlike a Wiki, the page will have some structure imposed on it - a template. The template will encourage and make clear the need for, and purpose of, each necessary component.
I've put an example, from the fountainhead - the book 'A Pattern Language' - by Chris. Alexander , at the end of this message, to give a concrete example in the field of architecture. But I am clear that the approach is relevant to many types of fundamentally complex situations.

Each pattern has a format:
TITLE (referenced)(confidence level)
picture
context
STATEMENT OF PROBLEM
Discussion
CONCLUSION - couched in parametric/generic/process based approach
elements for which this pattern is the context

Here is a fairly hopeless attempt at such a tool - by failing to impose or explain the necessary structure and relationships of patterns as they attempt to map complex situations, or the fundamental seriousness of what it means to set out to author a pattern, the site consists only of vague subjective statements. They have not got to grips with what a pattern or a pattern language must be, to have any power as a tool.

I imagine that the fundamental programming already exists - will there be open source wiki code? I'd be very happy with the relatively raw, html feel of the early wikis. Do you know how you originate an open source project?

I've written about these sort of ideas before, and had messages forwarded on to Ward Cunningham himself (wiki inventor and patterns in programming main man) - so I think that it could garner a community of interest.

Well - that's probably more than enough to be getting on with. Let me know what you think.

To: Dave Pollard

2006-09-04T10:39:00.000+01:00

Dear Dave

I've just come across your blog, via a link while looking into online tools to support a new 'sustainable communities' initiative I am planning here in London.

I am excited and interested to come across someone who is particularly interested in general approaches to ways for humans to address complexity intelligently.

It is clear to me, as it is to you, that this is urgently necessary, as we have reached a point where tools developed on the basis of radically simplified approaches to reality (using the rational method of addressing only very limited subsets of questions, and rigourously excluding consideration of wider implications ) have become so powerful and widely used, that the inevitable 'unintended consequences' (which occur whenever interventions are made into a truly complex system) threaten to swamp us.

The trouble is, that humans are not built to conceive complexity - our minds cannot hold even trivially complicated ('complicated, knowable' in your classification) subjects in consciousness and analyse implications of changes. When it comes to the truly complex systems, which you rightly recognise include almost all important environments, we are ridiculously poorly equipped.

We need tools to allow our simple minds to rationally address complexity. You are working on various approaches, which I have not yet had time to do more than skim. However, you don't appear to have come across (or if you do, you don't reference, as far as I can find) the work of Christopher Alexander. This is not necessarily surprising - he is primarily interested in, and known for, his work in architecture, but I believe his major achievement is directly relevant to these issues.

The following is a brief attempt to sum up his work in relation to complex systems. If my assumption that you have not come across his books is wrong, the please forgive me.

'A Pattern Language', and various following titles, outlines an approach to architectural design which is not described in terms of complexity. Indeed, published in 1977, it was written before complexity was beginning to be a term that was widely used in any specific sense. However, address complexity is exactly what it does.

The book is structured around 'patterns' - which I like to think of as recurrent eddies in the flow of complex systems - something like the 'strange attractors' of chaos theory - instances of which can form sustainable, vital parts of larger systems, and which support smaller systems. These patterns are linked in a loose hierarchy which is known in mathematical terms as a 'semi-lattice'. It differs from its cousin, the simple 'tree' diagram, in that it allows non-hierarchical linkages, while still capturing parent/child type relationships between elements. The key thing about this is that it is in itself a complex structure -patterns sets have the capacity to map real world complex structures, as they do not demand radical simplification, and are open to continuous refinement.

The links between patterns are made explicit, and the structure of each pattern as set out on paper encourages clear definition of the recurring situation (whether it be a problem or a structure), rational discussion, and crucially, a descriptive, rather than prescriptive, analysis of what is required for successful implementation.

Alexander himself remains committed to architectural practice (a profession which rubs its practitioners' noses in complexity with ruthless regularity!), and has not seemed to appreciate the applicability of this methodology to other complex situations. It has, though, been taken up by computer programmers of a particular bent with astonishing results (indirectly responsible for the amazing phenomenon of the 'wikipedia'). The odd thing about this is that programming is of necessity a practice which uses radical simplification - computers are the apogee of this, in that all problems must finally be reduced to binary questions. Thus discussions of pattern language approaches to non-architectural work have been dominated by programmers, who have not been interested in the power of the approach in relation to complexity.

I am currently involved with setting up a small independent school, and am beginning to use a patterning approach to building a flexible, 'living plan' for the institution, which can embody both ethos and working practice into a single, vital document, which remains part of the everyday life of the school, in a way that 'mission statements' and business plans never seem to.

I am also interested in applying the 'living plan' idea to more straightforward business planning.