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Christopher Alexander: The

ARTICLE

father of pattern language

What makes a design great? The way the carefully chosen colors
blend and play off each other? A set of pleasing shapes perfectly
placed in space? A seamless interactive experience that brings joy and
pleasure to its users?

Or is it something higher than that? A certain je ne sais quoi, perhaps

unnameable, but not unknowable.

Architect and design theorist Christopher Alexander called that spirit,

that energy, that … magic a “quality without a name,” or QWAN. Not
only did he seek to define it, but he created a movement, whose
purpose is to help anyone create meaningful architecture. His 1977
book, A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction (of which
Alexander says he’s been told is the best-selling architecture book of
all time, #humblebrag) marked the beginning of the movement and
earned him the title of the father of the pattern language movement.
What began in the physical world quickly made its way to digital, as
programmers, developers, and designers adapted Alexander’s theories
to systematically organize their own work.

A futuristic idea rooted in ancient tradition

Though Alexander’s A Pattern Language is described as a practical
architectural system, it’s not an Ikea-esque manual meant to provide
the exact directions on how to erect a room, building, or town. It’s a
simple guide filled with the proven elements any ordinary person could
use to create a living world that best serves the humans that interact
with it. Think Sims, but for the real world. (Fun fact: Will Wright, creator
of SimCity said Alexander’s work was influential in the origin of his
famous computer games.)

The basis of A Pattern Language came from observing medieval cities.

All were designed to local regulations but allowed the architect (or
artist; or designer; or simply, person) to adapt each room, level, and
building to particular situations. To Alexander, those particular
situations are what the human users required to feel comfortable,
fulfilled, and have their needs met without the distraction of
superfluous features or art for art’s sake. So, Alexander says, people
should build for themselves, and his A Pattern Language made widely
available the tools to “allow anyone, and any group of people, to create
beautiful, functional, meaningful places.”

Alexander’s idea of starting with fundamental building blocks that are

then adapted appears in object-oriented programming, a programming
language model that’s organized around objects rather than actions. In
1987, two decades after A Pattern Language was published, computer
scientists Kent Beck and Ward Cunningham started playing around
with the idea of using design patterns in programming. When they
shared their work at the Object-Oriented Programming, Systems,
Languages & Applications conference a few years later, jaws dropped
in the software engineering community, and a new branch of
programming started to form.

Even today, more than 40 years after Alexander’s influential book

appeared, developers, programmers, and designers continue to find
new ways to apply its revolutionary theories.

Modern design pattern application

Some have called Alexander’s work “a new form of architecture,” so it’s
not surprising that while Alexander created design patterns to help
inform the physical world of architecture and construction, digital
architects were quick to recognize the application of his theories in
their own work.

As A Pattern Language explains “Each pattern describes a problem

which occurs over and over again in our environment, and then
describes the core of the solution to that problem, in a way that you
can use this solution a million times over, without ever doing it the
same way twice.”

To any designer, this concept sounds wonderfully familiar – it’s the

basis of every design system.

Today, a design pattern is a formal way of documenting solutions to

common design problems. Design patterns are a universal resource to
align best practices, describe the elements of good designs, and most
importantly, provide a repository so that other people can easily reuse
these solutions. Why invent the wheel when a perfectly good one
already exists? Modern designers rely on design patterns to quickly
get new designers up to speed on brand nuances, capture collective
wisdom across time and people, provide teams with a common
language, eliminate wasted time spent on “double work,” and ensure
the end user gets a predictable experience no matter the medium or
designer.

Alexander created his language to highlight the relationships between

patterns, with the whole being greater than the sum of its parts. In
today’s digital design, that principle looks like this – a logo could be the
best ever created, the selected colors a spot-on representation of the
brand, and the layout a pleasing landscape of information, but if the
connections between all elements don’t have meaning, then nothing
does.

Following in the footsteps of Greek philosophers like Pythagoras,

Empedocles, and Plato, Alexander looked to nature for clues and
inspiration for how the first-created and most-tested patterns evolve.
From that, he acknowledged a “step-wise sequence” that re-uses
what has come before – a continuous transformation of elements. This
phenomenon is what Alexander sees as the next frontier of design. It’s
not about new technologies, or advanced mediums to create art, but
rather using what has come before and adapting it to satisfy current
human behavior and desires.

Alexander says this practice is what gives designs that “quality

without a name,” and that is what makes a design great.

Additional Resources

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Alexander

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pattern_language

https://www.permaculture.co.uk/articles/pattern-language-explained

https://cityterritoryarchitecture.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s40
410-017-0073-1

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=98LdFA-_zfA&

https://www.patternlanguage.com/

Sources

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Alexander

https://searchmicroservices.techtarget.com/definition/object-
oriented-programming-OOP

http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?
doi=10.1.1.56.4194&rep=rep1&type=pdf

https://c2.com/doc/oopsla89/paper.html

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