I have been trying to understand how I might be able to contribute to a better world for a long time. I started to write books several times only to get bogged down in what seemed like a disorderly mess of ideas that could not be reconciled. I thought then that I would have to write several books, but I hit on an idea that helped me organize my thoughts: patterns.
A Pattern Language, the book that introduced the idea of patterns was required reading for me in college. It was written by Christopher Alexander and a whole host of co-authors which I have always assumed were graduate students of his that did much of the work. It is a sweeping look at the physical design of our world from regional planning down to the details of how to build a wall, and it is a big influence on Sarah Susanka who is writing the Not So Big House books.
I immediately loved the book because, for me, it took the frustratingly nebulous topics of urban planning, architecture, landscaped design and interior design and blended them into a whole that I could comprehend. Each pattern was a small part of the whole that I could easily understand by itself, but once I started following the connections between patterns, I began to see the larger picture.
It occurred to me that patterns were a great way to loosely join a whole bunch of ideas in a kind of web of knowledge, and that is exactly what I needed to do: take what seems like a tangled mess of ideas and bring order to them. So, I have been working on a collection of patterns for several years now, trying to tease out what we know about what a World that Works might look like.
The patterns language is still very much a work in progress, but I’ve decided to release the patterns as an Open Artifact project. More on that to come.
