It’s with great pleasure that I introduce Beth Wallace, a new blogger for A Bigger Voice. Beth is the community-building lead and someone who sees and inspires community wherever she goes. When I first asked Beth to join our team at A Bigger Voice, I didn’t know about her background as a community-builder in businesses and non-profits, but I could feel it. Beth was my writing coach and editor and someone who always provided a depth of listening that made me feel seen and heard. She has since shown that the core tenets of community-building are part of how she lives her life. I hope you enjoy hearing Beth’s voice. –Carol Ross
I first encountered the ideas of Christopher Alexander and his colleagues in a series of summer classes on designing environments for children. These classes were taught by the late Anita Rui Olds and Ed Howe at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, in the early 90s. Alexander is an architect and now professor emeritus at Berkeley whose ground-breaking series of books from the 70s—The Timeless Way of Building (1979); A Pattern Language (1977); and The Oregon Experiment (1975)—changed the way that architects and planners thought about communities and buildings. The ideas in A Pattern Language have since also been applied to software design.
In a conversation with Carol and Bill, I remembered A Pattern Language and started thinking about how Alexander’s ideas about buildings and communities might apply to community-building in A Bigger Voice. This post begins a series on Alexander’s ideas as they apply to online community-building, starting with the two big concepts that seem central to me.
The first is that aliveness is key to the health and effectiveness of buildings and communities. Here’s how Alexander talks about it in The Timeless Way of Building:
There is a central quality which is the root criterion of life and spirit of [a person], a town, a building, or a wilderness. This quality is objective and precise, but it cannot be named.
The search which we make for this quality, in our own lives, is the central search of a person, and the crux of any individual person’s story. It is the search for those moments and situations when we are most alive.
In order to define this quality in buildings and in towns, we must begin by understanding that every place is given its character by certain patterns of events that keep on happening there.
These patterns of events are always interlocked with certain geometric patterns in the space. Indeed, as we shall see, each building and each town is ultimately made out of these patterns in the space, and out of nothing else: They are atoms and molecules from which a building or town is made.
The specific patterns out of which a building or a town is made may be alive or dead. To the extent they are alive, they let our inner forces loose, and set us free; but when they are dead, they keep us locked in conflict.
The more living patterns there are in a place—a room, a building, or a town—the more it comes to life as an entirety, the more it glows, the more it has that self maintaining fire which is the quality without a name.
The second, upon which Alexander’s design solutions in A Pattern Language are based, is that the same problems arise over and over again to be solved in the design of communities and buildings, and that it’s possible to describe the core of a solution to that problem “in such a way that you can use this solution a million times over without ever doing it the same way twice.” Alexander calls these solutions “patterns” and sees them as contained within and connected to one another; as interdependent. Together, the patterns form a language with which it is possible to design communities and buildings that foster life. In A Pattern Language, Alexander says:
…no pattern is an isolated entry. Each pattern can exist in the world only to the extent that it is supported by other patterns: the larger patterns in which it is embedded, the patterns of the same size that surround it, and the smaller patterns which are embedded in it.
This is a fundamental view of the world. It says that when you build a thing you cannot merely build that thing in isolation but must also repair the world around it, and within it, so that the larger world at that one place becomes more coherent, and more whole; and the thing which you make takes its place in the web of nature, as you make it.
What does this have to do with A Bigger Voice?
Part of what we’re after in the community-building segment of ABV is a pattern language for communities, a set of solutions to common problems that can help us design life-giving communities both online and in person. What makes an online community built around a person, an idea, or a central question or problem take off? Like towns and buildings, the character of an online community is shaped by “certain patterns of events that keep on happening there.” To shape a “vibrant community of kindred spirits” we must be able to construct communities in ways that let people’s inner forces loose. It’s not the geometric patterns of buildings that control what happens in a virtual community, but there are analogous structures. Just think of a clumsy user interface, or moderation that is either heavy-handed or nonexistent, and you’re looking at patterns that control the community’s experience, and in the end, its existence.
Having a bigger voice means accepting the responsibility Alexander names, not to build things in isolation, but to repair the world around them and within them, and make the world in that one place more coherent.What does that really mean? How else will Alexander’s work apply? I’m still thinking about this, and I’d love to hear your ideas. What does the idea of a pattern language spark in you? What structures make you more or less likely to engage, on- and off-line?
Building Communities Using a Pattern Language Approach
It’s with great pleasure that I introduce Beth Wallace, a new blogger for A Bigger Voice. Beth is the community-building lead and someone who sees and inspires community wherever she goes. When I first asked Beth to join our team at A Bigger Voice, I didn’t know about her background as a community-builder in businesses and non-profits, but I could feel it. Beth was my writing coach and editor and someone who always provided a depth of listening that made me feel seen and heard. She has since shown that the core tenets of community-building are part of how she lives her life. I hope you enjoy hearing Beth’s voice. –Carol Ross
I first encountered the ideas of Christopher Alexander and his colleagues in a series of summer classes on designing environments for children. These classes were taught by the late Anita Rui Olds and Ed Howe at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, in the early 90s. Alexander is an architect and now professor emeritus at Berkeley whose ground-breaking series of books from the 70s—The Timeless Way of Building (1979); A Pattern Language (1977); and The Oregon Experiment (1975)—changed the way that architects and planners thought about communities and buildings. The ideas in A Pattern Language have since also been applied to software design.
In a conversation with Carol and Bill, I remembered A Pattern Language and started thinking about how Alexander’s ideas about buildings and communities might apply to community-building in A Bigger Voice. This post begins a series on Alexander’s ideas as they apply to online community-building, starting with the two big concepts that seem central to me.
The first is that aliveness is key to the health and effectiveness of buildings and communities. Here’s how Alexander talks about it in The Timeless Way of Building:
The second, upon which Alexander’s design solutions in A Pattern Language are based, is that the same problems arise over and over again to be solved in the design of communities and buildings, and that it’s possible to describe the core of a solution to that problem “in such a way that you can use this solution a million times over without ever doing it the same way twice.” Alexander calls these solutions “patterns” and sees them as contained within and connected to one another; as interdependent. Together, the patterns form a language with which it is possible to design communities and buildings that foster life. In A Pattern Language, Alexander says:
What does this have to do with A Bigger Voice?
Part of what we’re after in the community-building segment of ABV is a pattern language for communities, a set of solutions to common problems that can help us design life-giving communities both online and in person. What makes an online community built around a person, an idea, or a central question or problem take off? Like towns and buildings, the character of an online community is shaped by “certain patterns of events that keep on happening there.” To shape a “vibrant community of kindred spirits” we must be able to construct communities in ways that let people’s inner forces loose. It’s not the geometric patterns of buildings that control what happens in a virtual community, but there are analogous structures. Just think of a clumsy user interface, or moderation that is either heavy-handed or nonexistent, and you’re looking at patterns that control the community’s experience, and in the end, its existence.
Having a bigger voice means accepting the responsibility Alexander names, not to build things in isolation, but to repair the world around them and within them, and make the world in that one place more coherent.What does that really mean? How else will Alexander’s work apply? I’m still thinking about this, and I’d love to hear your ideas. What does the idea of a pattern language spark in you? What structures make you more or less likely to engage, on- and off-line?