Welcome back to Loops and Cycles, after a short hiatus!
Over the last few weeks I packed up and moved house from one part of Porto to another — closer to the beach and a good jiu-jitsu school — while working on two client projects. It was a bit much; the newsletter suffered in the transition. The dust is finally settling, we're back at it.
We pick up where we left off last time with Alexander. I'm reading through The Timeless Way of Building again, and it's still remarkable in its ambition and clear-headed view of how to grow healthy systems.
Structure as activity
One thread that's caught my mind on this re-read is Alexander's insistence on the inseparability of space and event.
...we must begin by understanding that every place is given its character by certain patterns of events that keep on happening there.
— The Timeless Way of Building, pg. 55
As much as an architect might like to represent their work with flashy photos of its structure, its exterior, or its finishes, the ground truth of that space exists entirely in terms of what happens there.
The events that occur, and especially those that continue to recur, define the nature of the space, just as the space defines the nature of those events. (A new Viking range doesn't make a kitchen: it's repeated mornings, afternoons, and evenings of preparing food that define what this space really is.)
In the introduction, Alexander laid this out as a connection of deep interlock. He says, essentially, that the whole world is nothing but these recurring patterns of events:
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 the atoms and the molecules from which a building or a town is made.
— The Timeless Way of Building, pg. x (Introduction)
It signals his reconception of the nature of space. Instead of a valueless, uniform void, the structure of Alexander's world is entirely defined by its events. Structure in space is a receptacle that comes alive when healthy and interesting events occur and recur.
...our world has a structure, in the simple fact that certain patterns of events — both human and nonhuman — keep repeating and account, essentially, for much the greater part of the events which happen there.
— The Timeless Way of Building, pg. 69
The entire arrangement of physical space is built up by the patterns of the events that occur there. The ridges of a mountain are defined by the path of snowmelt and erosion, year over year, for centuries or millennia. The character of a classroom is defined by the people who gather there, and how they exchange information and interact with one another.
In Alexander's timeless way of building, the structure emerges from recurring patterns of events as they interact with the social and natural forces at play in a given situation.
...the world does have a structure, just because these patterns of events which repeat themselves are always anchored in the space.
— The Timeless Way of Building, pg. 69
We'll conclude quotations with this contextual foundation (remembering that Alexander published these ideas in 1979): patterns of events are always anchored in space.
I'll argue that the the same is true for the structure of software: what constitutes the space where repeating events can occur is not only physical or analog: there is a new domain, a new kind of space we're structuring, in the digital and ephemeral.
Recurring patterns and the structure of software
Regardless of physical or digital structure, what's crucial — the ground truth — are the recurring patterns of events that happen there. The further we stray from this truth, the more muddled and misguided conversation becomes. The key to clarity is in patterns of events, and we can only harvest patterns when we know what those events are, and how they unfold in the first place.
Many of my consulting engagements arise from a team or a leader seeing the blind spot: they have signals and assumptions, but no depiction of the recurring patterns of activity in context, or the forces that drive them. So much confusion in product teams and product planning springs from this source.
If you are a product manager, a designer, a researcher working with user-facing product surface, and you don't know how real people use your system or their existing solution for its intended purpose... on what basis do you and the team make decisions about how those patterns of activity ought to change?
We can spend an exceptional amount of time talking in circles through abstract models, high-level journeys, top-line metrics, and good intentions. It's just as remarkable how quickly we can snap into clarity when we say: here is what is going on right now, here is why it's like that, and here is how we think it should be different.
My approach tends to ask some form of the fundamental question — what are people actually doing, which events are actually occurring, right now? — such that we can harvest the patterns of behavior that build a constructive answer. (Weave in aggregate data and activity-focused disposable models to describe context and segmentation, and then you're really cooking.)
We need to focus on the actual events because, if Alexander is right, they're the primary forces that shape and interlock with the systems we're trying build, maintain, and grow. Without them, our pictures, plans, and prototypes aren't anchored on any concrete reality.
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