Joerka Deen, Pattern Architect in Interaction Design, Océ < >

Version: February 2, 2000

Reading Alexanders’ A Pattern Language, I was struck by content and form of the book. Being the son of an architect/city planner, I recognized immediately the content of the book. Of course, I love the little architect’s drawings I have seen my father and other architects make to capture their ideas. I also love the rich quality of mediaeval European buildings and cities, Alexander portraits in the pictures he uses to illustrate every single pattern. I share his sense of quality of the build environment. I was struck by the form in which Alexander tried to capture the design rules that let to this rich quality: a pattern language.

In our company we want to harmonize the human experience of our products. To control our product development process, we believe in a high level of autonomy of product-creating-project-teams. These two incompatible believes create a force field. This force field is in particular felt in the Industrial Design department that is responsible to create the final, concepts representing design that actually creates the experience of the user. As most Industrial Design departments, we do not have complete control over the conceptual design decisions that under pin the final representation. Because we are part of the project team we do have a potentially big influence on the all design decisions. So we are faced with the challenge to influence multiple autonomous project teams from within the project team, in order to harmonize the human experience which is not a goal of an individual project team. So could one begin to get some grip under these circumstances?

Three years ago, Alexander’s work inspired me to set up a Pattern Committee with Interaction, Graphical, and later on, Product Designers. I was a strong believer in Alexander’s way and we naïvely started a daunting task. We spent every other Thursday, a full afternoon with about seven people, trying to create patterns that would be as everlasting and poetic as Alexander’s, and... we had fun.

Creating patterns is fun. Creating patterns builds communities. In creating patterns, the designers got to know one another, each others believes, each other value systems, each others history. And law and behold we were developing a language, but was it made of patterns?

During these afternoons we gained some habits. We found that the first effort to create a pattern would leave us with a big plate of pattern spaghetti. And in stead of fighting this, we simple gave it a name: scout sessions.

During a scout session, a pattern owner would stands up and discusses his subject with the group. We experienced that round table conversation wasn’t the best format to unrafle the spaghetti. The presentation format offered the pattern owner a way to control conversation and focus the attention of the group. The goal of a scout session was to find the one pattern that the owner wanted to describe. We usually needed more than one session of an hour to find the one pattern.

Describing the one pattern needed some sessions too: pattern sessions. The magical sentence proved to be: Yes, but please tell us: what is the problem? This question was pronounced many times during our sessions, trying to focus ourselves on the true reason for our endeavors: try to solve a problem true and real for the user of our product, not our own problems.

In the end, the pattern owner would publish a pattern in a web page in our intranet. We simply followed Alexander nice drawings and his structure:

-context patterns

-problem

-forces

-solution

-elaborating patterns

After two thrilling years, we lost the energy to continue. Although the daily pressure to perform in the concrete product development was a factor, it was not the reason we lost energy. I would like to share some speculations.

Quality without a name?

Alexander is pretty vague about quality without a name, although I know it from discussions with my father. Quality has a name. Quality is about value systems, culture, about emotional markers, about believes, about judgement. Judgement needed to create quality cannot be replaced by a pattern language. The language is a medium, a way to shape the mind. In this perspective, it is funny to see a west-coast architect refer to European values in architecture so much as Alexander does.

Participatory design?

A pattern language is clearly written with the idea that everybody would be able to and like to build his own town, house, garden, kitchen. The participatory element was a political statement. How did this affect the language? To me there sounds a new age hum through the patterns. Although I have been open to new age ideas, it does not fit my utopia of truth in patterns.

Is it possible to make our knowledge explicit?

Language allows us to encode very rich ideas into a compact symbol. Language compresses what we want to convey in an enormous way, presupposing common knowledge of both sender and receiver. In his book ‘Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things, ‘ George Lakoff describes what kind of semantic network lies under a simple word like ‘mother.’ Alexander could create his pattern language in fifteen years, because architecture already had a language. I recognized this language in my father’s conversation, although he did not know Alexander work. It is my guess that they learned from the same source: centuries of architecture.

In the new design disciplines, stretching from software coding to information, interaction and graphical design, this common language simply is not there. The wonderful pictures of children playing, a kissing couple, a Roman courtyard. It is very difficult to think of an image to direct explaining a software pattern, an information structure, human-machine behaviour, and even in graphical design we tend to come up with something as trivial as the Macintosh trash can.

Individual skills and intentions

During our efforts we noticed that we each had very different levels of skill and very different intentions. Some of us would be very skilled and drawn to formulate quite abstract patterns, another would prefer very concrete solutions. Operating in industry, a clear relationship with practical work was appreciated, but sometimes it made us forget the true nature of patterns. At a certain point, we were proud to each having produced some patterns, but somehow lost an overview. How did all these patterns fit into a language?

What is the problem?

In the end, a pattern language is a language. That is to say, it is defined by a group, a society, that communicates its culture, values, beliefs, in a very compressed form: their language. Language is there for very pragmatic reasons. What language is used for, is very dependent on the intentions of the group and the individuals in it. So what is the problem?

We shouldn’t try to create the one context-independent pattern language. Treat language as the evolutionary defined way to communicate ideas. Accept that like any language , a pattern language lives; for pragmatic reasons. So can’t we hold on to some generic certainties?

I can imagine that we can find some structure or meta-structure that is trully compatible with the human mind and captures the thought-processes we try to capture with the pattern structure of today. I think that’s the real challenge for scientists.

Industry, I believe, could profit by putting some effort in making its language more precisely defined. I think the notion of patterns is a very powerful way to capture the knowledge contained in this language. I can imagine though, that it is an utopia to capture the volatile mind.

......

Joerka Deen, Pattern Architect in Interaction Design

work: Océ-Technologies B.V.

visit: Hakkestraat 3, NL-5900 MA Venlo, The Netherlands

snail mail: P.O. Box 101, NL-5900 MA Venlo

phone: +31-77-359-3744

fax: +31-77-359-5471

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home: Arienswei 34, NL-5912 JA Venlo, The Netherlands

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