Non-Distructive Development

We will pass this page around as the talking stick.

pete d

ward

eric

marc

I feel like I know Alexander having read lots. But I'm going to have to go from the word non-destructive and guess what it means.

I remember a pattern, Site Improvement maybe, that says you should locate buildings on the weakest part of the property. Not the best location. The building then takes the role of improving the property.

See Site Repair

I recently started reading patterns from A Pattern Language to my kids, who are 12 and 15. The 12 year old found them deeply frustrating and confusing. The 15 year old found them kinda motivating, certainly enriching and interesting.

I am curious about child development—something my wife introduced me to. What happens to a brain between 12 and 15 that makes the patterns something accessible?

I have been hearing people like Ward and Eugene talk about Pattern Languages for about 15 years, and I feel a bit guilty for not having found a text and definition so I could really understand what they are talking about. I think I am always trying to "fake it" around the term in these discussions.

I do have a somewhat intuitive understanding of what was is meant by this. Maybe it is accurate, maybe not. Here's something that comes to mind:

Last night we watched Hamilton (the musical). I knew little about it ahead of time, but a friend had urged me to look at themes about hiphop history. One thing stood out: when King George came out (the main villain), his style was different, his song was more like 1980s pop music. It seemed to me there was a subtext, that the hiphop style of the rest of the musical was a "rebellion" against the 80s pop style of King George. To me that seems like a pattern, in that it's an invitation to compare one kind of "rebellion" to another.

Janis. A face forward-outward. A face backward-inward. Always act from the widsom of the place one stands AND the Janis insights too.

It may be that with a large enough sample the simple Janis Rule would make our worlds beautiful, without a controller. A simple rule for the creation of beauty. Maybe we then need to and a light weight scavenger to remove cancer (ugly) instances.

I'm sorry I misspelt the title of this page but suggest we live with it as I launched this conversation.

Allow me the rest of today to reflect on Alexander and especially his Natural Genetic Infrastructure.

Most animal genes orchestrate the exotic sequence of development from single cell to reproductive adult. Cancer's uncontrolled growth often results from one of these genes becoming damaged and misapplied. A not-yet cancerous cancer gene would be a proto-cancer-gene.

This is a "too much of a good thing" circumstance that shows up often in computer programming. We discover a new process and apply it to make so much of a once good thing that we are burdened with this product to the detriment of the next discovery.

"Will it scale?" With this question one software geek begins the chest thumping with another.

We build distributed systems so that the business will continue running when one of the parts fails. We persist in applying this trick until our system always has some part of it partially broken.

What separates a simple system from a complex system? Simple systems can be understood by a single person. Complex systems cannot be so understood.

I went ahead of Pete F. and moved my name to the bottom, leaving his at the top. We can discuss options for cadence.

Development--as in Alexander's pattern language: Curtesy and love. Love of my family, curtesy toward my neighbors. One could wish for more but it may be enough. Maybe affection is an inverse square function with distance? Maybe it just dilutes? Maybe it requires different dynamics at increasing scale. I think it can be strong enough just beyond my door.

Alexander came to deeper patterns he called 15 Properties-Transformations. Transposing these to society as Ward did with pattern language and software? That will be fun. BrainSite

When I learned that a Diff function is built deep into computer code I was happy. That is the beginning and end and also a very handy way.

If one has a numbered list of things then one can visit them in their natural order, 1, 2, 3 and so on. But if each thing remembers which thing follows it, the next thing, then starting anywhere one can follow the remainder of the imposed order to its conclusion.

A variation of this "linking" strategy can be made to work forwards or backwards through the imposed order by storing the bitwise difference (⊕) between the next and previous number. That is, one number links both ways.

To make this work will require some cooperation. We will start at any place where P and Q are adjacent and link(P) and link(Q) are the single stored differences at each location.

prev(P,Q) = link(P) ⊕ Q

next(P,Q) = link(Q) ⊕ P

The bitwise difference (⊕) will be true in the result for every bit position in the arguments where the bits differ. That is true ⊕ false is true, as is false ⊕ true. Other combinations are false.

I didn't catch on to what we were doing here very well in the beginning, and as the text has grown my understanding has grown less. I'm going to remove my name from the lineup for the time being so I'm not a bottleneck.

Non-destructive = organic, integrative, graceful, co-emergence with adjacencies. Requires a wonderful degree of situated awareness. Aikido. Dancing together. Family at its best.

Development = getting better as a whole, more integrated, more alive, more capable, more graceful. I suspect that this applies to built environment, computer programming, neighborhood relationships, and so much more. There must be enough freedom and choice that each part can move in accord with its adjacencies. It cannot be done to something. It cannot be centrally controlled except by sharing the simple rules, patterns, and principles that still must be used in unique situations.

It is opposed to rip and replace, to re-engineering, to parachuting anything in to a strange context--like most consultants and even well intentioned executives vis-s-vis the front line.

Beauty (nondestructive development) requires intimacy among adjacencies.

I've returned from a Pandemic Family Road Trip. We moved through a lot of space and many spaces. Starting at Crazy Horse and Mt. Rushmore opened our journey amid the painful contradictions in the history of the US. Lewis & Clark and the subsequent Oregon Trail were on our minds. We saw only two bison and a statue of a Lakota woman.

Struggled to make a campfire in Shenandoah—the kids displayed remarkable persistence for the reward of hard-earned roasted marshmallows. Here I read a few more patterns knowing we'd be visiting some Jeffersonian architecture in Charlottesville the next day.

Surprising pile of emotions showed up for me in Shenandoah... I was surprised to rediscover how deeply I had once admired Thomas Jefferson. Realized that were it not for this pandemic induced road trip, I would probably never have gotten around to seeing Monticello in person.

Then actually visiting Monticello... another emotional journey. As we awaited our turn to enter my son said to me, "Dad, you are gonna totally geek out on us, aren't you?" As we stood in Jefferson's office looking at his desk and some architectural designs... standing in The room Where It Happened, recalling the Hamilton musical from earlier in the summer. My son said quietly to me "Dad, I get it now. I get why your geeking out." As we wandered the long hallway in the basement, the crushing weight of disillusionment that this hero of mine enslaved 600 people over his time there.

I have always known that. Something very different about being in the room where it happened.

My 12 year old came to appreciate patterns more. It turns out the core objection to Alexander is about the bossy tone of voice in much of the advice. There's a sense of resentment—who is this guy to make the rules? And an objection to the complexity in the rules. Couldn't they be more clear?

By contrast, the 15 year old sees the rules more like guidelines—perhaps trying to see all rules like guidelines. Both positions seem exactly age appropriate.

Patterns are everywhere, it is the only thing we humans can even become aware of. The question is, which patterns do we want to use and importantly, why do we want to use them? What can we learn from the history of dancing-humans-of-the-earth.

As Alexander and his colleagues learned the hard way, a dictionary is not a language. And even languages can be dead (born dead?) or only written and only studied only by scholars in antiquity libraries. Their hope was to bring a forgotten or displaced or dying language back to life. My belief is that living languages (especially pattern languages) live only in the speaking. They are learned in the speaking. The speaking in context is what builds understanding and skill.

And human language is at its most compelling in stories told around campfires. Ward has kindled a few campfires. I so appreciate being in the warmth of two of them, learning patterns and perhaps some new languages that can become vernacular. I will do what I can to learn and speak patterns of community.