Dear Molly, Terry and interested listers
It is great to see some in depth research emerging into the history of
Christopher Alexander's contributions to design. With a background in
mathematics from Cambridge, Alexander was at Harvard during an
exciting time for design thinking. Ivan Sutherland, "the father of
computer graphics", was developing Sketchpad and Introducing 3-D
computer modeling, visual simulations, computer aided design (CAD) and
virtual reality. Herbert Simon was delivering the lectures that became
The Sciences of the Artificial. As Molly notes, as a Harvard fellow
Alexander worked at MIT on the HIDECS computer program for analyzing
highway design problems. In an interim report " The Design of Highway
Interchanges: An Example of A General Method For Analyzing Engineering
Design Problems" co-authored by Marvin Manheim in 1962 they described
a design problem as "a list of misfits or ways in which a design can
be "wrong" and by a list of the pair-wise interactions among the
misfits. Descriptions in this form make it possible to associate a
linear graph with every problem. A set theoretic criterion is used to
obtain a heirarchical decomposition of the graph. The result is a
program for developing a solution to the design problem". However, in
the same report they went on to note a problem with this conception
that led to one of Alexander's most celebrated papers "The City is
Not a Tree". In that classic paper he characterized a design problem
as a lattice rather than a heirarchical graph. To me this was an
historic moment for design that also helped explain much of his
subsequent work. Through his work design became interesting to people
in many fields. For example, books like "Understanding Computers and
Cognition: A New Foundation for Design" (1986) cited Alexander's work
for the field of software design. "A Pattern Approach to Interaction
Design" is a more recent and more explicit homage. Anecdotally, as a
PhD student I was invited into a doctoral seminar in psychology
because of the professor's interest in Alexander's ideas. ( I spent
much of the time saying can't you see the similarities while my
classmates said can't you see the differences. It taught me that
designers had a different mind set than the psychologists of that
period. That was why I had been invited to participate)
Alexander was always as interested in the structure and processing of
patterns as in the concept of discrete if-then-because patterns. A
Pattern Language Which Generates Multi Service Centers (1968) was
just one example of his concern with structure, process, and
application.
Some references that may be of interest.
Alexander, C., Manheim, M., 1962: The Design of Highway Interchanges:
An Example of A General Method For Analyzing Engineering Design
Problems" Publication # 159, Schoolof Engineering, MIT, Cambridge 39,
Massachusetts
Alexander, C. The City is Not A Tree, Architectural Forum, Vol 122, No
1, April 1965, pp 58-62 (Part I),
Vol 122, No 2, May 1965, pp 58-62 (Part II) also in Thackara, J. (ed.)
(1988), Design After Modernism: Beyond the Object, Thames and Hudson,
London, pp. 67-84.
Alexander, C., Ishikawa, S., Silverstein, M., 1968: A Pattern
Language Which Generates Multi Service Centers, Center for
Environmental Structure, Berkeley, CA
Borchers, J., 2001: A Pattern Approach to Interaction Design, John
Wiley & Sons, New York
Winograd, T., Flores, F., 1986: "Understanding Computers and
Cognition: A New Foundation for Design, Addison -Wesley Publishing
Company, New York
On Dec 12, 2008, at 4:23 PM, Terence Love wrote:
> Dear Molly,
> Fantastic. Thanks very much for posting and thank you for providing
> the
> background history on Alexander's early work. I didn't know about this
> deeper background in architectural theory although I knew parallel
> studies
> in engineering design theory and systems design at that time. If
> you have
> anything you would feel happy to send me I'd be very interested in
> reading
> it.
> Can you say whether Alexander's thinking was shaped by the patterns in
> Design Theory in Mathematics as well as sets, graphs and topology,
> and how
> much he relied on the prior work in systems theory?
> Best wishes,
> Terry
>
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