droqen's forum-shaped notebook

On art => Close reading => Topic started by: droqen on January 04, 2023, 05:17:11 PM

Title: The Nature of Order // Book Two // The Process of Creating Life
Post by: droqen on January 04, 2023, 05:17:11 PM
Regarding Christopher Alexander's
"
The Nature of Order
Book Two
The Process of Creating Life
"
Title: Re: The Nature of Order // Book Two // The Process of Creating Life
Post by: droqen on January 04, 2023, 05:25:08 PM
This book starts strong. It recaps Book One, and some of the things Alexander writes are so in line with my own 31 unmarked games post-mortem (the game is available (https://droqen.itch.io/31-unmarked-games), the post-mortem itself is unpublished). Here's what he writes.

P. xiv
I believe that many of these new artifacts and buildings -- including, for instance, the apparently harmless developer-inspired motels of our era or our mass housing projects -- are structures which can be thought, invented, created artificially, but they cannot be generated by a nature-like process at all. . . .

//

I do not agree with Alexander's high-level reasoning for why this is bad (he writes that they "are, structurally speaking, monsters" and implies that they are monsters (i.e. bad) because they are "a type of structure on earth which nature itself could not, in principle, create.")

My perspective is more akin to (a knowing misreading of) this quote from his previous book: "for the sake of our welfare, the world must be made so that it contains, and is built from, living structure (http://newforum.droqen.com/index.php?topic=364.msg1673#msg1673)." The nature-like process itself, in my mind, is justification enough. We must choose a world which can be built by intuitive human means, because that preserves our agency, our human need to do something meaningful for ourselves and the spaces we inhabit.

I'm looking forward to this book.
Title: Re: The Nature of Order // Book Two // The Process of Creating Life
Post by: droqen on January 04, 2023, 10:24:02 PM
P. xvi
How is living structure to be made by human beings? What kind of human-inspired processes can create living structure?
. . .
In the photograph opposite, . . . we see a case of wonderful life. We see the impact of hundreds of acts, done by different people, making a living street where, rich or poor, people are truly comfortable.
Title: Re: The Nature of Order // Book Two // The Process of Creating Life
Post by: droqen on January 04, 2023, 10:37:59 PM
It has been a long time since I've thought about this, but at the heart of my interest in MMORPGs has always, at least in part, is an idea precisely captured by the above quote: These are worlds made out of the acts of people. Newer MMOs have moved further and further away from this over time, I suppose because it is harder to maintain the changes of so many people and also make a good game that sells... a good game to play, perhaps a good haven from the screaming noise of the internet.

I have always been terribly fascinated by cities for the same reason: to see all the individual human choices that comprise an entire landscape. Not the people themselves, but the results of their many different "acts" all visible and noticeable to varying degrees -- not in a melting pot which simplifies a great ocean of players down to a single shared metric (e.g. Noby Noby Boy, or Splatoon's splatfests) but in a garden or a cemetery, which maintains as much complexity, as much resolution, as is possible.

However, the idea that Alexander presents also captures something I wish I had thought of or internalized earlier: that part of this garden or cemetery is not a mere collection of any acts, but acts which contribute to a living space, here a "living street" but generally a space which is alive.

Starseed Pilgrim's hub world is such a living space; although it is a living space only occupied and built by one person, it is still composed of many human acts, each one made with human purpose, for beauty and/or comfort.

I have made intentionally acerbic space before (Cruel World) and generally fantasized about more along these lines: Worlds full of thieves and betrayals, which some moral players might elect to avoid. Other cruel worlds where living structure could in theory be built but where it was the exception (the beautiful exception), not the norm.

Minecraft is a more beautiful game than any of these ideas. Minecraft worlds are more alive, though a game could be more attuned to living process. It is certainly not the perfect game, or the only possible way to make such a game.
Title: Re: The Nature of Order // Book Two // The Process of Creating Life
Post by: droqen on January 04, 2023, 10:45:27 PM
There is more to this thought but I will return to the book for now.
Title: Re: The Nature of Order // Book Two // The Process of Creating Life
Post by: droqen on January 05, 2023, 09:36:35 AM
PREFACE

ON PROCESS
Title: Re: The Nature of Order // Book Two // The Process of Creating Life
Post by: droqen on January 05, 2023, 09:41:25 AM
P. 2
. . . It is my hope that a world of architecture, more suitable for human life, will emerge from this new view of living process and of what process is.
     Book 2 invites us to reconsider the role and importance of process and how it is living or not. It is about the fact that order cannot be understood sufficient well in purely static terms [as those described in Book 1] because there is something essentially dynamic about order. Living structure can be attained in practice . . . the nature of order is interwoven in its fundamental character with the nature of the processes which create the order.

P. 3
     What process can accomplish the subtle and beautiful adaptation of the parts that will create a living architecture? In a certain sense, the answer is simple. We have to make [what was described in Book 1].
. . . It is generally assumed that doing all this well is the proper work of an architect. . . . [However,] processes are more important, and larger in their effect on the quality of building, than the ability or training of the architect. Processes play a more fundamental role in determining the life or death of the building than does the "design."
Title: Re: The Nature of Order // Book Two // The Process of Creating Life
Post by: droqen on January 05, 2023, 09:42:32 AM
P. 3
     Many of the processes used today, sadly, are nearly bound to fail. We see the results of this failure all around us. The lifeless buildings and environments which have become common in modern society are not merely dead, non-living, structures. They are what they are precisely because of the social processes by which they have been conceived, designed, built, and paid for.
Title: Re: The Nature of Order // Book Two // The Process of Creating Life
Post by: droqen on January 05, 2023, 09:47:56 AM
I didn't quote nearly enough from my watching, but see The Only Unbreakable Law (https://newforum.droqen.com/index.php?topic=269) - the way it was summarized to me is that a thing will always mirror the structure of the organization which produced it. I see a sibling idea in Alexander's claim: that "the nature of order" and "the nature of the processes which create the order" are "interwoven", and that "processes" play a fundamental role, specifically that "living processes" play a fundamental role in the production of "living structure."
Title: Re: The Nature of Order // Book Two // The Process of Creating Life
Post by: droqen on January 05, 2023, 09:57:28 AM
P. 4
Architects are much too concerned with the design of the world (its static structure), and not yet concerned enough with the design of the generative processes that create the world (its dynamic structure).
Title: Re: The Nature of Order // Book Two // The Process of Creating Life
Post by: droqen on January 05, 2023, 09:57:43 AM
yep, this scans
Title: Re: The Nature of Order // Book Two // The Process of Creating Life
Post by: droqen on January 05, 2023, 01:34:22 PM
P. 5, under PROCESS, THE KEY TO MAKING LIFE IN THINGS

. . . When I ask [my friend Bill McClung] what makes him keep [making his meadows in the hills of Berkeley], he answers, "The knowledge that I am making life: that something living is being enhanced. That keeps us inspired. It makes it worthwhile. It is a tremendous thing."
     But then I ask him, pushing, "Isn't it really more the actual pleasure of each day? You go, and go again, because each day, each hour, is satisfying. It is simple work. You enjoy the sunshine, the open air, . . ."
. . . I ask him if this pleasure in the process he is following is not worth almost more than the knowledge that he is making something come to life? He acknowledges my comment and admits, "Yes, this daily ordinary thing is almost more important than the other."

. . . it is the two together: the daily pleasure, . . . with the deeper knowledge . . . that in this process he is making a living structure[.]
Title: Re: The Nature of Order // Book Two // The Process of Creating Life
Post by: droqen on January 05, 2023, 02:36:23 PM
p. 9
. . . a map of an imaginary future, used as a control device . . .
Like machines, . . . within a mechanistic view processes are always seen as aimed at certain ends, we think of things by the end-state we want, and then ask ourselves how to get there. . . . the machine-age view showed a process like kindness as being oriented toward a goal, just as every machine too has its purpose --- its goal, what it is intended to produce,
Title: Re: The Nature of Order // Book Two // The Process of Creating Life
Post by: droqen on January 05, 2023, 02:38:34 PM
P. 10
. . . our era is crippled by this overly-simple, goal-oriented approach.
. . . most important of all, the background underpinning of this goal-oriented view --- a static world almost without process --- just is not a truthful picture.
Title: Re: The Nature of Order // Book Two // The Process of Creating Life
Post by: droqen on January 05, 2023, 02:40:42 PM
P. 13
In a good process, each person working on the building is --- and feels --- responsible for everything. For design, schedule, structure, flowers, feeling --- everything.
Title: Re: The Nature of Order // Book Two // The Process of Creating Life
Post by: droqen on January 05, 2023, 02:43:04 PM
P. 13, last paragraph of the chapter, "ON PROCESS"

     In this book I make an effort, perhaps for
the first time, to make this distinction and to
lay a basis for a theory-- and for a form of daily
practice-- which allows for a world in which
living process, hence living structure, dominates
the world and its creation.
Title: Re: The Nature of Order // Book Two // The Process of Creating Life
Post by: droqen on January 05, 2023, 02:43:51 PM
CHAPTER ONE

THE PRINCIPLE OF

UNFOLDING WHOLENESS

IN NATURE
Title: Re: The Nature of Order // Book Two // The Process of Creating Life
Post by: droqen on January 06, 2023, 12:04:55 AM
P. 18, INTRODUCTION

Living structure, as I have defined it, is . . . in a more general sense, the character of all that we perceive as "nature." The living structure is the general morphological character which natural phenomena have in common.
. . . why does living structure, with its multiplicity of centers and their associated fifteen properties, keep making its appearance in the natural world? Why, and how, does living structure keep recurring in these widely different domains? ["in rocks, animals, plants, clouds, rivers, landscapes, crystals", and "throughout the worlds studied in physics, chemistry, biology, geology, fluid dynamics, ecology, crystallography, cytology, and molecular biology"] What is the mechanics of the process by which living structure is made to appear, so easily*, in nature? What is the process by which this kind of structure repeatedly, and persistently, occurs?
Title: Re: The Nature of Order // Book Two // The Process of Creating Life
Post by: droqen on January 06, 2023, 12:07:35 AM
I'm so overwhelmed by this last section (quoted above). Book one's fifteen properties reside in my mind, incredibly powerful conceptual tools. My all-overriding hope is that Book two presents such a functional taxonomy of properties of living processes by which I might judge mine.
Title: Re: The Nature of Order // Book Two // The Process of Creating Life
Post by: droqen on January 06, 2023, 12:12:59 AM
Regarding order: I realized I have been --- erroneously --- thinking that it is impossible to tell whether the world follows the aforementioned 'fifteen properties' or whether we are merely pattern-recognizing machines, spotting 'nature' and 'centers' automatically, everywhere. But it finally occurred to me that of course that cannot be the case. It's as easy as picturing an artificial construction of non-natural character; it's extremely easy to produce a (simple) structure which would not occur in nature.

More importantly, it's extremely easy to produce a structure which does not follow the fifteen properties. Alexander gives many examples himself in Book 1 and I expect will provide some more throughout this book, whether he draws attention to them as examples of such or not. It's trivial to notice that it is not merely the presence of noise or detail or any simple character which activates our pattern recognition . . . it is something morphologically specific which we are tuned to detect and which is also produced everywhere throughout our reality, across our universe, on our planet, and in our lives.
Title: Re: The Nature of Order // Book Two // The Process of Creating Life
Post by: droqen on January 06, 2023, 12:20:46 AM
I'm coming around steadily to Alexander's way of thinking, now that we're out of the first book. "Life" is a feature of space, an objectively measurable characteristic. But the interesting thing is that the objective measuring tool most available to us is also tightly bound to subjectiveness: it is our own minds. The objective measure of this property, "life," is our human pattern recognition. Our senses, our brains.
Title: Re: The Nature of Order // Book Two // The Process of Creating Life
Post by: droqen on January 06, 2023, 10:11:37 AM
P. 19, under NOTE FOR THE SCIENTIFIC READER

In what follows, I shall argue that the emergence of new structure in nature is brought about, always, by a sequence of transformations which act on the whole, and in which each step emerges as a discernible and continuous result from the immediately preceding whole.
     This thought [is] obvious if taken naively, but profound and difficult if taken literally as a piece of science. . .
Title: Re: The Nature of Order // Book Two // The Process of Creating Life
Post by: droqen on January 07, 2023, 11:20:24 AM
P. 35
Throughout centuries of study of nature, many, many cases of emergence of form from the whole have been observed and studied. . . . Generally speaking, the emergence of form in the world has been seen and understood as a relatively straightforward mechanical emergence of the product of different causal laws.
Title: Re: The Nature of Order // Book Two // The Process of Creating Life
Post by: droqen on January 07, 2023, 11:22:35 AM
I just thought this was very funny:

P. 42
. . . many scientists have been spending their energy trying to insist, "no it is not God's design, Mr. Creationist, it is by a series of step-wise changes, gradually evolving," instead of answering the difficult question about how the very sophisticated machinery was actually arrived at, step by step. Of course (for me anyway) the question is not "Was it God's design, or was this step-by-step?" No doubt it was step-by-step. But how does step-by-step actually accomplish its results when the result requires sophisticated and complex global geometry to work.
Title: Re: The Nature of Order // Book Two // The Process of Creating Life
Post by: droqen on January 07, 2023, 11:27:39 AM
P. 42
. . . is there a pattern-like tendency which makes transformations toward coherent patterns (based on the fifteen properties) which then tend to produce coherent mechanisms for geometric reasons --- and the selective process then finds a use for these beautiful and coherent mechanisms to gain advantages.

//

Alexander describes in book 1 his theory of how 'beautiful' and 'coherent' are one and the same. Rather, in that book, he says 'function' and 'ornament'. I would go back to check that out if I hadn't returned it to the library already. I can see him building upon this principle here. If there is something inherently functional about good geometry, it is much easier to imagine a geometry-producing principle in action at all levels than a functionality-producing one.

(Actually, the principle of least action is more functionality-producing in character than is the 'unfolding' principle which he gives later. I've never thought of the principle of least action as unscientific.)
Title: Re: The Nature of Order // Book Two // The Process of Creating Life
Post by: droqen on January 07, 2023, 11:32:27 AM
P. 45-46
Underlying all these cases there is a geometrical principle, reminiscent of the principle of least action, but more general. This principle may be formulated as follows: the evolution of any natural system is governed by transformations of the mathematical wholeness and by a tendency, inherent in these transformations, for the whole to unfold in a particular direction.
     In more detail, I postulate that every natural system has a disposition, a tendency caused by the most simple way forward for the system to move in the direction which preserves wholeness. I do not mean that it preserves wholeness in some pious emotional sense, nor that it "wishes" to preserve wholeness. I simply mean that wholeness, which I have defined as a structure of symmetries and centers (Book 1, chapter 3 and appendix 1), will always have a natural dynamic of such a nature that as many as possible of these symmetries (and especially some of the larger ones) are preserved as the system moves forward in time. As the system evolves, it destroys these symmetries and larger centers AS LITTLE AS POSSIBLE. It maintains as much of the structure of symmetries and centre as possible, and destroys as little of the structure of symmetries and centers as can be managed while yet moving forward.
Title: Re: The Nature of Order // Book Two // The Process of Creating Life
Post by: droqen on January 07, 2023, 11:35:05 AM
P. 48
. . . living structure always arises slowly, by successive transformations of what exists, gradually, gradually, and then decisively changes slowly until a new thing is born. . .
Title: Re: The Nature of Order // Book Two // The Process of Creating Life
Post by: droqen on January 07, 2023, 11:36:01 AM
CHAPTER TWO

STRUCTURE-PRESERVING

TRANSFORMATIONS
Title: Re: The Nature of Order // Book Two // The Process of Creating Life
Post by: droqen on January 07, 2023, 11:38:12 AM
P. 52
. . . from now on I shall refer to these types of transformations as structure-preserving transformations. My claim in Book 2 is that the intricate and beautiful structure of living centers comes about naturally, and most of the time without effort, as a result of the repeated application of structure-preserving transformations to the wholeness which exists.
Title: Re: The Nature of Order // Book Two // The Process of Creating Life
Post by: droqen on January 07, 2023, 11:40:19 AM
"the wholeness which exists"

"most of the time without effort"
Title: Re: The Nature of Order // Book Two // The Process of Creating Life
Post by: droqen on January 07, 2023, 11:46:01 AM
These quotes match up with the way it feels to make things on a good day -- there is a genuine sensation of transformations which preserve what already is, and which strengthens what already is, and doing this feels in some cases effortless. I don't think the act is creationless or egoless -- something new often must be created -- but at the same time the thing that is created, fitted, placed, that new thing is often obvious. The obvious thing.

It is very hard to get started without "the wholeness that exists". The problem of the blank page, the blank canvas. In most or all of the work that I've actually finished (games, music, poems) there has been a distinct phase where the work proceeded "without effort". In a platformer, this phase is very often the level design. There is all this work to make the thing function, and then the laying out of levels is effortless. . . This probably isn't the same thing as what Alexander is describing exactly, but this is the experience I've had which relates to him best in this moment.

The worst part about making a videogame is building up new wholenesses from scratch every time.

I also enjoy this part.
Title: Re: The Nature of Order // Book Two // The Process of Creating Life
Post by: droqen on January 08, 2023, 04:55:08 PM
Quote from: droqen on January 06, 2023, 12:07:35 AMBook one's fifteen properties reside in my mind, incredibly powerful conceptual tools. My all-overriding hope is that Book two presents such a functional taxonomy of properties of living processes by which I might judge mine.

He has delivered!

P. 65-66
. . . if under a structure-preserving transformation, new centers are being added that enliven or deepen the existing centers, this means that the fifteen properties must slowly come into being, step by step, with each new transformation. . . . the presence of the fifteen properties in a naturally evolving structure, will increase as the evolution goes forward, as a direct result of the repeated use of structure-preserving transformations.

P. 77, FIFTEEN TRANSFORMATIONS
Let us now consider the fifteen properties, not merely as results of the structure-preserving transformations, but as the names of particular types of structure-preserving transformations themselves. . . . for any given structure, this transformation may be thought of as injecting into it new centers which provide more beautifully articulated intermediate [instances of the property].
. . . In general, all the geometric properties identified in Book 1 are also associated with dynamic transformations which will inject these geometric properties into the system of centers of any emerging, growing whole.
Title: Re: The Nature of Order // Book Two // The Process of Creating Life
Post by: droqen on January 08, 2023, 05:19:40 PM
When I wrote that initial quote I thought, even hoped, the 'properties of living processes' might take a form mirroring the fifteen properties. Yes, Alexander goes through each and every property and describes one or more transformations that might produce them. I will summarize them for future reference. I do not do this to indicate that these are rigid rules, but I think they will make a very useful starting point for seeing what a process might be lacking if it aspires to a feeling of aliveness. i.e.: is it missing a certain type of transformation?

FIFTEEN TRANSFORMATIONS

(1) LEVELS OF SCALE
- introduce intermediate-sized centers to fill out the hierarchy of scales by...
* differentiating a loosely distinguished zone into parts, or
* introducing smaller parts

(2) STRONG CENTERS
- all the transformations help to achieve this fundamental goal, but we might achieve it somewhat directly

. . . i'm going to do this in a different format. slides, anyone?
Alright, I did it in google docs, but then I just copied and pasted it and reproduced the nice formatting in bbcode
Title: Re: The Nature of Order // Book Two // The Process of Creating Life
Post by: droqen on January 08, 2023, 08:38:11 PM
1 LEVELS OF SCALE
Introduce intermediate-sized centers to fill out the hierarchy of scales.
Two methods:
Differentiate a loosely distinguished zone into parts
Introduce smaller parts

2 STRONG CENTER
All the transformations help, in some form, to achieve this fundamental goal.
Some key words: differentiate, distinguish, sharpen, give weight, define.

3 BOUNDARY
Strengthen the existing 'cloudy zone of space' which surrounds any center.

4 ALTERNATING REPETITION
Generate a repeating pattern of similar entities within a previously undifferentiated field.
It simultaneously generates a second pattern of repeating centers, interlocking and alternating with the first.

5 POSITIVE SPACE
Strengthen the existing 'cloudy zone of space' which exists between other centers.

6 GOOD SHAPE
???

7 LOCAL SYMMETRY
Give an existing center or system of centers an internal axis of symmetry.
Do not extend this symmetry beyond the center's influence. Sometimes this transformation is only applied to the "kernel"; that is, it is better to go too small than too large.

8 DEEP INTERLOCK (and ambiguity)
Create connections between contrasting parts in which each enters the other.
Especially in an existing 'boundary zone', which has perhaps experienced the boundary transformation.

9 CONTRAST
Increase the distinction between two kinds of centers.
The contrast may be achieved by any physical characteristics. This may also be described as a sharpening of the separation.

10 GRADIENT
Systematically vary certain aspects according to an uneven or non-homogenous field.
Aspects: size, shape, weight, darkness, or spacing.
Fields may be simple (an axis, a position) or complex and even structureless.
This transformation is capable of "introducing coherence of a new kind into an almost random-like field of structure."

11 ROUGHNESS
Prefer (local) fit over (global) regularity.
This is used "in the course of" other transformations.
Examples given are making positive space, strong centers, local symmetries, or alternating repetition.

12 ECHOES
Take characteristics of certain repeating centers, apply them to other centers in the field.
Characteristics: procedures, angles, shapes, and shape-characters.

13 VOID
Clean up a relatively differentiated area that does not need its differentiation.
Make it homogenous.

In a way, a specific case of the contrast transformation, increasing the distinction between centers whose distinction is their relative strength and complexity; in other words, makes the 'weaker' and 'simpler' area maximally weak and simple.
Produces a boundary zone around the newly homogenous area.

14 SIMPLICITY (and inner calm)
Remove unwanted centers.
Cleans up unnecessary structure. Similar to the void transformation, but throughout the structure, rather than in one area.

15 NOT-SEPARATENESS
Take pieces of two separate areas; copy them inside one another.


Title: Re: The Nature of Order // Book Two // The Process of Creating Life
Post by: droqen on January 08, 2023, 08:46:25 PM
The above is my summary of the transformations given on pages 77-79. Yes, my summary of good shape really is "???"

On one hand there is a sort of recursive beauty in the way these transformations (and the properties) are out of order, repeat one another inside one another in an ambiguous way (in a way that suggests deep interlock, which I do believe is there).

On the other, it is nice to boil things down to their essence. I suppose I might say that I am applying the SIMPLICITY (and inner calm) transformation to the fifteen transformations themselves. yes. I am not saying that the property of good shape, or even that the transformation of good shape, is unnecessary . . . but in some sense I think that describing it is meaningless. Isn't it frustrating? The properties themselves are practically an attempt to break down what "good shape" is in the first place, and one of the fifteen is itself "good shape". Each one of the properties contains each of the other properties, but good shape contains almost nothing but all of the other properties. It is a necessary component, but it is also meaningless.
Title: Re: The Nature of Order // Book Two // The Process of Creating Life
Post by: droqen on January 08, 2023, 08:49:17 PM
Okay, fine.

6 GOOD SHAPE
Exaggerate the characteristics of an existing center or system of centers.
Generally this is akin to taking certain repeated features and strengthening them as centers, but without overwhelming the parent center which binds them into one shape.

~ Linked from #108, on imperfect symmetries in form language -- many pages and chapters ahead in this book (http://newforum.droqen.com/index.php?topic=391.msg1987#msg1987)
Title: Re: The Nature of Order // Book Two // The Process of Creating Life
Post by: droqen on January 09, 2023, 10:26:53 AM
P. 82
To grasp the underlying nature of this process clearly and systematically, we need just the one assumption: Throughout the process, centers will always tend to form in such a way as to preserve and enhance previous structure --- and this means, in such a way as to help sustain other existing and emerging centers. Mathematically, this structure-preserving process will them be embodied in the fifteen possible transformations I have described.

P. 84
This is a startling and new conception of ethics and aesthetics. It describes good structure as a structure which has unfolded "well," through these transformations, without violating the structure that exists.
. . . This startling view provides us with a view of ethics and aesthetics that dignifies our respect for what exists, and treasures that which grows from this respect. It views with disfavor only that which emerges arbitrarily, without respect for what exists, and provides a vision of the world as a horn of shimmering plenty in which the "new" grows unceasingly from the structure that exists around us already. That this horn of plenty is inexhaustible, and that we may conceive an everlasting fountain of novelty without ever having to beat ourselves over the head for the sake of novelty per se --- that may perhaps be one of the greatest potential legacies of this new view of the world.
Title: Re: The Nature of Order // Book Two // The Process of Creating Life
Post by: droqen on January 09, 2023, 10:41:18 AM
What is to be done about that unfavourable stuff which exists? Alexander writes about "our respect for what exists," and I believe this must in some cases extend to even nonliving stuff, dead stuff, bad structure which has not unfolded well.

There is an incomplete thought hinted at in what are the stakes? (https://newforum.droqen.com/index.php?topic=334) as well as in my currently pinned tweet (https://twitter.com/droqen/status/1584265756677935104); my anarchy has mutated over time since my reading of The Dispossessed (https://newforum.droqen.com/index.php?topic=299.0).

It is so easy to imagine, whole cloth, a new world, a new set of rules, a new society, and suppose that even with its flaws it represents a "better" world. I have been applying that way of thinking to Alexander's writing; surely he is calling for an overturning of architectural thinking? A revolution?

But he calls for no such thing, and it follows from his own theories and way of thinking that the way forward should grow, should follow naturally, from where we are now. The design of the world does not matter; the process matters. The design of those processes do not matter; the process of those processes matters. We are where we are, now. What does a smooth unfolding from this point onward look like?

This does not mean nothing should change, or nothing daring should be done, but at all levels, one can apply transformations, smooth transformations, structure-preserving transformations, "without violating the structure that exists," and this will increase the life in the structure.

The only ways in which the fifteen transformations "allow" for the destruction of centers are the VOID transformation and the SIMPLICITY transformation, which as written can target only unnecessary centers. (My summary of SIMPLICITY says "unwanted" first, but let us say that "unwanted" describes a consensus or objective state, rather than an individual one.)

The view of ethics and aesthetics as presented "dignifies our respect for what exists, and treasures that which grows from this respect" and avoids us "having to beat ourselves over the head for the sake of novelty."

It may be the case that Alexander is looking too much into the past (as some of his critics claim), but in his words I see only the future. From where we are now, identify living centers, identify those centers which win our respect for their existence, and transform space so that they are strengthened, and strengthened, and strengthened, forever.
Title: Re: The Nature of Order // Book Two // The Process of Creating Life
Post by: droqen on January 10, 2023, 11:56:40 AM
CHAPTER THREE

STRUCTURE-PRESERVING

TRANSFORMATIONS

IN TRADITIONAL SOCIETY

P. 86
Any part of the world we build will have life if it is created by structure-preserving transformations, and will not have life if it is not created by structure-preserving transformations.
. . . This means that even if we architects were to understand completely the living structure described in Book 1, and tried to put this structure into our designs, if we were nevertheless trying to get our buildings conceived, designed, and built by the social processes which currently exist --- the buildings would still inevitably break life and could not have life.
. . . it is, ultimately, the process, not the design, which gives life . . .
. . . Thus the issue of process is immense. In its impact on the quality of architecture, it is more important than the static structure of the designs.
Title: Re: The Nature of Order // Book Two // The Process of Creating Life
Post by: droqen on January 10, 2023, 11:58:51 AM
P. 86
     The absence of life we recognize as a familiar problem of the past century does not come about merely because modernistic design was ignorant of the structural principles expressed in Book 1. It comes about, far more profoundly, because the processes which create objects, artifacts, buildings, neighborhoods, agriculture (https://newforum.droqen.com/index.php?topic=267), forests, towns, roads, bridges --- nearly all fail to have the character of unfolding wholeness.
Title: Re: The Nature of Order // Book Two // The Process of Creating Life
Post by: droqen on January 10, 2023, 12:32:43 PM
P. 88
. . . at each step, the weaver [of a traditional carpet] looks at the wholeness, judges it, and makes a next step which extends the wholeness. . . . the mode of perception typical of "primitive" people tends to be holistic. There is no motivation which will tend to make people fracture the wholeness at any stage. [emphasis mine] This is, in many ways, the type of process which has been called unconsciousness, or primitive. It takes the wholeness, continues it, enhances it, develops it.
Title: Re: The Nature of Order // Book Two // The Process of Creating Life
Post by: droqen on January 10, 2023, 12:39:40 PM
P. 92
    One might say: but the shape of modern timbers, too, is determined by the modern lumber-milling process, just as ancient timbers were shaped by the process of the adze. But there is an enormous difference. The modern process leaves no room for feedback. The process goes on without regard for the character of each log and its position [emphasis mine] in a building. The traditional adzing process allows each timber to be hewn, shaped, and carved according to its place in the house. And there is constant feedback going on. With almost every stroke [emphasis mine] . . . the carver looks at what he has done, judges it, checks it against the wholeness to see if it fits --- and , as a result, he keeps the structure-preserving process on course.

// I read this as a counter to the more general argument of "all things are produced by a process, so what's the problem?" --- I think his focus on feedback, local feedback, and response to feedback, is the key here. People do not want to fracture the wholeness, but if they are forced to, or (more often) they are made blind to the impact they have on the wholeness, it can still occur.
Title: Re: The Nature of Order // Book Two // The Process of Creating Life
Post by: droqen on January 10, 2023, 06:17:57 PM
P. 103, under "LOVE OF LIFE"
In order to make buildings by unfolding --- hence by structure-preserving transformations --- it is necessary, truly, to pay attention to the wholeness in the world. This "paying attention to the wholeness" is essentially synonymous with love of life. . . . to everything: to the life of water, other people, the thirst of a stranger, the starts in the black sky. . . . to the emptiness of the desert, to the passion of an old woman sitting on her doorstep, to one's own passion, . . . to a banana skin on the ground

P. 105
. . . this open place comes from structure-preserving transformations of that wholeness which includes the children, and preserves and extends their love of children. We, in our sophistication, have lost that love --- perhaps not in our hearts, but certainly in our technical willingness to allow the love of children to be overlaid with . . . "necessities."
Title: Re: The Nature of Order // Book Two // The Process of Creating Life
Post by: droqen on January 10, 2023, 06:19:47 PM
CHAPTER FOUR

STRUCTURE-DESTROYING

TRANSFORMATIONS

IN MODERN SOCIETY

THE FAILURE OF UNFOLDING

P. 107, under "WHY ALL PROCESSES DO NOT CREATE LIFE"
Is every building process a process of unfolding wholeness? Is the creation of order, or life, in buildings and in towns inevitable? Does the life, the deep wholeness formed by the fifteen properties, appear mechanically, and inevitably, as a result of any building process?
     Evidently not!

// Oh, yes, this is exactly what I was talking about two posts ago, in #41 :)
Title: Re: The Nature of Order // Book Two // The Process of Creating Life
Post by: droqen on January 10, 2023, 06:24:32 PM
P. 108
     I have argued that in the absence of any interference [structure-preserving transformation] will tend to keep on happening in nature. . . . there is no way, in the normal operation of the laws of physics, that this structure can be destroyed even when it is being transformed. . . .
Humans guide their actions according to a mental "picture" of the situation. . . The images, or schemata, which people use to guide their actions may be wholeness-preserving, or they may not be. . . .
For a variety of reasons, in modern society the rules of the game --- the schemata and images --- have become more and more willful, more rule-bound. . .
. . . the everyday processes through which buildings and the world are made, lost the essential features which made them able to create living structure.
Title: Re: The Nature of Order // Book Two // The Process of Creating Life
Post by: droqen on January 10, 2023, 06:32:08 PM
P. 116
 . . . modern people are, very often, not holistic perceivers. Instead of seeing the wholeness and acting on it, they (especially if they are educated in verbal concepts at modern institutions) now perceive according to invented categories, which often blind them to the wholeness which exists.

Quote from: The One-Straw Revolution, p26An object seen in isolation from the whole is not the real thing.

Specialists in various fields gather together and observe a stalk of rice. The insect disease specialist sees only insect damage, the specialist in plant nutrition considers only the plant's vigor. [emphasis mine]

http://newforum.droqen.com/index.php?topic=267.msg989#msg989
Title: Re: The Nature of Order // Book Two // The Process of Creating Life
Post by: droqen on January 10, 2023, 06:36:12 PM
P. 122
. . . such planned communities, and indeed nearly all developer-built artificial communities, are based on structure-destroying transformations. This comes not from their failure to be consistent with the land where they are built, but merely from the fact that they are planned at all, rather than "grown."
Title: Re: The Nature of Order // Book Two // The Process of Creating Life
Post by: droqen on January 10, 2023, 06:43:04 PM
P. 125
The base of [this] building . . . did not arise as part of an unfolding process from the land that was there before, . . . the base is a thought --- like thin paper --- not a reality which has grown from the actual situation. And . . . because of this, it does not work. It is probably vulnerable to water penetration. It is probably not very strong in earthquake or against cracking. Certainly it is not a place where plants can grow. It is not a place where a person can be comfortable, sitting or leaning or standing against the wall. The lack of unfolding not only makes the building ugly; it also makes sure that it does not work.

// I see Alexander repeating his argument that ornamentation and functionality are inseparable, and it is more compelling here than before . . . the "smooth" unfolding process which produces life is that process which takes what is there and builds upon it, strengthens it, notices it, loves it. If the ornamental process does not respect the conditions, how can the functional? Are they one?
Title: Re: The Nature of Order // Book Two // The Process of Creating Life
Post by: droqen on January 10, 2023, 06:46:29 PM
P. 126
The geometry is stark, harsh, not well adapted to itself internally*. Again and again, this comes about from a failure of unfolding, and  from a procedure (during the design stage) which must have been structure-destroying.

// *emphasis mine. If the process does not respect the ground, why should it respect its own foundation? It follows that a process of building that cares to strengthen its centers, to build upon its self, would be capable of applying such to the space it was built on. . .
Title: Re: The Nature of Order // Book Two // The Process of Creating Life
Post by: droqen on January 10, 2023, 06:50:34 PM
I love this next header.

P. 128-129

6 / SOME SYMPATHY FOR THE ARCHITECTS
WHO MADE THESE THINGS

I believe it is in appropriate to feel anger toward them . . . What has caused the new tradition of structure-destroying forms of this era, are mainly the machine-like processes . . . However, even with the sympathy, I do not think one can avoid the realization that many architects have been sucked into a cooperation with the structure-destroying program of modern society. . . Yet that production process which we [architects] justified and which many people came to believe in is inherently incapable of creating life.
Title: Re: The Nature of Order // Book Two // The Process of Creating Life
Post by: droqen on January 10, 2023, 06:56:00 PM
Another miserable banger.

P. 129

7 / THE THRALL OF IMAGES

Images in the 20th century had a unique power, where image became divorced from reality, and often more important than reality. . . . photographs of buildings in magazines became more important than the buildings themselves. Buildings were judged --- at least by members of our own profession --- more by the way they looked in magazines, than by the satisfaction people felt when using them.

. . . because of the new role of images in society, many of us [architects] began to believe in our own propaganda . . . the images of Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe [began to form the backbone of an accepted style.] . . . These images were highly destructive. As a result of the fame of such architects younger architects then wanted to be like that, too, and perpetuated this style of work, with all its inherent life-destroying qualities. Yet it all came from images, hardly ever from life.

// sounds like 'touch grass' could have preceded the internet. god damn
Title: Re: The Nature of Order // Book Two // The Process of Creating Life
Post by: droqen on January 10, 2023, 07:02:30 PM
P. 129-130
     The essence, in all cases of unfolding, is common sense. You want to make a house. At each moment, you ask yourself, What is the most important thing I have to do next, which will have the best effect on the life of the house? Then you do it.
. . . It is not complicated, not pretentious, but simple and obvious. It is just common sense.

. . . the structure-preserving character unfolding is deeper than it seems. A student once asked me . . . Could you, in fact, create the designs of Mies van der Rohe, Botta, Le Corbusier by the same process? The answer is that you could not.
. . . Suppose you do start with an idea of a building --- as Mies, Le Corbusier, Botta all typically did. All of them started with a certain idea, a certain image. Imagine . . . you also start with an image. . . . Now you start an unfolding process, a structure-preserving process, on the site, carrying this image in your mind. If you do really and truly follow the wholeness of the land, site, and emerging building, and allow the wholeness to unfold --- then, gradually, each part of the initial (and arbitrary) image will slowly give way to common sense: that is, to reality, to the wholeness of what is there, rather than to the idea of it you carry in your image.

. . . the images of Le Corbusier, Mies, Botta, and others like them cannot, IN PRINCIPLE, be created by an unfolding process. Anything that starts with an imposed image, if then taken step by step through an unfolding process, will change --- often drastically --- as it unfolds. . . . In other words, many of the buildings we have inherited as icons of the modern movement are arbitrary, and do not --- deeply --- make sense at all.
Title: Re: The Nature of Order // Book Two // The Process of Creating Life
Post by: droqen on January 10, 2023, 07:08:30 PM
P. 135

8 / MASS-PRODUCED BUILDING AND CITY FORM

. . . the very idea of city images, or plans, and the very idea of city planning as an activity, is itself inherently at odds with the idea of unfolding, and at odds with the idea of the land giving rise gradually, and of its own accord, to natural extended city form. . . .

The modern developments we know too well, . . . necessarily depend on images --- because it is the images which first draw investors, and then potential buyers, to the land.
Title: Re: The Nature of Order // Book Two // The Process of Creating Life
Post by: droqen on January 10, 2023, 07:10:00 PM
P. 136, "CONCLUSION"
In a living system what is to be always grows out of what is, supports it, extends it structure smoothly and continuously, elaborates new form --- sometimes startling new form --- but without ever violating the structure which exists.
. . . Creativity comes about when we discover the new within a structure already latent in the present. It is our respect for what is that leads us to the most beautiful discoveries.
Title: Re: The Nature of Order // Book Two // The Process of Creating Life
Post by: droqen on January 10, 2023, 07:11:16 PM
INTERLUDE





I N S P I R I N G   M O D E R N   C A S E S   W H E R E

U N F O L D I N G   D I D   O C C U R
Title: Re: The Nature of Order // Book Two // The Process of Creating Life
Post by: droqen on January 10, 2023, 07:14:30 PM
Alexander writes, "I have, as a counterpoint to the pessimism of chapter 4" (much appreciated) "written this next chapter which extols the beauty of our era. I mean it as a source of inspiration, and as a source of hope. And I mean it, too, to be instructive, to show us that perhaps we have been looking in the wrong direction, at the wrong examples."

This is a single joyful page, very warm and comforting. And it comes at just the right time: as a counterpoint, as he says, to the chapter which precedes. Of course both centers strengthen one another. I would be startled to find Alexander getting meta (he does not), but it follows his philosophy closely as I notice much of his writing's structure does.
Title: Re: The Nature of Order // Book Two // The Process of Creating Life
Post by: droqen on January 10, 2023, 07:15:42 PM
"If we are honest, we can still love what we are, we can find all the good there is to find, and we may find ways to enhance that good, and to find a new kind of living world which is appropriate for our time."
Title: Re: The Nature of Order // Book Two // The Process of Creating Life
Post by: droqen on January 10, 2023, 07:16:56 PM
CHAPTER FIVE

EXAMPLES OF LIVING PROCESS

IN THE MODERN ERA

I haven't turned the page yet. I'm not going to write anything down from this chapter, at least not until I've finished the entire thing. I need the breather and I'm going to enjoy it fully, for myself.
Title: Re: The Nature of Order // Book Two // The Process of Creating Life
Post by: droqen on January 10, 2023, 08:02:33 PM
These are my memories of living places, living processes:

- Live musicians and comedians, in the bandshell at the CNE. The crowd there.
- In Suzhou, the gardens.
- In Tianjing, the old men playing Xiangqi (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xiangqi), surrounded by onlookers. I stood on a bench so I could see down at the game.
- Vending machines in Tokyo, tucked away in the winding streets of a residential neighbourhood.
- FJORDS (https://mooonmagic.itch.io/fjords).
- Ward's Island, Toronto. The houses there, the people there.
Title: Re: The Nature of Order // Book Two // The Process of Creating Life
Post by: droqen on January 11, 2023, 06:55:01 PM
PART TWO

LIVING PROCESSES
Title: Re: The Nature of Order // Book Two // The Process of Creating Life
Post by: droqen on January 11, 2023, 07:11:18 PM
. . . In the present way of thinking about architecture, one is supposed to design a building completely, occasionally even plan a whole neighbourhood, and then use the description (the design, with its plans and drawings) as a specification from which to build. But the essential idea of Book 2 is that it is precisely in this way that architecture has gone wrong, and that it is because of this that living structure rarely appears in contemporary buildings. Instead of using plans, designs, and so on, I shall argue that we MUST instead use generative processes. Generative processes tell us what to DO, what ACTIONS to take, step by step, to make buildings and building designs unfold beautifully, rather than detailed drawings which tell us what the END-result is supposed to be.

. . .

     So we come to the core of Book 2. In the next chapters I try to specify not only what I mean by living process in technical detail, but also what characteristics are operationally necessary to any process which is a "living" process --- in other words, what is necessary to
ANY and EVERY process which is capable of generating living structure.
Title: Re: The Nature of Order // Book Two // The Process of Creating Life
Post by: droqen on January 11, 2023, 07:16:24 PM
In Emergence, Steven Johnson identified (http://newforum.droqen.com/index.php?topic=352.msg1412#msg1412) 'five fundamental principles' of 'systems where macrointelligence and adaptability derive from local knowledge'. In short, emergence. In shorter, perhaps, Alexander's 'life'. I found this claim very interesting, but the actual execution of it . . . eh.

Whereas I feel that Alexander will deliver. I'm not sure what he's going to deliver on, exactly. That is, I don't even know what I'm looking for. I don't know whether Emergence failed to deliver, or whether it in fact delivered but I was not so interested in what it was delivering on after all.

There are a hundred mirrors in Alexander's writing to my own thinking. I have never been so interested in emergence as I have been in what comes out of it: real life.

What is it that I love about cities? I read Emergence because I thought it would tell me. It did not, not really.

I am here now.
Title: Re: The Nature of Order // Book Two // The Process of Creating Life
Post by: droqen on January 11, 2023, 07:17:46 PM
CHAPTER SIX

GENERATED STRUCTURE


W I T H   S P E C I A L   A T T E N T I O N   T O   T H E   D I F F E R E N C E

B E T W E E N   G E N E R A T E D   S T R U C T U R E   A N D   F A B R I C A T E D

S T R U C T U R E   A N D   T H E   H U G E   E C O N O M I C   C O S T

T O   O U R   S O C I E T Y   O F   T H E   F A B R I C A T E D

S T R U C T U R E S   W H I C H   A R E   C R E A T E D   B Y

C O N T E M P O R A R Y   A R C H I T E C T U R E

struck out because i don't think i'm taking enough notes to justify every one of these chapter headers! things may be quoted out of order.
Title: Re: The Nature of Order // Book Two // The Process of Creating Life
Post by: droqen on January 12, 2023, 02:48:16 PM
P. 223-224, 'Reprinted from William McClung, "How to Make a Meadow Following Alexander --- 1," published in THE BUFFER ZONE, 2, (1998), page 3.'

Meadows [akin to Old English mädwan to mow] may sometimes appear naturally, but I think they usually are constructed places. In fire mitigation work, we make meadows by cutting and reducing vegetation, from weeds to grass to excessive tree and brush growth. The art of the meadow is in how we apply reduction, and what we do with what we have removed.

The Fundamental Operation. We can produce life in space, according to Christopher Alexander, if we make things following a natural, slow-unfolding process, which involves these steps: (1) Observe and absorb the deep structure of the whole space. The deep structure of a potential meadow is usually formed by the shape of the land, the major trees and brush clusters, natural edges, vistas, colors, smells, shadows, the way the sky is revealed and hidden, and important animal and plant life of the place. Such things Alexander call strong centers. (2) Ask what we can do next to most intensify the life of what is before us, by strengthening the strong centers and wholeness already there. (3) Try to do it. Life-generating work always involves strengthening existing strong centers, large or small, and in such a way as to make structure-preserving transformations. (4) Evaluate the result and the new wholeness. (5) Repeat the process step by step. (6) Stop when further improvements in the feeling of the whole cannot be made.

In a one-acre meadow we might reduce and shape as much as five tons of plant and tree material, choosing what to cut and what to leave, reshaping the space, making it more alive if we are successful, while reducing fire danger by reorganizing fuels downward. The fuels near the ground decompose more rapidly and have less oxygen in a fire. The opening of good spaces where there was dense vegetation is how we make the meadow. The defining feature of the land form is better revealed when the grasses and weeds are cut, brush removed. An important vista is opened by removing dead tree debris. Insects and bugs thrive in the low debris piles, providing food for lizards, salamanders, birds and other animals. Well made, it will feel right. The feeling a place presents to us is a measure of its life. If the meadow feels safe and inviting, it probably is.
Title: Re: The Nature of Order // Book Two // The Process of Creating Life
Post by: droqen on January 12, 2023, 02:54:42 PM
P. 186, 'HOW TO COUNT MISTAKES'

When we examine an object, we may see that each element in the object (part, line, edge, position, color, size) represents a decision. . . . Each element has the possibility of being wrong. By that I mean that the element as placed, sized, and oriented, may be well-adapted to its neighbours, to the space around it, to the conditions which exist, and to the conditions arising from the structure of the surrounding elements --- or it may be badly adapted to the neighbours, conditions, space, trees, arising from surrounding elements.
     We are going to count the number of possible mistakes, and try to estimate how many of these mistakes have been avoided, and how many have been committed, in different types of plan. It is here, that we shall see the vast superiority of generated plans. They avoid mistakes. A fabricated plan cannot avoid mistakes, and in all fabricated plans, the overwhelming majority of possible mistakes, are actually committed.
Title: Re: The Nature of Order // Book Two // The Process of Creating Life
Post by: droqen on January 12, 2023, 02:58:56 PM
In Paradise I was briefly enamoured by the idea of perfection. What does it mean for something to be perfect? I thought that it was, perhaps, out of reach. But that passion has been rekindled by this section on mistakes; a perfect thing is simply something made without mistakes. And mistakes . . . mistakes are countable.

I like that Alexander's approach is not to repair mistakes that were made, but to not make them in the first place, through structure-preserving transformations. The mistakes are measured by what mistakes are made in the process of each of the transformations performed to produce the work. Did these transformations strengthen the whole, or did they weaken it? Did they respect the relationships, or did they damage or destroy them? These mistakes, these wounds, are not bugs in code. They scar, they cannot be fixed. Scars heal over, but they do not vanish. I think there can be beauty in damage which has been allowed to grow over. A structure-preserving transformation does not destroy even 'bad' structure. It grows over and around it. The damage remains, but does not remain a fresh wound.
Title: Re: The Nature of Order // Book Two // The Process of Creating Life
Post by: droqen on January 12, 2023, 03:00:51 PM
P. 225, 'NECESSARY FEATURES OF ALL LIVING PROCESS'

     I would like the reader to consider my discussion of living process in the next ten chapters as applying to every conceivable process in society, and to every architecture-creating process, at any scale, in which the reader is herself/himself involved.

// Way ahead of you. Already doing it. These next ten chapters are going to be awesome. I thought we were done the core of the book at the fifteen transformations, but I can tell the next ten chapters are full of promise.
Title: Re: The Nature of Order // Book Two // The Process of Creating Life
Post by: droqen on January 15, 2023, 09:59:25 PM
[pingback: INVENTING YOUR OWN PROBLEMS as LATENT CENTERS (https://newforum.droqen.com/index.php?topic=404)]
Title: Re: The Nature of Order // Book Two // The Process of Creating Life
Post by: droqen on January 15, 2023, 10:43:31 PM
P. 225
I believe future understanding of living process --- if the concept survives in future generations [I will fight for it] --- must have at least [these features] . . . In the next chapters I shall discuss these ten features of living process in detail.

// I'll try to recap each 'feature of living process' chapter in its entirety as I relate to it.
Title: Re: The Nature of Order // Book Two // The Process of Creating Life
Post by: droqen on January 15, 2023, 10:53:45 PM
CHAPTER EIGHT
STEP-BY-STEP ADAPTATION
GRADUAL PROCESS TOWARD LIVING STRUCTURE

"The result must be unpredictable." Alexander invokes the butterfly effect to explain how the building process which genuinely has this feature, which I shall summarize as "adaptation to feedback at every step," must not have a fixed result determined ahead of time. Now, he has constructed buildings with purposes, and I believe that this is highly distinct from a fixed result. To build a school, you shouldn't look at a school and copy it... you should ask yourself, What purpose(s) does my building have? To build a game, you shouldn't look at a game and copy it... you should ask yourself what purposes or needs your game seeks to satisfy. You should seek what they tried to seek (https://letterclub.games/2022/04/03/seek-what-they-tried-to-seek/). I've struggled with this in the past, and I probably will continue to struggle with it.

What are games for?

Quote from: @droqeni spent a couple decades learning how to program and design computer games. i've become disenchanted over the past few years. please refill my sense of purpose:

how have you - and others you care about - used games and computers to make your life better?

(especially recently)

tweet (https://twitter.com/droqen/status/1555942320708657152)

Lots of interesting replies there, which shows how long I've been thinking in these terms (if not, probably, longer). But this also explains the extreme difficulty of building up a game from an idea, and depending on the rigidity of the idea, the deadness of the process... However, an idea may contain a nugget of 'purpose' within it.

My thinking now... Game ideas are like concept art, and when building a game, the design ideas are like the wrapper of the feeling you're after. The game idea is not about the mechanics but about containing, deep inside, the secret of what the game is really trying to satisfy. Naked purpose is difficult and uncomfortable for people to convey, if not impossible. Easier to express something so subtle through a piece of art, a higher-level idea. Through a medium. wow

I really need to summarize this later on.
Title: Re: The Nature of Order // Book Two // The Process of Creating Life
Post by: droqen on January 15, 2023, 10:59:14 PM
Oh and the dude literally brings up painting and wholeness and while I wrote "I want to experience a game like I experience a painting, all at once (https://twitter.com/droqen/status/1570645606997327874)" I of course want to make games like that too...

It's not a perfect bridge but there is an echo. The idea of comparing a painter's process to the process of building an entire building is similar in audacity. The painting is made step by step, without much of a clear idea of how it will turn out (or so he says, anyway). If we can do this with a building, surely we can also do it with something as simple as a game.
Title: Re: The Nature of Order // Book Two // The Process of Creating Life
Post by: droqen on January 16, 2023, 05:52:15 PM
CHAPTER NINE
THE WHOLE
EACH STEP IS ALWAYS HELPING TO ENHANCE THE WHOLE

I have this feeling that I struggle to hold many small parts in my mind at once, much easier for me to hold one large object in my mind. Moreover, I think other people are . . . different? More capable of handling, or more comfortable with, or more preferring, a large body of little pieces? I wonder what it is -- whether rooted in choice, or nature.

In this chapter Alexander highlights difficulties of focusing on the whole. He suggests that we all have "some negative voice . . . discouraging us from really and truly making every process structure-preserving o the larger whole. This is a kind of mental inhibition (something fuelled by ego, sometimes by greed) which continually makes us focus on the local . . ." and forget to focus on the whole.

He says FORGET as if we all know that focusing on the whole is right, and that anything else is a misstep. I am inclined, strongly, to agree, but I also wonder about this idea of a difference in mentality. Is it a difference in ability? Do people's brains allow them to picture wholes and parts better or worse than each other? What he really says is that we "forget that it is our responsibility, at every turn, to heal and make more whole, the structure of the world." As I said: I am inclined, strongly, to agree, but all I can say for sure is that this is certainly my feeling -- that this is my philosophy or very close to it, and to forget that is a genuine forgetting. A misstep.

Then comes "6 / AT EACH STEP DECIDE ONLY WHAT YOU KNOW WITH CERTAINTY" (p 257) which comes from combination of this step and the previous (i.e. THE WHOLE + STEP-BY-STEP ADAPTATIONS): "Each step is, in a sense, a return to the whole and a starting over with a "first step."" One should not, then, jump at the first idea that presents itself... but consider many ideas and "reject most of them. If we do accept one, we should accept it, reluctantly, only when we finally encounter something for which no good reason presents itself to reject it, which appears genuinely wonderful to us, and which demonstrably makes the feeling of the whole become more profound."

Accept only perfection. Alexander says "If we do accept one"! This implies that we may not accept any of them. I have written in Paradise that I would like to aspire to ". . . perfect games, or perfect art. It's not that a perfect work has no flaws; however, when I produce such a thing, I feel as though I need to make no excuses for what it is, and it makes no excuses for itself." Perhaps Alexander is here to give me another piece of this particular puzzle; a perfect work can have no flaws if we think about each and every decision made in the pursuit of its birth as a thing which can be right or wrong. A perfect thing has unfolded perfectly: without mistakes. Perfection is back on the table, baby.
Title: Re: The Nature of Order // Book Two // The Process of Creating Life
Post by: droqen on January 16, 2023, 08:08:13 PM
"The process starts with a vision of a possible whole that comes out of the circumstances, that is felt as something which grows out of the form of the world.

Every step is made with he idea that the feeling of this very large whole is being made deeper, more intense.

Even if it is a only a tiny step, this is still the guiding rule." (p.266, end of chapter)
Title: Re: The Nature of Order // Book Two // The Process of Creating Life
Post by: droqen on January 16, 2023, 08:08:48 PM
CHAPTER TEN
ALWAYS MAKING CENTERS
SO THAT EVERY CENTER IS SHAPED BY THE NEXT STEP IN THE DIFFERENTIATION

This chapter contains a remarkable step-by-step breakdown of a process, which I have seen Alexander do before in his books. (P277-278)

Aside from this, we have a chapter which I can see building on top of the previous two chapters. Making a center is a step, and making a center should enhance the whole. The nature of the idea of centers is that they can be taken in steps (I have added one center), and that they enhance the whole -- becaus a center is nothing but a relationship to the whole:

P. 268

Centers are not atomic, and are not in any normal sense building blocks. . . . centers are above all, labile, they are foci of wholeness, they are not things, but regions, qualities, focal points of centeredness which . . . extend the whole while making that wholeness benefit, while they are fused into the wholeness, as they go forward.

//

Throughout this chapter there is a motif of playfulness and effortlessness. ". . . because it is so simple, yet creates new structure without effort, it is intensely interesting." "almost automatic." "intellectual knowledge is far removed from the practical awakening that there really is nothing else going on in the process which creates life . . ."

And there is one last thing that I thought I'd capture. Alexander criticizes James Stirling's Berlin Library for centers which do not connect or work together, but in part blames this on the fact that they are "quite literally, cut and pasted from history books. One is the stoa. . . . The half circle is like a Greek theatre or arena. . . . [The] plan is an almost perfect replica of an Armenian or Byzantine church." This made me think about using game mechanics from other games... they are borrowed centers without life. They are based on "images" rather than unfolding in due time from a center, a wholeness, a singleness.

They don't have the same RELATIONSHIPS; a center is not a thing, it is a focus.
Title: Re: The Nature of Order // Book Two // The Process of Creating Life
Post by: droqen on January 19, 2023, 06:20:10 PM
CHAPTER ELEVEN
THE SEQUENCE OF UNFOLDING

GENERATIVE SEQUENCES ARE THE KEY TO
THE SUCCESS OF LIVING PROCESS
WHENEVER COMPLEX STRUCTURE
IS BEING FORMED

This chapter is talking about that one part of The Timeless Way of Building where Christopher Alexander gives a list of patterns and describes his process of mentally building a house by following those patterns. . . Again this chapter merges with all previous chapters to form an even stronger picture. These patterns are step-by-step adaptations, but now Alexander says the order of the steps matters. These patterns are always creating centers. These patterns start from the whole and always work at it through differentiation.

A series of patterns or a 'pattern sentence' is named here a 'generative sequence'.
~ SYNAPSE: Generative Sequence of Patterns (https://newforum.droqen.com/index.php?msg=2696)

I haven't read the middle of the chapter yet and I'm saving it for later, and you'll understand why when I copy this quote:

P. 302-303

     The following twenty-four steps give the generative sequence for a traditional Japanese tea house. To understand the extraordinary power (and effectiveness) of this sequence you should, if possible, ask someone to read it to you while you sit with your eyes closed, and allow a vision of a tea house to form in your mind. . . . After you have heard all 24 statements, with a bit of luck you will have a complete vision of a teahouse in your mind. The process is almost effortless.
     Please, if possible, do ask someone to read this to you, now. And please do close your eyes while you are listening, so that the images can form freely in your mind (as they cannot if you merely sit here and read the words yourself).

// He asks so nicely. I must comply.
Title: Re: The Nature of Order // Book Two // The Process of Creating Life
Post by: droqen on January 19, 2023, 07:47:28 PM
I have plans to meet a friend and make a new friend tomorrow and I'm going to try and make them do the teahouse thing with me. In the meantime, the remainder of chapter eleven... is incredible... just mind bogglingly inspiring. I have never before now felt any level of confidence in my ability to convey how I approach level design, or design in general. The way Alexander says it, it is so obviously simple. It is always just a series of steps... Is there even anything I can quote here? I will quote a piece of step 9 of the "generative sequence for apartment buildings in Pasadena", "an old town with a nice history recently ruined by an influx of ugly multi-family apartment buildings" which leapt out at me in particular as I read it, but please remember this is one part of one step of eleven. It may mean nothing on its own.

P. 311

Cut up the [overall building volume which has been established in previous steps] into apartments in such a way as to define the best and most pleasant apartments. There should be no attempt to make apartments of a standard shape. Rather, each apartment should take a shape which is appropriate to its unique position in the building volume and with respect to daylight, access to outdoors, and entrances. The living room or main room of the apartment should have a garden view if possible.
Title: Re: The Nature of Order // Book Two // The Process of Creating Life
Post by: droqen on January 19, 2023, 07:49:53 PM
P. 317

Although the generative sequence itself is fixed (and needs to be fixed in order to embody the dictates of the fundamental process), the variety this sequence generates, when interacting with a variety of contexts, is very great indeed --- indeed, it is essentially infinite.[8]

[8] . . . My friend Dan Solomon, the San Francisco architect with whom I was joint-venturing the creation of the zoning ordinance, came to me and told me that he felt the generative sequence was an offense against architects, that it abrogated the individual freedom of expression of any self-respecting architect who might wish to apply for a building permit in Pasadena, and that he could not agree with the idea that the ordinance would contain the sequence as a major component. . . . It is significant, I think, that the fundamental rightness of generative sequences, as a source of life in buildings, was so deeply misperceived by a fellow-architect, who felt it to be a denial of freedom. It was, of course, only a denial of the freedom to do something willful and "creative" in the name of architecture: just the very aspect of architecture which caused so much damage in the 20th century. But the generative sequences are the origin of real freedom in the creative process --- if that freedom is aimed at creating living structure.

P. 322

The single most important thing that happens during the process of making anything, is the ever watchful task of getting the next bit of sequence right and modifying it as we go along. Paying attention to what has to be done next, and getting this right. . . The more one understands the key role which sequence plays in the unfolding process, the more it becomes clear that the process of design and the process of construction are inseparable.
Title: Re: The Nature of Order // Book Two // The Process of Creating Life
Post by: droqen on January 19, 2023, 07:53:57 PM
CHAPTER TWELVE
EVERY PART UNIQUE

A PROCESS SO
FINELY TUNED TO CIRCUMSTANCE
THAT EVERY PART BECOMES UNIQUE
Title: Re: The Nature of Order // Book Two // The Process of Creating Life
Post by: droqen on January 19, 2023, 08:09:40 PM
P. 324, "GEOMETRY: UNIQUENESS, REGULARITY, DIFFERENTIATION"

     During the onrush of the late 20th century, love of the unique --- at least in places and things --- sometimes appeared almost quaint, a desperate search for humanity among the inhumanity of dull repetition, stereotypes, and nearly identical McDonald's shops and Japanese cars. Uniqueness, a lost quality, still existing only in a few fishing villages, was regrettably now kept only for vacations. Daily life itself was marked by replicas, by sterile repetition, by the loss of uniqueness. Video-tapes of films, identical cars, bags, packages, refrigerators, houses, windows, streets, created a sense of a modular world in which parts were not unique. We were informed, solemnly, by the architectural theorists of that century, that modularity was an inevitable aspect of production, part of the march of progress, and that it would lead us to the triumphs of technology.
Title: Re: The Nature of Order // Book Two // The Process of Creating Life
Post by: droqen on January 23, 2023, 04:20:12 AM
I stopped reading for a few days, troubled. How do I feel about uniqueness? I like it of course, but how does it come to terms with this passage from my recent letterclub post (https://letterclub.games/2023/01/13/living-games/)?

"Modern values suggest common feelings are not that important, and rather it is individuality that has an overriding importance. "It's not for everyone." "There's no accounting for taste." "Your difference is what makes you beautiful." And so on. // I point this out because this [common] feeling of life cannot be fully understood without first acknowledging that underlying feeling which it contradicts."

The more I read over this though the more I understand that it is not in conflict... still I'm left a bit unsettled. Did I really sound so anti-uniqueness? It's not that I don't value, or that I undervalue, the unique... but that I value the common, too. The ayy lmao (https://twitter.com/visakanv/status/1443196315970670598) between 🌀 uniqueness is worthless, and 🐉 everyone is unique in every way or else
Title: Re: The Nature of Order // Book Two // The Process of Creating Life
Post by: droqen on January 23, 2023, 04:32:08 AM
P. 325

During the 20th century, our ideas about repetition and uniqueness were distorted. . .

First, by a conviction that it was inevitable that a modern industrial process could only make exact replicas, if it was to be efficient, via mass-production. . . . it was an aesthetic idea, a philosophical ideal, an intellectual extension of the ideas of mechanism [and the 20th century mechanistic view].

Second, our concept of repetition was distorted by a conviction about atoms and fundamental particles, which seemed to provide a basis for thinking that the world is, in its essence, modular. . . . At one time physicists believed that atoms --- then thought to be the ultimate constituents of matter --- were the modular units from which everything was made. Later it was thought that electrons, neutrons, protons were the identical modular units . . . Later still, quarks and strings . . .

P. 325 - 326

. . . the intellectual bias of the century was often mixed with the philosophical (and practical) dream of a small number of components which could be combined in infinite richness of arrangement to create beautiful things. . . . [but if] wholeness as it is expressed in Book 1 turns out to be correct, and if the unfolding of wholeness described in this book turns out to be fundamental, then one must come to expect that each atom and each particle will be different according to its context, and that there are no ultimate identical constituents of matter at any scale.
Title: Re: The Nature of Order // Book Two // The Process of Creating Life
Post by: droqen on January 23, 2023, 04:34:17 AM
P. 337

Just make it nice at every spot.

P. 340

If we concentrate on understanding by what process each part must become itself --- in just the right way which emerges from its position in the whole --- it will be tied to the whole, harmonious with the whole, integrated with the whole, yet unique and particular according to just the unique conditions which occur in that part of the whole. This will give us the living process, and our understanding of it, too, in its entirety.

Title: Re: The Nature of Order // Book Two // The Process of Creating Life
Post by: droqen on January 23, 2023, 04:41:13 AM
The idea as far as I am able to understand and express it for myself is that there is a uniqueness which arises from following common patterns. A common process, that is, a non-unique process, so long as the process pays attention to context or has "respect for what exists" (the name of the 6th and final section of this chapter), produces unique results constantly and infinitely.

Put another way, space is already unique. . . every spot of space is unique in its relationships to other spots of space. Every person is unique too, in this way as well as many different ways.

Uniqueness does not take effort. Uniqueness is already present in every moment and every part of every life. We can appear to produce unique results by paying very close attention to what already exists.

It is this common uniqueness which I struggled with, above. Uniqueness not as a struggle to create, but as a quiet noticing. Notice that latent uniqueness and strengthen it; respect it; step-by-step adapt to it; create new centers to do so; unfolding in sequence, one will discover that every part is unique.
Title: Re: The Nature of Order // Book Two // The Process of Creating Life
Post by: droqen on January 23, 2023, 04:41:55 AM
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
PATTERNS

GENERIC RULES FOR MAKING CENTERS
OR
''MAKING LIFE ENJOYABLE''
Title: Re: The Nature of Order // Book Two // The Process of Creating Life
Post by: droqen on January 23, 2023, 04:51:18 AM
This chapter will prove useful for understanding game design -- not all game design but game design in context.

P. 342
In any sane process which is able to make living structure . . . giving proper attention to the functional basis . . . to what people need, and want, and desire, in order to make themselves comfortable . . .

P. 343
When we begin a . . . project, our clues about what should be built, what should be done next, must come not only from the land but from society, too, and from the culture where this is being done. We are faced with the empty canvas, and we puzzle about what to do.

P. 343 - 344
It is the human family which makes us build a house, it is the concept of transportation and community which makes us seek roads and sidewalks; it is the way that people are in their custom and behaviour, which provides the all-important physical subtleties. . . . a true unfolding process must be rooted, always, in the whole, in the cultural and human whole and the land and the ecological and natural whole and the physical wholeness [and the technological, digital wholeness and the genre tropes and and and...] of that place which forms the context of our work.
Title: Re: The Nature of Order // Book Two // The Process of Creating Life
Post by: droqen on January 23, 2023, 04:53:07 AM
When we begin a project, we are faced with the empty canvas, and we puzzle about what to do. Our clues about what should be built, what should be done next, must come from the context. In any sane process which is able to make living structure for people, we must give proper attention to what people need and want and desire to make themselves comfortable.
Title: Re: The Nature of Order // Book Two // The Process of Creating Life
Post by: droqen on January 23, 2023, 05:21:09 AM
Suddenly noticing similarities between this 'unfolding' and Wolfram's "Beautiful . . . Fundamental Theory of Physics" (https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2020/04/finally-we-may-have-a-path-to-the-fundamental-theory-of-physics-and-its-beautiful/)
Title: Re: The Nature of Order // Book Two // The Process of Creating Life
Post by: droqen on January 23, 2023, 09:16:00 AM
I've had this question lingering in the back of my mind: Why is Christopher Alexander not more well-known as an architect? Of course his ideas might just be wrong, but this passage made me think that part of the problem is his bedside manner. His way of describing his approach and involving others in the process was blunt, cut to the point in a way that people do not find comfortable. I can relate.

P. 355

[My clients] quickly realized that this discussion was . . . a discussion about [their] whole way of life. . . . Both of them felt that their future . . . was on the line. The discussion of spaces, and centers, itself harmless, but profoundly disturbing in its implications for family life, for the relation of man to woman, and much more, created tremendous anxiety. We had to stop talking for a while.
Title: Re: The Nature of Order // Book Two // The Process of Creating Life
Post by: droqen on January 23, 2023, 06:13:29 PM
I have been trying to read each chapter without succumbing to the desire to copy every single quote that grabs me, but this chapter is too much. It's too much. I want to capture the whole idea of the chapter, not every little bit, but I fear . . . what if I miss the trees for the forest? What if I forget every little gem? I think it helps to sit down with the chapter and read it all in one sitting. If I break it up into little pieces, half paying attention and half not, then the wholeness escapes me more easily. Then it helps to grab every quote I can.

I am in that position now, distracted; so I will grab the quotes.

P. 366
The essential centers are those whose presence is already latent in the field . . . the essence of the real life which is going on.
. . . in a period of history where people like to stress the arbitrariness of all things, such an idea may seem doubtful or impossible to accept. But the crux of all life is, nevertheless, the difference between recognizing the essential thing and separating it from the trivial thing.

//

Quote from: Ian BogostBy holding everything at a distance, we trap ourselves within our imperfect minds. Irony doesn't protect us; it only makes things worse.
--Play Anything (http://newforum.droqen.com/index.php?topic=25.msg57#msg57)

Bogost suggests that play is to see a thing for what it is, to accept it. The contrast is irony, which is to 'hold at a distance.' There is a mirror here . . . to play is to pay attention to the essential thing, irony is to hold it at arm's length and pay attention instead to a trivial thing, to the wrapper, to something else. Hmm
Title: Re: The Nature of Order // Book Two // The Process of Creating Life
Post by: droqen on January 23, 2023, 06:18:35 PM
P. 360, "ESSENTIAL CENTERS NOT GIMMICKS"
. . . examples of developer architecture and postmodern "image" architecture, which put the accent on image, not on the essentials. . . . the accent is on the box, not the flowers. . . . In the fancy staircase balustrade, all the emphasis is on the impression which the balustrade will make --- not on the problem of holding on. . . . image-conscious, and sterile. . . phony.
-----
In the Italian case, the rough plastered trough for flowers is unobtrusive, what matters is the flowers. The flowers are intense, they are at just the right height to see them, smell them, experience them. . . . In the economical iron railing, which comes from an 11th-century palace, the essential thing is the beauty of the steps, and getting upstairs to the door. . . . simple, often cheap, and goes to the guts of the situation in a way that matters. . . real . . . They go to the heart of the structure that is already there, they summarize and encapsulate the essence of the real life that is going on in people's hearts.
Title: Re: The Nature of Order // Book Two // The Process of Creating Life
Post by: droqen on January 23, 2023, 06:28:58 PM
P. 350 - 351
I found that I could imagine the Peruvians' feelings best just by being one of them. . . . if I looked at life from the point of view of being one of them, my own feelings, and my own knowledge of what had to be, was more reliable than anything else of what was needed for a Peruvian family. . . . I barely needed to ask any questions . . . I could feel it, all of it, but I could feel it only by being one of them. I, myself . . . didn't have a house like that, and I don't want a house like that --- because for me, in Berkeley, with my family, it would not have made sense . . . But as a member of that Peruvian family, in the Peruvian culture, in the context of that family which I was a part of, it did make sense. It was natural, necessary, and I could feel its necessity, as part of me.

P. 347 - 348
Imagine a chair in a room. As an experiment, I get a big ball of scrap iron, on a rope, and hang it so that the scrap iron is hovering near the seat of the chair. . . . When the chair stands by itself, there is one set of most salient centers in space. The chair in its wholeness is then defined by this system of salient centers. When I bring the scrap iron towards the chair, the wholeness changes. . . . if I view "the" chair as defined by its wholeness, the chair itself has changed. . . . It does not merely seem different, or have a different human picture of it. It is different. Mathematically, it is a different thing.

//

It is the quotes around "the" that gets me on board here. What does it mean to refer to the chair, "the" chair? Are two instances of the same mass-produced chair "the" same chair? What if we move one out of the room and put the other right in its place, an instance of the same design in the same spot in the same room? If we look at Christopher Alexander as the chair, he may not be "the" Christopher Alexander when placed in a different context . . . I certainly feel different in a new context. What does it mean to "be" myself? (See picture of the self (https://newforum.droqen.com/index.php?topic=415.0))
Title: Re: The Nature of Order // Book Two // The Process of Creating Life
Post by: droqen on January 23, 2023, 06:40:01 PM
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
DEEP FEELING

THE AIM OF EVERY LIVING PROCESS IS,
AT EACH STEP, TO INCREASE
THE DEEP FEELING OF THE WHOLE

~ linked from Ideas are vessels for Feeling (http://newforum.droqen.com/index.php?topic=418.msg1918#msg1918)
Title: Re: The Nature of Order // Book Two // The Process of Creating Life
Post by: droqen on January 24, 2023, 02:27:11 PM
"We come now, to the most important and most profound aspect of living process. I believe it is the deepest issue in this book." (370)

"During the early part of the 20th century there was a school of thought where a great deal was said about artists expressing their feelings, as if . . . the feeling goes from the artist into the work while the work is being made. . . . What matters is that the building — the room, the canyon, the painting, the ornament, the garden — as they are created, send profound feeling back towards us." (371-372)

Diagrams, displayed side by side (372)

ART AS EXPRESSION
 THIS IS NOT VERY INTERESTING
artist — puts feeling —> into work
Not this

FEELING IN THE WORK OF ART
THIS IS ESSENTIAL AND IMPORTANT
the work — generates feeling —> in me
This is what must be happening

". . . as we move forward, before we take an action, we can [from time to time] grasp the latent structure as an emotional substance, we may feel it as a vision — a dimly held feeling which describes where we are going, but is not yet concrete, in physical and geometrical terms. . . . we can sense, ahead of time, the quality of the completed whole . . . The final target, then, has the feeling which we anticipated much earlier, but often has an unexpected, unfamiliar geometry." (372)

~See Don Potts Sculpture Lecture (http://newforum.droqen.com/index.php?topic=417.msg1909#msg1909)
~Linked from Handmade Pixels, outro post (http://newforum.droqen.com/index.php?topic=413.msg1925#msg1925)
SYNAPSE~ Process for intensifying the feeling that is generated. (https://newforum.droqen.com/index.php?msg=2845)
Title: Re: The Nature of Order // Book Two // The Process of Creating Life
Post by: droqen on January 24, 2023, 05:49:02 PM
". . . as the geometry develops, the feeling is keep intact, but becomes more and more solid — provided we do not depart from the feeling that existed in us at the beginning." (372)

". . . it can be described as a mathematical structure, [but] it is too complex to take in by purely analytical means. In order to get the whole, to grasp it, one must feel it. Its wholeness can be felt. Using our own feeling as a way of grasping the whole, we can put ourselves in a receptive mode in which we grasp, and respond to, the existing wholeness . . . This is not an emotional move away from precision. It is, rather, a move towards precision." (372 - 373)

Ah, here I have a nitpick. I would say that it is more importantly a move towards accuracy; feeling is more vague, like saying 12 x 10^5 instead of 1,200,000... the latter has more precision, but it is WRONG precision, given too early. Feeling is more vague but correctly vague, and allows us to wait until the appropriate time to increase our accuracy. It is the concrete form that is more precise. But the feeling is more accurate, or rather, less inaccurate, than non-concrete analysis.
Title: Re: The Nature of Order // Book Two // The Process of Creating Life
Post by: droqen on January 25, 2023, 07:22:46 AM
Alexander writes of examples in which focusing on life (and deep feeling) is more important than the details.

- One cannot create a fishpond only by knowledge of fish, ecology, etc. It is important to have a vision of "the slow movement of the fish, the edge, the light on the water, the kinds of things that may  be present at the edge . . . the kind of soft and subtle feeling of life which such a fishpond requires."

- A colleague or student working on a house for a client, thinking 'There are too many stairs, for the old people to climb' and 'It is bad that you have to go through the rain to get to the bedroom'...

- Similarly on the Eishin campus, teachers arguing, "How can you make a school where you can't go from one classroom to another without getting wet?" // It seems that the discussion actually was brought down to this level for a little while, alexander responding "Rain is part of life", but ultimately it was this appeal to process, and the mechanics followed:

"We argued and argued. Finally I reminded them that it had been their own choice to make classrooms separate [which] brought with it a second reality --- that the classroom buildings really would be separate . . . and that one would then have to go out into the rain . . ." (394-395)

"A year after the buildings were finished, I asked them if they minded getting wet between classes. They laughed. "We like it," they said. "We have umbrellas. Or we run. We feel more alive."" (395)

Looking at this I think any inconvenience can be forgiven, can even be fully embraced, if it really strengthens the whole. It is necessary and we see that it is necessary.
Title: Re: The Nature of Order // Book Two // The Process of Creating Life
Post by: droqen on January 25, 2023, 07:45:59 AM
On page 373 there is a box containing seven "different ways that feeling and living process are connected" which I will summarize even more briefly.

1. We grasp wholeness (best) by feeling it
2. We can feel the next latent wholeness - where it should go next, how it should unfold
3. A thing, given life, must induce deep feeling in people
4. We can carry feeling to some dim extent without the thing-which-is-to-induce-it
5. Feeling comes from the wholeness of the thing, not from us
6. A thing, given life, may be said to have feeling, not merely induce it
7. Every wholeness has a latent wholeness, which we experience through feeling

Many of these are said much more eloquently but here I am simplifying it unbeautifully. Boiled down like this, reduced, it is apparent to me that there is a core idea simply surrounded by a basic graph of nodes, often explicitly connected both ways as if those are separate points.

1. A thing has a wholeness, and every wholeness furthermore has, or includes, a latent wholeness: future states which may arise from structure-preserving transformations.

2. We can feel all of this: the wholeness, the latent future wholeness, and so on. Everyone can, and automatically does, feel all of this. Sometimes we use the feeling to see how to develop a thing further. Sometimes the feeling is simply felt, making us feel good or bad or something else.

3. Feeling does not belong to either the one who feels or the felt artifact; semantically, we may say that we have the feeling, or that the object has the feeling, but the reality is that the feeling exists --- only --- in our intersection, in the wholeness of experiencer and experienced. More generously we may be forgiven for saying, as it is easier, that "I feel" and also that "The thing has feeling" are both equally correct (in that they are both strictly incorrect).

 . . . but that's a little long. Can I simplify that?

1. We can feel the wholeness of any part of the world, a wholeness which includes every part of it, as well as latent wholenesses, future states, things that it might become, or could become, in a way that preserves structure. These latent wholenesses, or this latent structure, is not quite defined yet, but we can feel it.

2. Feeling belongs to both us and to the thing which provokes the feeling. It is equally correct to say that it is our feeling and that we feel it, or to say that it is the world's feeling and that it induces the feeling in us --- which is to say that both are equally incorrect. The feeling belongs to the overlap between experiencer and experienced. Without either one, there is no feeling. However, it is easier to simply allow that both individual ownerships are valid enough, and that they are equally valid.

3. We can remember feeling, dimly. Although the feeling is not ours to have alone, we can remember a feeling once it has been felt. We can hold onto feeling, we can also play with feeling, imagine feeling. We can carry this dim memory with us for long enough, for a very long time, and this ability allows us to pursue it.
Title: Re: The Nature of Order // Book Two // The Process of Creating Life
Post by: droqen on January 25, 2023, 07:46:25 AM
That was a good chapter. I think that's quite enough.
Title: Re: The Nature of Order // Book Two // The Process of Creating Life
Post by: droqen on January 25, 2023, 07:46:52 AM
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
EMERGENCE OF
FORMAL GEOMETRY

APPEARANCE, FINALLY, OF COHERENT FORM
Title: Re: The Nature of Order // Book Two // The Process of Creating Life
Post by: droqen on January 29, 2023, 07:51:40 PM
Noooo I love this chapter. I thought I would fall out with it, resist it, so I left it awhile. But here... I see that it is a chapter about how the form asserts itself.

P. 407
. . . we need to introduce this almost alien, slightly rigid, formal order of the built nature of a building, into the soft landscape of surrounding forms [and feelings.] . . . It [like any form] has its own laws. . . its regularity may seem -- and sometimes must actually be -- brutal in a certain sense, because it comes from itself.
     By that I mean that it comes from the need for internal geometric coherence of the building, not the surroundings. Of course, as we introduce this formal geometry, work it, care for it, we do our best to make it harmonious, we tame it, we introduce necessary irregularities to make it fit the surroundings as well as possible. We fit it to the terrain, the idiosyncrasies of street and site and neighbouring volume.

//

This is perhaps my favourite part of pixel art and writing poetry, even sometimes of making games - marrying the necessary formal geometry of whatever form itself to my deep feeling's "soft landscape". The process is a joy and births such surprising solutions and results.
Title: Re: The Nature of Order // Book Two // The Process of Creating Life
Post by: droqen on January 29, 2023, 07:54:11 PM
P. 407

No matter how hard we work to make the building in harmony . . . this step is undeniably a brutal act, frightening for an artist who has sensibility for the beauty and softness of the land and of what others have built before him. Yet it is from this moment of brutality, that real order must come. The moment cannot be avoided.
Title: Re: The Nature of Order // Book Two // The Process of Creating Life
Post by: droqen on January 29, 2023, 08:05:30 PM
I WAS NOT EXPECTING THIS. Here we have a chapter so explicitly about architectural forms and Alexander is talking about aligning things to a grid, his process for doing so, and IT IS SO RELEVANT TO MY PRACTICE OF PIXEL ART. WHATTHEFUCK.

On pages 408-409 are laid out feeling-y sketches that become more and more gridlike, until the final image is an actual full floor plan.

(There is an "aperiodic" or "tartan-like" grid, meaning a grid where the rows and columns are not identical in size but they do all meet at right angles.)

It is an inspiration to me directly to see these sketches which takes space roughly felt, to space perfectly grid-aligned. Perfectly structural. Perfect order.
Title: Re: The Nature of Order // Book Two // The Process of Creating Life
Post by: droqen on January 29, 2023, 08:07:29 PM
I love love love organically-yet-orderly nestled rectangles. Seriously. I had been thinking of how to get away from that but this has deeply rekindled that passion. I love right angles given life.

~ Feeling (http://newforum.droqen.com/index.php?topic=427.0)
Title: Re: The Nature of Order // Book Two // The Process of Creating Life
Post by: droqen on January 30, 2023, 02:19:21 PM
P. 430

I believe the language of this chapter, pretty much as I have written it, applies . . . also to the emergence of any coherent whole, in almost any medium.

~ see also external link to The Nature of Poetic Order (http://www.natureoforder.com/library/nature-of-poetic-order.pdf)
Title: Re: The Nature of Order // Book Two // The Process of Creating Life
Post by: droqen on January 30, 2023, 02:19:53 PM
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
FORM LANGUAGE AND STYLE

HOW CAN HUMAN BEINGS IMPLEMENT
A GEOMETRICAL DIFFERENTIATING PROCESS
SUCCESSFULLY?
Title: Re: The Nature of Order // Book Two // The Process of Creating Life
Post by: droqen on January 31, 2023, 07:16:38 PM
Now this is a difficult chapter.
Title: Re: The Nature of Order // Book Two // The Process of Creating Life
Post by: droqen on January 31, 2023, 07:25:06 PM
At first chapter sixteen appeared to be discussing embracing formal limitations, or at least the idea of being aware of them.

"At any given time in our history, we are able to create only what can be "made" from the schemata which we already have in our form-language. . . . even with the best will in the world, we shall only be able to reproduce versions and combinations of what can be "reached" by that form language." (433)

I need to go back to Alexander's definition -- so what is a form language . . . ? Did I misunderstand?

". . . we do not start each new design from scratch. Somehow, we learn, over years, the ingredients that make a building good. . . . more important than anything, in our work, is the combinatory system we grow in our own minds, the form language we use to speak the words that come out as buildings
     And what format must this form language have? It is the box of tricks, the elements, rules, ways of making roofs, edges, windows, steps, the ceiling of a room. . . . The shape of the edge where the building meets the sky. The ways . . . [by which a work] can be built, in our time, by means we understand, control, and can execute for not impossible amounts of money." (432)

I suppose the disconnect is that Alexander describes past form languages as different from, not lesser than, the present form language. If this is true it is painful to accept but I suppose it must be true. There are things we can no longer do today, things that are more expensive and more painful to do today than they were in the past.

"the kind of geometry which is needed for living structure, and which must emanate from proper use of any living proces, is not necessarily attainable within the combinations of today's form-language. There are reasons to believe that the form languages of traditional societies helped people to work in living process. . ." (433)
Title: Re: The Nature of Order // Book Two // The Process of Creating Life
Post by: droqen on January 31, 2023, 07:26:14 PM
Alexander plainly states that our form language may not be sufficient and calls for us to develop new kinds.

Yes, I am here for this.
Title: Re: The Nature of Order // Book Two // The Process of Creating Life
Post by: droqen on January 31, 2023, 07:27:36 PM
"What kinds of new form language might help us achieve this might let us create simple and unconscious, unfolded form . . . ?" (439)

Tools that are easy, comfortable, happy to use, intuitive human tools, unconscious tools? Tools like fingerpainting? Tools like pixel art?
Title: Re: The Nature of Order // Book Two // The Process of Creating Life
Post by: droqen on January 31, 2023, 07:44:56 PM
(Quotes from P. 440)

In looking at the "traditional huts of New Caledonia" Alexander identifies that their "shape is imperfect" and their "symmetries are imperfect. They are not gross asymmetries, but imperfect symmetries." The roughness here is a result of an interaction with "some unpredictable reality."

I love this stuff . . . when I study game design, when I look at games, I enjoy peering into the cracks to determine what 'unpredictable reality' lead to some given development turning out the way it did. I have written in Paradise about my ongoing struggle with perfection, and what I like here is this feeling of imperfect perfection. Try . . . try to accomplish something perfectly realized, try to accomplish something impossible, but do it in a relaxed way, in a way that responds to the everyday texture of doing the work.

In Alexander's architecture, this is mostly the physical reality of physics, the pre-existing beauty of the land.

In something like poetry, we have the limitations of language at least, and many more things as well (I am not a great poet, just a minor one from time to time).

In game design . . . Around the time of the assembling of Issue 1 of Paradise Zine (https://paradise-collab.itch.io/paradise-zine-1), although the phrase does not appear in the zine itself, I remember many Paradisean conversations about 'good game design' and our non-belief in it . . . Recently I have been thinking about good game design and how it does exist, how there really are good or best practices. Patterns? Forms? I don't know. But these are the things I ought to be relaxed about, the natural shapes of the land; the landscape of games is the culture of games, is players' expectations of what games are.

It is impossible to make a perfect game; I could eschew all forms of player desires and quality-of-life and all these things. I could strive to perfectly realize a vision and ignore the player.

But perhaps the real design is having that perfect vision, striving always for it, and yet also doing so in a relaxed way which responds, always, to the landscape. A perfect vision roughed by the landscape of expectations, of player promises, of 'good game design'. Not the good game design you'd read in a textbook, but the good game design that becomes obvious after decades of designing and playing games. The good game design that one must expend more and more effort in order to reject. The good game design that adheres to common feeling.

The good game design that feels good.

Hmm.

"Good feeling."

One of the fifteen properties from Book 1 is "good shape," and I think I can understand it better, in the context of game design, when I transform it into "good feeling." What did that book have to say about it? I didn't write it down! But I do have a quote from this book, Post #35:

QuoteExaggerate the characteristics of an existing center or system of centers.

But in Book 1 I am sure Alexander wrote that he could not exactly describe it. Good shape is something you feel. You take something that has some shape (some feeling) and exaggerate its characteristics. Not too much. It still has to have the same shape (the same feeling), just a little bit more. Taken to a comfortable maximum. A local maximum.

~ #35, on GOOD SHAPE (http://newforum.droqen.com/index.php?topic=391.msg1720#msg1720)
Title: Re: The Nature of Order // Book Two // The Process of Creating Life
Post by: droqen on January 31, 2023, 07:46:28 PM
One of the fifteen properties of a living game is "Good feeling". Hmm.
Title: Re: The Nature of Order // Book Two // The Process of Creating Life
Post by: droqen on January 31, 2023, 07:48:55 PM
These properties are with regard to . . . "how centers work together to produce life". I am not sure how, or if, good shape is about working together with other centers, but at least I can remember that a center must have "good shape." In a game which is to be a living game, one ought to pay attention to the "good shape" of its centers, or I might say the "good feeling" of its centers.

Well, I do like it. The feeling, the deep feeling, that can be bad --- unpleasant, painful, frustrating, anything.

But the centers must have good feeling.
Title: Re: The Nature of Order // Book Two // The Process of Creating Life
Post by: droqen on January 31, 2023, 08:06:47 PM
Feelings of play. The thought occurred to me -- what feelings are the deep feelings of a building? The feelings of a place. You think about how a place feels and then you enhance that feeling, respect it, grow out of it . . .

So, then, the feelings (the 'correct' feelings?) which a 'living' game ought to grow out of . . . those are feelings of play.

~ Feelings of Play (http://newforum.droqen.com/index.php?topic=428.new#new), stickied post of the new Feelings of Play subforum contained within the 'Feelings' subforum.
Title: Re: The Nature of Order // Book Two // The Process of Creating Life
Post by: droqen on February 01, 2023, 06:00:28 AM
P. 442

. . . Noam Chomsky . . . coined the phrase transformational grammar. [He, and Emil Post, a mathematician giving a precise formal definition of "language", both had ideas where] the basic idea was this: a string-creating system was defined; the starting point was usually a null sentence consisting of a single character, or word, or the null string. The language provided a series of rules which allowed certain kinds of transformations which would elaborate a given string, and turn it into another string which was allowed (hence the term transformational grammar). Typical allowed transformations might include substitution, inversion, concatenation, etc.
     The rules of the language were then these transformations. . . . You can see how similar this is to the idea of differentiation as defined in chapter 7.
Title: Re: The Nature of Order // Book Two // The Process of Creating Life
Post by: droqen on February 01, 2023, 06:06:32 AM
P. 449-450
. . . the accompanying sketches [of imaginary but possible building projects] should be taken rather literally. I do not mean them as rough drawings of a more pristine reality. Instead, I mean that their actual ROUGHNESS, and the visible soft morphological character they have because of this roughness, are of the essence of the fact that they are living. . . . to be truly living structure, it must actually be built with this character as I have shown it

//

When I think about . . . structure-preserving transformations, I think about the strong sense of life that I do get from a sketch that I feel is almost always lost in a final image. What is it about a finished thing, a polished thing, that is so lifeless? I have almost always felt this way, about most things, and it's often frustrated me --- I've felt like I'm seeing things in a wrong way, that the polished image is "better." But Alexander saying this makes me think about it differently. I think I am allowed to feel that a sketch is in fact better, and that the final image is missing something. The translation from sketch to final form may in fact reduce the whole feeling in a way that is destructive and negative.
Title: Re: The Nature of Order // Book Two // The Process of Creating Life
Post by: droqen on February 01, 2023, 06:08:01 AM
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
SIMPLICITY
Title: Re: The Nature of Order // Book Two // The Process of Creating Life
Post by: droqen on February 01, 2023, 08:35:10 AM
What is simplicity?

Given a forest, what is simpler: a tree, or a perfect sphere?
Title: Re: The Nature of Order // Book Two // The Process of Creating Life
Post by: droqen on February 01, 2023, 08:38:44 AM
In this chapter the pursuit of simplicity is stated to be the same as the pursuit of life. One of the headers reads, "MAKING LIFE" AND "BEING SIMPLE" ARE THE SAME. Rather than simplicity of result in a vacuum -- a mathematical primitive, a cube or a sphere -- the idea of a process of simplicity is proposed. . . What is the simplest transformation? In a forest, it is much simpler to envision another tree than a perfect sphere, even though a tree is a very un-simple thing, and a sphere is very simple by many metrics.

What is simplicity?
Title: Re: The Nature of Order // Book Two // The Process of Creating Life
Post by: droqen on February 01, 2023, 08:41:13 AM
"In painting, I try to make a realistic scene. I look at the life there. I try to make the picture come to life, and half of me is asking, What makes it real? What makes it real? I try to paint what I see. But I have to shout at myself, all the time, play, play, play, stop worrying . . ." (490-491)

"In building, the same thing. . . . Is it the most beautiful I can make it? Just don't forget. Just don't forget. Keep doing it. It is only when I do that, have joyful fun, do nothing else, just keep on doing that, to make each shape beautiful, that the thing begins to gain its life. It ought to be easy. But it is so hard." (491)
Title: Re: The Nature of Order // Book Two // The Process of Creating Life
Post by: droqen on February 01, 2023, 08:42:14 AM
I look at the life there.

. . . half of me is asking, What makes it real? What makes it real?
I have to shout at myself, all the time,

. . . play, play, play, stop worrying . . .
Just don't forget. Just don't forget.
make each shape beautiful,
have joyful fun,
do nothing else;

It is only when I do that . . . that the thing begins to gain its life.
It ought to be easy. But it is so hard.
Title: Re: The Nature of Order // Book Two // The Process of Creating Life
Post by: droqen on February 01, 2023, 08:55:54 AM
I don't think I've written a proper post about it yet but I have returned to this idea of perfection over and over, lately.
I think this idea of simplicity is the same as my idea of perfection.
Or, they are both becoming one another.

~ simplistic art, elegant art (https://newforum.droqen.com/index.php?topic=315) may be relevant?

I'll need to go back for another quote from earlier, something I found very evocative, at least in context.
I will strip the context from it and hope it maintains its force when I come back to it later.

Alexander is writing about symmetry.

P. 475

. . . things which are similar must be similar, and things which are different must be different. Or . . .
. . . more precisely: The degree of similarities which exist in a structure must correspond exactly to the degree of similarity of the conditions there, and the degrees of differences which exist in a structure must also correspond to the degrees of difference in the conditions there. . . .

P. 472, 474-475

. . . a harmonious structure . . . is one whose internal similarities and differences correspond exactly to the degrees of similarity and difference that exist in its conditions. That is the best definition of simplicity. Consider the shape of a soap bubble. When . . . floating in the air, it roughly has the shape of a sphere. . . . there is one simple explanation [for this], more fundamental than all the others. It is simply this. The air pressure on the inside of the bubble presses out with equal force in all directions. The same is true of the air pressure outside the bubble, pressing in. It presses with equal strength all over the bubble. Under these circumstances the bubble must take on the form of a sphere, because a sphere is the only volume-enclosing shape whose surface is the same at every point.
Title: Re: The Nature of Order // Book Two // The Process of Creating Life
Post by: droqen on February 01, 2023, 08:56:01 AM
things which are similar must be similar, and things which are different must be different.
Title: Re: The Nature of Order // Book Two // The Process of Creating Life
Post by: droqen on February 01, 2023, 08:57:16 AM
We are nearly to the end of PART TWO, wow. I made it. There is one last little bit in the chapter on SIMPLICITY, these two sections titled 'METAPHYSICAL NOTE' and 'NOTHINGNESS' and I am quite excited to read them, but I think I would like to have a clear mind before doing so. See you soon enough, book.
Title: Re: The Nature of Order // Book Two // The Process of Creating Life
Post by: droqen on February 01, 2023, 06:35:06 PM
Oh yeah that's good stuff! It makes me really want to read Book 4. And, upsettingly, makes the link stronger between this and Kastrup's mental world. Argh!

I don't need a quote for this. Simplicity, perfection, nothingness, being alive. They are all the same.

The 4th book is called The Luminous Ground; this little section at the end of simplicity, "NOTHINGNESS," contains the first solid reference to that Ground; simplicity is closeness to the Ground, aliveness is an unbroken lineage from nothingness, perfection is . . . all of the above? I think they are all synonymous, or at least symmetrical.

Perfection is symmetrical to nothingness.

Now that's a phrase.
Title: Re: The Nature of Order // Book Two // The Process of Creating Life
Post by: droqen on February 01, 2023, 06:36:30 PM
PART THREE
A NEW PARADIGM
FOR PROCESS IN SOCIETY

EVOLUTION TOWARDS A SOCIETY WHERE
LIVING PROCESS IS THE NORM
Title: Re: The Nature of Order // Book Two // The Process of Creating Life
Post by: droqen on February 01, 2023, 06:43:39 PM
P. 496

. . . living processes . . . require freedom of action, freedom within the process. This means that each process must allow every step of each adaptive sequence sufficient latitude to go wherever it needs to go . . . freedom of action at each step.

. . . totalitarian democracy . . . the system of thought and action which is prescribed by the rules, procedures, lock-step processes of the modern democratic state, which attempts to [function] by social routines that are military and regimented, not free or organic.

. . . in the future age which stretches before us, we must now find ways of turning society beyond its too-regimented path, and towards paths of design and planning and construction which allow the life of every whole and the life of every part to emerge freely from the processes by which we make the world.
Title: Re: The Nature of Order // Book Two // The Process of Creating Life
Post by: droqen on February 01, 2023, 06:44:42 PM
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
ENCOURAGING FREEDOM

STARTING TO MAKE CHANGES
IN THE CHARACTER OF PROCESS
Title: Re: The Nature of Order // Book Two // The Process of Creating Life
Post by: droqen on February 02, 2023, 07:04:49 PM
This chapter contains a rather wonderfully exhaustive list of ordinary processes ("Looking at the instructions in a software manual . . . transfer of funds from one bank account to another . . . application of fire safety laws to make all staircases at least three feet wide . . . use of weedkillers on driveways . . ." (p500)) in order to make the point that a large number of them are neutral in character, not "directly concerned with the life of the result" -- but that "The world is shaped by these processes, is given its style, order, character, and functional form by these hundreds of thousands of processes acting in concert over the surface of the Earth." (p501)

The chapters concludes with a section entitled "THE PRIMARY FUNCTION OF SOCIETY."

"society --- the huge system of process-rules and principles we know as society" (p. 509)

Alexander is very prescriptive in this chapter in a way that is gently inspirational but mostly a bit excessive? I don't disagree. In fact I agree very much. But I don't mean to take on such an aspirationally transformative attitude towards a creature as large as society. Society is a monster. A great beast.
Title: Re: The Nature of Order // Book Two // The Process of Creating Life
Post by: droqen on February 02, 2023, 07:05:02 PM
CHAPTER NINETEEN
MASSIVE PROCESS
DIFFICULTIES
Title: Re: The Nature of Order // Book Two // The Process of Creating Life
Post by: droqen on February 02, 2023, 07:07:12 PM
Yes, here Alexander faces off against this great monster but knowingly. I like what he said in the last chapter ---
"The world is shaped . . . given its style, order, character, and functional form
by these hundreds of thousands of processes acting . . ."
It truly captures the whole monster in all its fury, though I will not be fooled into thinking capturing a clear description is the same as capturing the monster.
Title: Re: The Nature of Order // Book Two // The Process of Creating Life
Post by: droqen on February 02, 2023, 07:13:50 PM
In this chapter, MASSIVE PROCESS DIFFICULTIES, Alexander describes specific struggles with the shape of our society today. I am sympathetic to these struggles, I grieve for them. His grievances take on a shape so familiar that it makes me uncomfortable and I see no need to dwell on them further than I have already.

However.

There is a chapter that echoes a piece of Mutual Aid (https://newforum.droqen.com/index.php?topic=306.0), when it speaks of eschewing experts and specialization. I can't find that quote from Mutual Aid, but I'll quote Alexander in the next post:
Title: Re: The Nature of Order // Book Two // The Process of Creating Life
Post by: droqen on February 02, 2023, 07:17:05 PM
P. 521
     The mystification of professional expertise causes further difficulties. In order to achieve local adaptation of the millions of centers in a living structure, it is necessary that decision-making control over these centers is decentralized as far as possible, placed in the hands of the people who are closest to it. Yet in modern society an extraordinary number of men, women, and children are convinced that they do not know enough to lay out a house or an office or a road --- that it is an arcane matter for professionals which only professionals can do. This deep-seated and wrong-headed belief has been inculcated by the heavy-handed tone and legal character of design and engineering professions, leaving people as impotent recipients of the designs handed to them by their more competent "betters."
     The architect's claim to be the only person in society who can manage design capably, is not only manifestly false (because architects have done such a bad job). It is also, from a deep theoretical point of view, inimical to the growth of a living environment, because it concentrates too much design authority in a handful of people, making successful adaptation impossible.

. . . the critical issue lies in the matter of competence and permission. It is necessary for people to have access to the minimal competence to lay out small parts of the environment . . . This competence must lie within individual hands of people who do not have special training. And it requires, also, that some similar competence for local design of streets, public space, shared space, is in the hands of groups of individuals, again unskilled . . . And, most important of all, it requires a system of social arrangements which ALLOW people to have control over these parts of their environment, which touch them so deeply.
Title: Re: The Nature of Order // Book Two // The Process of Creating Life
Post by: droqen on February 02, 2023, 07:24:05 PM
I'd like to extract a few choice phrases from the above, but I loved those two paragraphs so much whole as they were written that I had to put it up just like that.

1. It is necessary for all people to have access to the minimal competence, and social permission, to lay out small parts of their private environment, the shared environment, or indeed any domain which touches them deeply.

2. Any claim to exclusive expertise over this access is inimical to the growth of a living environment.

3. An extraordinary number of men, women, and children have been convinced, perhaps by such claims, that changing the conditions of the environment which touches them is an arcane matter which only experts with exclusive expertise can do.

4. In order to achieve local adaptation, the local adaptation so crucial to living structure, it is necessary that decision-making control over the important parts of the world at each and every scale -- "centers" -- is decentralized as far as possible, placed in the hands of the people who are closest to it, and not according to any claim of exclusivity over any domain.
Title: Re: The Nature of Order // Book Two // The Process of Creating Life
Post by: droqen on February 02, 2023, 08:43:21 PM
P. 523, describing the modern process of "development":

. . . all the primary decision-makers are absent from the project, uncaring about the individuals or the land . . .
Title: Re: The Nature of Order // Book Two // The Process of Creating Life
Post by: droqen on February 03, 2023, 07:08:12 AM
P. 529

     The very methods that render bureaucracy efficient [are] namely, the application of fixed rules in the wrong kind of way, and the early 20th-century version of systemization of rules and procedures so that people can be replaced[.]

     The advent of computers has changed some of that [static systematization]. For the first time, mechanized procedures are available with are inherently flexible, context-sensitive, capable of responding uniquely to differences, and thus approximating, in human-created fashion, the organic living processes of nature and of traditional society.

//

How weird. But in some way this mirrors some of my own hopes about the internet, especially around the years this was published (less so now, in the strange ad-laden internet that appears dominated by the megasiloes of social media).
Title: Re: The Nature of Order // Book Two // The Process of Creating Life
Post by: droqen on February 03, 2023, 07:16:12 AM
P. 515-516, "INTENTIONAL RIGIDITY OF RULES; THE INFLUENCE OF FREDERICK TAYLOR"

What we know as the modern organization with machinelike repetition of processes, came from Frederick Taylor [an American machinist]. . . . It is amazing to realize that Taylor himself very well understood the positive social and human conditions of the living process . . . And then, for reasons of money and efficiency, he deliberately set out to destroy it. Three principles of Taylorism are: (1) Disassociate the labor process from the skills. . . . (2) Separate conception from execution. (3) Gain monopoly over knowledge to control labor process. . . . Taylor himself wrote: "The full possibilities of my system will not have been realized until almost all of the machines in the shop are run by men who are of smaller caliber and attainment, and who are therefore cheaper than those required under the old system."

P. 530, footnote on Taylor

I have given a short summary of Taylor's ideas because even those of us who are thoroughly sick of the bureaucratic and machinelike character of modern society will, in general, not be aware of the extent to which it all started with the work of one man, nor the extraordinary extent to which these changes were deliberate, conscious, willful. Obviously, if all this was created by the deliberate thought of an individual --- as indeed it was --- it becomes easier for us to conceive the possibility of changing it. It becomes conceivable that within a short space of time --- perhaps, no more than another fifty years --- another, entirely different system of processes can be made to grow in society.
Title: Re: The Nature of Order // Book Two // The Process of Creating Life
Post by: droqen on February 03, 2023, 07:16:49 AM
CHAPTER TWENTY
THE SPREAD OF LIVING
PROCESSES
THROUGHOUT SOCIETY

MAKING THE SHIFT TO A NEW PARADIGM
Title: Re: The Nature of Order // Book Two // The Process of Creating Life
Post by: droqen on February 03, 2023, 07:19:41 AM
P. 532
We shall now turn our thoughts to the practical problem of effecting a gradual transition to a world governed by morphogenetic processes. It is perfectly plain that an effective solution to this problem can only work by piecemeal means.
Title: Re: The Nature of Order // Book Two // The Process of Creating Life
Post by: droqen on February 03, 2023, 07:26:03 AM
P. 533, "SNIPPABLE GENES"
. . . Amazing, but true, that a gene which causes a certain desirable kind of enzyme activity can be transplanted from a fish to a person, sometimes even to a mushroom. Most genes are highly general in what they do. What they do is limited, but "snippable" --- each one can be cut out and used, individually, by itself. . . . small, interchangeable, and can be transplanted effectively from one system to another --- in many cases with success.
Title: Re: The Nature of Order // Book Two // The Process of Creating Life
Post by: droqen on February 03, 2023, 07:31:25 AM
P. 535
. . . Suppose, for instance, that a new contractual process is invented for construction. . . . the sequence is long and complex with many interlocking features. A move to adopt this new construction system will put stress on [everyone and everything involved] . . . making it less likely that the innovative process will [be adopted].
     It is difficult to find social conditions in which all the features . . . can change at the same time . . .
     But suppose that the same improved process of contracting is broken up into, say, twenty separable sequences. Together the twenty smaller processes define the new system in its entirety. But let us also assume that these twenty sequences (or genes) are carefully defined, and chosen, so that each one, individually --- any one of them by itself --- is separable from the nineteen others, and can therefore be successfully injected by itself into an otherwise normal or mainstream system . . . essential, new, morphogenetic ingredients can flourish one at a time. They can be tested, improved --- and can spread deep into society and existing social processes --- simply by virtue of the improved performance they create "without rocking the boat too much."

. . . What is needed is simply a way of "cutting up" the original innovative process, into a small set of process genes or small sequences that work individually, and that are robust enough to work in wide variety of contexts, even when not supported by other parts of the new system.
Title: Re: The Nature of Order // Book Two // The Process of Creating Life
Post by: droqen on February 03, 2023, 08:30:26 AM
P. 536
     Many of [my and my colleagues'] experiments succeeded. . . . [but these experiments] demanded too much. In our early experiments, we often went to almost unbelievable lengths to get some new process to be implemented, and to get it to work. But the amount of effort . . . was also the weakness of what we achieved. In too many cases, the magnitude of special effort that had to be made to shore up a new process was massive --- too great, to be easily or reasonably copied. ". . . the processes defined so complex internally, that they are hard to transplant separable parts, and one has the strong impression that to work, they need to be taken lock, stock and barrel, as a whole" (p. 549, end of chapter notes)
     We succeeded because we replaced an existing system with a large system in which every aspects of procedure, process, attitude, rules, were changed: it worked.

. . . [But] Stated in abstract terms one might say that our new or revised living processes were too "large" to be widely copied. [// Might one even say the process of deploying the processes was not structure-preserving enough?]

. . . In co-housing, families meet. They lay out the commons with the architect. But . . . within today's paradigm, the results come out much too much like the half-dead environments typical of upscale 20th-century housing tracts. The co-housing process contains a few good features that make it slightly better . . . Nevertheless, in spite of its limitations, the co-housing process has been copied all over the United States because it is compatible with 20th-century professional definitions of architect, contractor, and so forth[.]

Unlike the patterns in A PATTERN LANGUAGE, which are copied widely because they are small and snippable, our process innovations --- though far more profound --- remain largely unknown. . . . we may summarize like this. When models of a new process are too intricate, too complete, too indivisible, they require specially trained people to carry them out, they put unworkable demands on the practical social system in which the innovation occurs.
Title: Re: The Nature of Order // Book Two // The Process of Creating Life
Post by: droqen on February 03, 2023, 08:36:36 AM
Alexander gives an example of a process gene. I'll summarize rather than quoting.

He ran an architecture + construction firm for a long time, the two parts together, but this is rather overwhelming for an architect to handle. It is a lot of responsibility.

However the snippable "process gene" which bridges the gap between isolated-architect and architect-and-construction unity is the idea of the architect taking responsibility over one small aspect of construction, say, window-making or tile-setting.

This brings more income to the architect themselves (or through them, this part is not clear to me - is the architect doing the window-making, the tile-laying, or are they simply working directly with the subcontractor responsible?), and the architect gets to be involved with the actual construction of the building rather than only sitting at a drafting table drawing which is "not so much fun."

Actually, I will quote his concluding statements.

P. 538
     As a result of injecting it into the normal process, daily life for architects, clients, and tile-setters, becomes more meaningful. And the buildings get better.
     The chance that this process gene will spread is quite considerable.
Title: Re: The Nature of Order // Book Two // The Process of Creating Life
Post by: droqen on February 03, 2023, 08:40:48 AM
Process gene.
Title: Re: The Nature of Order // Book Two // The Process of Creating Life
Post by: droqen on February 03, 2023, 08:45:51 AM
How do people learn game design? What is game design?

"Where is the gene pool located? . . . The natural answer to this question for the 21st century is, of course, the Internet." (P. 541-542)

This website is very cute: www.patternlanguage.com
Title: Re: The Nature of Order // Book Two // The Process of Creating Life
Post by: droqen on February 03, 2023, 08:47:17 AM
P. 542
. . . If my predictions are fulfilled, the PATTERNLANGUAGE.COM site will in the end be only one of many similar sites: all carrying evolving sequences. And we must hope that the movement and evolution of the sequences goes, by common public agreement, towards those which do sustain life.
Title: Re: The Nature of Order // Book Two // The Process of Creating Life
Post by: droqen on February 03, 2023, 08:55:05 AM
This next bit is about processes 'triggering' each other. A living house layout process may evoke a living street repair process, or describe its layout to a living neighbourhood.

I think of this as part of the process gene piecemeal strategy; the gene might be usable in the context of usual 'modern' processes but explicitly calls out better 'living' processes in order to hopefully have a cascading effect . . . It should, i think, do so in a way that is inviting rather than prescriptive. E.g. 'while building a house you may need a process for designing and making windows, one that does x and y and z, and would you look at that,  here's a good one that does all of those things. . .'
Title: Re: The Nature of Order // Book Two // The Process of Creating Life
Post by: droqen on February 03, 2023, 08:56:00 AM
P. 545
. . . a system of processes . . . evolving gradually according to people's experience of what makes the world around them living . . . the environment can gradually be healed.
Title: Re: The Nature of Order // Book Two // The Process of Creating Life
Post by: droqen on February 03, 2023, 08:59:55 AM
According to people's experience of what makes the world around them living. I think about this. Complaints about the world and how it works and people's place in the world . . . I look at these like a designer looking at playtesters' comments. It's not the specific complaints and certainly not the specific solutions that a person says they wish were applied . . . But what is the deep feeling of such complaints?
Title: Re: The Nature of Order // Book Two // The Process of Creating Life
Post by: droqen on February 03, 2023, 09:03:37 AM
I worry myself about whether I would just be injecting my own bias into situations when I ask someone to see for themselves the deep feeling, but I also think a designer is nothing special; I have no exclusive claim to the ability to see past a bad reactive proposed (or demanded) solution to the deeper feeling. If I look at something like this as a designer (is that even the right word? I need a better word), do I involve the person making the complaint or do I carry on without them?

It is a more living world in which I can speak frankly to the person about what I think they really feel. Then that is what I must do.

However: it also depends on the context. If it is someone who doesn't really care, who has no reason to care, no investment in the process, then I do not need to involve them in the process. I just need to discuss with them their own feeling, not . . . the whole entire thing.
Title: Re: The Nature of Order // Book Two // The Process of Creating Life
Post by: droqen on February 03, 2023, 09:09:41 AM
P. 545-546, "INTERDEPENDENCE OF SEQUENCES"
In order to make the system of living processes work best, what is necessary, above all, is that the linked processes actually are initiated when needed. How, then, can linkages be activated? . . . (Example given regarding arithmetic: certain mathematical processes call on others. Division sometimes calls upon multiplication) . . . in the act of making meadows, we must call on a sequence which teaches us how to make modest, hidden, cheap, yet workable parking lots.

// the "meadow-making process" does not define the "parking-lot making process", it merely calls upon it. each one is a gene. in order to be snippable, i.e. capable of being used by itself, it must define the positioning of its boundaries, it must have 'snip lines', it must be aware - and make its students aware - of where this gene relates to another gene. it must stop there, but with an open hand, not a dead end.
Title: Re: The Nature of Order // Book Two // The Process of Creating Life
Post by: droqen on February 03, 2023, 09:13:47 AM
P. 546

. . . the MEADOW-MAKING PROCESS must call on the PARKING-LOT-MAKING PROCESS . . . because the creation of meadows in the areas of the urban fringe requires that the meadows be useful, hence that people drive to them sometimes, hence that a few cars can be placed modestly and quietly, without huge parking lots. . . . This is neither voluntary nor compulsory. It is simply a part of what it means to understand the MEADOW-MAKING PROCESS

. . . the unfolding creation of a human being in the embryo state must call on the LEG-MAKING SEQUENCE

. . . in arithmetic, the LONG DIVISION PROCESS must call on the MULTIPLICATION PROCESS or on the SUBTRACTION PROCESS
Title: Re: The Nature of Order // Book Two // The Process of Creating Life
Post by: droqen on February 03, 2023, 09:58:04 PM
(Notes taken in transit on phone)

Page 547-548, "The network evolves"
. . . imagine such a passionate new process in which all we members of society together generate a vessel for our lives. . . . What might this new world be like? . . . I believe four general features of the overall system of society will turn out to be fundamental:
1- every process in common use has, among its tasks, the major act of consciously creating coherent form.
2- a fluid over-arching process, created piecemeal by the actions of thousands and millions of people, slowly begins taking care of the whole, and we understand how it does so. Within that whole, smaller processes will take care of some of the smaller centres, and we understand how they do so. And then, once again, still smaller processes will take care of the still smaller centres. . .
3- it becomes natural for people to consider making or modifying their own sequences, sharing and exchanging ideas, trying consciously to improve the sequences they know . . . it is part of their obligation to share the material they have, to deposit improved sequences in the gene pool, so that others may gain the benefit, also. . . .
3.5?- sequences all have the important character that deeper aspects of structure are laid down first, and that subsequent steps always follow smoothly
4- ". . . we shall all gradually come to feel a concrete and realistic obligation to make sure that every action taken, by anyone, in any place, always, heals the land. A widespread ethical change begins to appear. Healing the land is understood by more people: Throughout society, slowly each person comes to recognize his or her fundamental obligation to make sure that in every act of every kind, each person does what he or she can do to heal the land and to regenerate, shape, form, decorate, and improve the living Earth of which we are a part."

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
THE ROLE OF THE ARCHITECT
IN THE THIRD MILLENIUM

P. 559, LARGER AND DEEPER
. . . a new and different kind of professional [than the 20th-century architect], undertaking different tasks, playing a larger role, increasing the scope of what is covered — yet at the same time also playing, at least half the time, a smaller and more modest role, a more engaged role, more embracing in his/her artistic responsibility as a maker.

P. 556
. . . imagine a small architectural firm of four architects . . . working together for a year [and together designing and completing] all the buildings, roads, gardens, on about 300 acres, and they must achieve this one a year, every single year of their working lives. This is a huge number . . .

P. 560
    In this vision, the craft of the architect — the forming of the environment in its beauty, in its majesty, in its humanity — is to be assisted by semiautonomous generative sequences that help millions of people to become creative.
. . . What is an architect to do? . . . Four words encompass an answer . . .

Making

Designing

Building

Helping
Title: Re: The Nature of Order // Book Two // The Process of Creating Life
Post by: droqen on February 03, 2023, 10:00:59 PM
P. 560

     Helping hundreds of people to design and layout and build their own structures, adding a touch here and and touch there to make the largest processes go well. . . . Once again, the emphasis . . . must be on the beauty and coherence and positive space within the large, as it results from the cooperative work of hundreds.
Title: Re: The Nature of Order // Book Two // The Process of Creating Life
Post by: droqen on February 03, 2023, 10:05:20 PM
P. 557, "HOW TO ENLARGE THE ARCHITECT'S RESPONSIBILITY // BROADER SCOPE WITH LARGER IMPACT"

. . . the methods an architect must use in the 21st century, to have the right kind of relationship to the environment --- can only be indirect methods. We can only accomplish our aim, by finding some way of creating living structure, without personally having to design every bit of it . . . This must --- can only --- lead to an indirect, generative method.

P. 555
     I imagine a new role for the architect, in which we take more seriously our responsibility for all form and space in the world . . . Just as doctors, as members of their profession, take the responsibility for the care of illness and disease --- and take this responsibility , in principle, for all the people on the Earth . . .
Title: Re: The Nature of Order // Book Two // The Process of Creating Life
Post by: droqen on February 03, 2023, 10:06:58 PM
P. 561, "THE ARCHITECT'S DREAM"

. . . work at a suitable scale large enough to make the world beautiful in its entirety, small enough to allow love of craft, and making, and detail, to find expression in every project.
Title: Re: The Nature of Order // Book Two // The Process of Creating Life
Post by: droqen on February 03, 2023, 10:07:33 PM
CONCLUSION

LIFE-BASED SOCIETY
A VISION AND LONG-RANGE OVERVIEW
Title: Re: The Nature of Order // Book Two // The Process of Creating Life
Post by: droqen on February 03, 2023, 10:24:19 PM
Feeling --- "not an idiosyncratic touchy-feely kind of thing, but serious, holistic connection to the whole, which provides a wholesome feeling in the actor" (566) --- I prefer to say 'some specific feeling', not all feeling but a feeling nonetheless --- "should become the main anchor of the huge, hundred-million-variable process which creates life on Earth" (566)

"Instead of technology, feeling." (567)

"There is no conflict between the life of the parts and the life of the whole. Every living process seeks, at every single moment, to increase the life of the parts and the life of the whole, together." (568)

"I am not insisting that there is any one super-process, or only one kind of viable process. Rather, I am specifically insisting that there is only one class of living processes --- albeit a very large* class indeed --- and that any particular process must, if it is to be a good one, belong to that class." (568)

* I may add that 'very large' may be understating the size: this class will certainly be mathematically infinite.

"It is the vision of a future living Earth, which draws me on. . . . the idea that one day such living process will cover and completely generate, in biological fashion, the natural and human-made and built environment that we may ultimately learn to call our living Earth." (570)
Title: Re: The Nature of Order // Book Two // The Process of Creating Life
Post by: droqen on February 03, 2023, 10:26:06 PM
That is the end of Book 2, excepting the sixty-page appendix which details one single "small example of a living process." I may read this at some point but not immediately. I have read enough for now, and it is time to get to work.
Title: Re: The Nature of Order // Book Two // The Process of Creating Life
Post by: droqen on February 03, 2023, 10:29:08 PM
If you've been reading along, if you have some overlapping interest between game design and the ideas contained within this book --- regardless of your experience level in either --- please do feel welcome to contact me. My email address is available on my website. -droqen