2.1.    Alexander: the Structure of a Design Situation

Deliberation on the question of whether and how computers should be used to support the work of designers has raged for several decades. In the beginning of the 1960's Alexander (1964) pioneered exploration of this possibility by running a series of computer programs for the hierarchical decomposition of systems into subsystems, diagrams, or patterns. This kind of decomposition was central to the methods he proposed for design, and it seemed logical and necessary to use computationally powerful equipment to implement such analysis. However, within several years, Alexander was discouraged about the use of computers to support design. He complained that, “the people who are messing around with computers have obviously become interested in some kind of a toy. They have definitely lost the motivation for making better buildings” (Alexander, 1971, p.309). In his 1971 Preface to the paperback edition of his original work, he characterized the problem with attempts at computer support in terms of a broader problem of separating the study of design methodology from the practice of designing (Alexander, 1964).

The issues surrounding the appropriate use of computers go to the heart of what design is and should be. In his now classic Notes on the Synthesis of Form—which presents his dissertation work incorporating the early computer programs—Alexander reviews the history and even the prehistory of design in order to argue that the field reached a second watershed in the mid-twentieth century. The profession of design had originally emerged when society started to produce new needs and innovative perspectives too rapidly to allow forms to be developed through “unselfconscious” activities of slowly evolving traditions. Now, the momentum of change has reached a second qualitatively new stage:

Today more and more design problems are reaching insoluble levels of complexity. This is true not only of moon bases, factories, and radio receivers, whose complexity is internal, but even of villages and teakettles. In spite of their superficial simplicity, even these problems have a background of needs and activities which is becoming too complex to grasp intuitively. (Alexander, 1964, p.3)

Design problems are situated in “a background of needs and activities.” These design situations are becoming so complex that the management of complexity must become a primary concern of the field of design. The level of complexity that Alexander had in mind is characterized by the fact that it exceeds the ability of the unaided individual human mind to handle it effectively. Various methodologies can help to decompose complexity, and this is where the mathematical structures, diagrams, or patterns that Alexander proposed come in. They provide the representational or computational basis today for computerization. In an obvious sense, computers are a natural tool for storing large amounts of information. But at a deeper level, computer languages and applications are designed to manage complexity. It is no coincidence that the movement toward structured programming was contemporaneous with Alexander's emphasis on functional decomposition.

Alexander saw a major advantage of the systematic use of structures or patterns in what he referred to as a “loss of innocence”. When design first became a profession with rules that could be stated in language and taught, there was, according to Alexander's account, a first such loss of innocence. More recently, when Bauhaus designers recognized that one could design for mechanized production, another accommodation was made with changing times. The use of systematic methodologies to help manage complexity would, Alexander claimed, entail an analogous acceptance of the limitations of the individual designer's intuitive powers. This would bring with it a significant opportunity for progress of the profession. When the design process is formulated in terms of abstract structures it becomes much more readily subject to public criticism than when it is concealed in the mysteries of the lonesome genius’ artistry, just as the earlier formulation of previously unselfconscious design into explicit plans, articulated processes, and stated justifications laid the basis for a science of design that could be refined through on-going debate. Loss of innocence entails the removal of an outmoded barrier to the kind of public critical reflection required for a profession.

But Alexander did not see the issue one-sidedly. Recognizing the power of both formal representations and non-formalizable tacit knowledge, he did not propose that design methods substitute for the practice of design or for the designer's practical intuitions. Rather, he recognized that intuition and rationalism were equally necessary, and argued for a proper balance: “Enormous resistance to the idea of systematic processes of design is coming from people who recognize correctly the importance of intuition, but then make a fetish of it which excludes the possibility of asking reasonable questions” (ibid., p.9). Alexander felt that the fetishism of intuition as some kind of inalienable artistic freedom of the designer functioned as a flimsy screen to hide the individual designer's incapacity to deal with the complexity of contemporary design problems. As a consequence of the designer ignoring these limitations, the unresolved issues of complexity get passed down to engineers who have been trained to work out details rather than to grasp complex organization synthetically; the product that results tends to be a monument to the personal idiom of the creator rather than an artifact with a good fit to its function.

The themes raised by Alexander three decades ago for design methodology generally still confront the particular task of figuring out how best to use computers to support designing. Consider his first example above, that of designing a moon base. This is a task requiring a significant amount of knowledge. One needs to take into account technical considerations about supporting humans in a vacuum, including issues that may not have previously been thought of and investigated (such as the practicality of using lunar rocks as building materials). One must also consider the mission goals of the base, both stated and implicit. Then there are social and psychological issues concerning the interactions among groups of people who are confined in an alien environment for a prolonged period of time. All of these factors interact with the more common issues of designing a habitat for working, eating, socializing, and sleeping—resulting in a design problem of considerable complexity. While computers may be necessary to manage this complexity, the tacit knowledge of human designers must also be brought to bear with their intuitions about what it would be like to live together in a lunar habitat.

Three themes can be mentioned from Alexander's discussion in Notes: (a) The point of his method of decomposition is to derive substructures through an analysis of the design problem so that the design process can be approached (understood) in terms that grow out of the problem situation and provide a basis for the solution. One problem of people who follow a methodology divorced from practice is that their representations are not based in attempts to solve concrete tasks. (b) The design profession has emerged from unselfconscious traditions. Rapid technological change has necessitated a multiplication of individual perspectives (and group movements) on design, but these perspectives need to retain ties to traditions in order to maintain goodness of fit and avoid academic or idiosyncratic arbitrariness. (c) Professional designing has evolved out of tacit knowledge of form. While we need to make things self-conscious or explicit now, we should remember the basis of such knowledge in tacit understanding: the kind of understanding that the traditional Slovakian shawl makers (see Alexander, 1964, p.53) had so they could distinguish good from bad designs without having any theory or rules to go by. Such tacit knowledge provides a basis for what Alexander calls intuition. These three themes reappear in Alexander's other writings.

It may sometimes seem that Alexander eschews personal interpretations and instead tries to compute mathematically determined structures, objective relations, and universal patterns. One can certainly view his work that way, in which case the problems he inevitably acknowledges represent a reductio ad absurdum of the attempt to define a theoretical basis for the automation of design. But it is also possible to see in his work the recognition that practice, perspectives, and intuition are as necessary as theory, objectivity, and rules. Certainly in Notes and in Alexander’s reaction against the reception of Notes it was already clear that computerizable, mathematical methods of analyzing structural decomposition must be integrated with human design practice and intuition based on traditions and tacit knowledge.

In The Atoms of Environmental Structure (Alexander & Poyner, 1966), for instance, Alexander starts out by arguing for an objective approach to design, based on computations of relations that meet stated requirements. His first example of a requirement is to provide people working in an office with a view. How, he asks, does one know that people need or want a view? Alexander is frank about the complications involved here. He tries to operationalize the hypothesized need in terms of an underlying tendency. It is not sufficient to ask people, because their knowledge of their own needs is largely tacit. So experiments are needed to see if people choose desks with views, and under what conditions they do so. Further experiments are needed to rule out other factors, such as seeking better light or ventilation. Then “in order to make the hypothesis more accurate, we must try to specify just exactly what kind of people seek a view from their offices, during what parts of their work they seek it most, just what aspects of view they are looking for” (p.126). In the end, Alexander admits that “The ideal of perfect objectivity is an illusion—and there is, therefore no justification for accepting only those tendencies whose existence has been ‘objectively demonstrated’. Other tendencies, though they may be speculative, are often more significant from the human point of view” (ibid.).

Another example where Alexander seems to be arguing for an objective approach, but in fact presents a case for supporting subjectivity is A Pattern Language (Alexander, et al., 1977). Here Alexander and his colleagues present 253 patterns for architectural designing and planning. Superficially, it may seem that these patterns are the kind of objective structures that might have been produced by computer analyses (as in Notes), that represent the resolution of fields of relationships (as discussed in The Atoms of Environmental Structure), or that describe eternal, de-contextualized solutions (as implied by the title of the companion volume to A Pattern Language, A Timeless Way of Building). For instance, Alexander claims, “Many of the patterns here are archetypal—so deep, so deeply rooted in the nature of things, that it seems likely that they will be part of human nature, and human action, as much in five hundred years, as they are today” (p. xvii). However, a closer look shows that these patterns are intended as a basis (distilled from the traditions of world architecture) for people to create their own, situated perspectives on design: “Each solution is stated in such a way that it gives the essential field of relationships needed to solve the problem, but in a very general and abstract way—so that you can solve the problem for yourself, in your own way, by adapting it to your preferences, and the local conditions at the place where you are making it” (p. xiii).

In fact, the philosophy behind A Pattern Language is that every healthy society and every one of its members has their own perspective on design. These perspectives are shared and evolving; based on the constraints of the problems to be solved; and contributory to what it means to feel human and social.

A Timeless Way of Building says that every society which is alive and whole, will have its own unique and distinct pattern language; and further, that every individual in such a society will have a unique language, shared in part, but which as a totality is unique to the mind of the person who has it. In this sense, in a healthy society there will be as many pattern languages as there are people—even though these languages are shared and similar. (p. xvi)

The 253 patterns given in the book are meant as templates to start building new languages. First one chooses the templates most central to one's project. Then one selects related patterns to the extent that they are appropriate or desired for the particular project. Extensions must be made to the list of patterns to cover missing topics, and one is always free to modify patterns and even rename them to make them more relevant. Finally, one's personal language can gain richness, subtlety, and “poetry” by compressing multiple pattern templates for a specific problem.

In the works just reviewed, Alexander is concerned with how to support interpretation in design. He successively suggests interpreting a design problem in terms of structures (of functional decomposition), relations (based on tendencies), and patterns (articulated in a language of design). In each case, he tries to push the notion of objectivity to its limits in terms of mathematical algorithms, operationalism and empiricism, or eternal paradigms. This would make computer support relatively straight-forward—that is, it would make sense to pursue the automation of design via expert system approaches embodying algorithms for decomposition, rules for relations, and templates of fixed patterns. However, in each case Alexander notes the limits to objectivity and the over-riding importance of tacit intuition, the human point of view, and contextual factors. Thereby, he has raised the issue of how to support interpretation in design, and even debated the use of computers in doing this. Whether one construes Alexander as ultimately arguing for or against objective methods, he has in the process provided arguments against both purely objective and purely subjective approaches.

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