Christopher Alexander's invention of 'Pattern Language' was an important advance that has only been weakly understood for what it really offers - which is a tool of unparalleled usefulness in mapping complex domains non-reductively, in such a way that they are easy to engage with by humans, with their particular cognitive capacities.
Through developing increasingly complex social and mechanical environments, humans have arrived at a condition where our technical capacity and practical impact have enormous implications for the biosphere of which we are a part. It is crucially necessary that we manage these interactions effectively, wisely - and that we begin to do this rapidly, since we are almost certainly in a condition of severe overshoot in terms of our demands upon the biosphere.
However, our minds are not well equipped to deal with complexity in consciousness - and at the same time, our concept-framed systems are only poorly addressable by our evolved unconsciousnesses.
Human conscious cognitive capacity is highly limited in the number of independent variables which can be considered in parallel - literature suggests that three is about the limit for most people in general circumstances. Complex systems typically arise from the interaction of many factors, which depend upon each other only indirectly, through feedback loops that are often themselves complex and subject to yet other feedback. This renders them effectively impervious to conscious cognition.
Humans typically employ three different modes in such contexts:
- Intuitive mode - no attempt at rational / logical / concept-driven decision making. Reliance instead upon 'feeling'. This is often, in natural systems (especially ones where the decision maker has had extensive experience) a good choice, since the unconscious/embodied aspect of mind is significantly more capble of integrating multiple signals on the basis of experience. However, in the current human context, where >50% of us live in cities - where we interact most of the time with systems wyhaich are not mediated by exchanges with which we have co-evolved, but through conceptually driven language and increasingly more abstracted mechanical and digitally encoded concepts - our intuitive capcities are significantly less capable, since the embodied brain doesn't 'natively' use conceptual, mechanistic or binary modes.
- Heuristic mode - reliance upon 'tried and tested' approximations. These are risky. While the approach can work within specific bounds, those bounds are hard to recognise, and are rarely encoded into the heuristic, which is itself usually couched as folk wisdom of some kind. Attempts to 'hard code' heuristics only expose their deficiencies.
- Reductive formalisation - in cybernetics, this is also known as Variety reduction (see Requisite Variety). In this mode, a deliberate decision is made to include only such factors in the decision-making process as can be reduced to manageable conceptual models. This is typically the rationalist approach.
- Born in struggle - most notably in renaissance europe - this mode was able to achive cultural dominance through the effectiveness of engineering in increasing the material productivity of human labour. Of course, in resulutely ignoring what are described as 'externalities', these approaches have led us directly to the point where such externalities threaten the viability of human civilisation.
- With the advent of increasingly powerful engineering tools - in the form both of mathematical abstractions and, more evidently, in the ubiquity of digital computing - an especially dangerous refinement of this mode has occurred - where the attempt is made to add more and more variety to the model, despite this making the model too complex for human cognition to grasp as a whole - and then to rely upon tools to provide 'answers'. These answers are of course the result of the interactions of many reductive systems - their inabilities to model real conditions multiplied in ways which again only reductively map the real world interactions between the systems they represent.
Clearly, none of these modes will do if we are rapidly to improve our capacity to manage our civilisation fwell and at the same time regenerate the carrying capacity of the biosphere.
The Pattern Language approach offers a powerful approach to this problem, one which has not been well examined or understood, despite there being several domains in which the Pattern Language has become influential, and within which excellent work has been done.
This site is a beginning of an attempt to address this reality, to address pattern language as a general approach, to encourage and explore the development of tools which could promote and popularise the approach.
The sketch pattern 'Pattern Languages' on this site has more detail.
contact: dil dilgreen dot net