In 2000, I bought a book on the recommendation of a friend. It's a gigantic, floppy paperback, with an ethereal, nautically-themed cover, and the grave title of Cognition in the Wild. It's an ethnographic analysis of the navigation team of an aircraft carrier, which dives deeply into the nuts and bolts of how people think and collaborate. This fearsome tome sat on my shelf for ten years. All the better, too, as I don't think I would have understood it if I had picked it up a day sooner. Perhaps because in it, the author, Edwin Hutchins, wrote passages like this:

A navigation chart is an analog computer.

and

If we built the right formal system, we could now describe states of affairs in the world that would have been impossible or impractical to observe directly. Such a state of affairs might be something in the future, which we cannot observe directly, but which can be predicted. I consider the mastery of formal systems to be the key to modern civilization. This is a very, very powerful idea.

I'll get back to these statements in a moment, as I'm still laying a foundation, but reading them I was floored. Around this time, I had acquired a copy of a lesser-known book by one of Hutchins's colleagues, Don Norman. In it, he describes a type of thing called a representational artifact✱, a human-made object, purpose-built to embody representational states and the transitions between them. In other words, a representational artifact has a meaning beyond, or even irrespective of, its utilitarian physical properties. Norman also wrote of cognitive artifacts, which are representational artifacts designed to support memory and reasoning—Things That Make Us Smart. This, I surmise, is what Hutchins meant by the navigation chart being a kind of computer.

I had just begun, at this time, to develop my own understanding of formal systems and how they relate to computation, largely due to another daunting volume, this time by Douglas Hofstadter. Gödel Escher Bach is not only about formal systems, but also about morphisms, which are structure-preserving mappings between arbitrary categories of things. Think like a mathematical function, but more abstract, and simultaneously more concrete. A morphism could, for instance, be a way to describe what goes on when we take a photograph, or transcribe a conversation, or construct a building. Hofstadter's argument was that meaningful form in our environment is transformed across media, through our senses, with its meaning intact, and represented analogically in the structures of our brains. It is then synthesized with other meaningful forms within, and turned outward through our bodies to act on the world. The ongoing interplay between these states of affairs is what we call consciousness.

Whether or not you buy that last bit is irrelevant, because in this context it's the morphisms that are important. A known initial state plus a known morphism equals a predictable result. This equates to the deliberate composition and manipulation of formal systems. This process is also known as computation. Specific types of morphisms may also be employed to translate a representational state from one physical medium to another, to yet another, without losing any information. This idea provides the foundation for data storage and networking. It's also what we're doing when we render an image, or navigate a ship, or prosecute a law, or turn a blueprint into a building.

This trio of books had such an impact because they furnished me with the notion that any artifact, and any non-artifact, and any system or mix thereof, can be a representational medium, and any representational medium is inherently a computational medium. The machines we recognize today as computers constitute an efficient, yet extremely narrow interpretation of this idea.

This brings me to the heterodox architect, Christopher Alexander. Around 2008 or so, I read his 1964 PhD dissertation, Notes on the Synthesis of Form. The thesis was about the use of a structure-preserving mathematical decomposition of complex design problems into hierarchies of simpler problems which could be readily solved, then recomposed into a complex solution. Seeing enormous value in this technique, and puzzling at why I couldn't find an implementation anywhere, I wrote the code myself. Aside from my math skills being insufficient at the time to implement the method properly, I couldn't understand how Alexander generated the initial structure, manually, to be processed by his computer program.

In order to use Alexander's technique, you had to gather hundreds, if not thousands, of what we would typically call requirements—orders of magnitude more than common practice. Then you'd have to work them to get them all into roughly the same conceptual scope—that is, such that they deal with the same size of concern—arguably a subjective criterion. Then you connect these objects together on the condition that a change to one affects the state of another. Such a task would be positively enormous, and must be fixed before you can even begin to apply the technical innovation.

The hierarchical shape produced by breaking this hairball apart at its natural articulation points is called the decomposition pattern. Because the decomposition pattern depends on the structure of these connections, a latecomer requirement would almost certainly produce a wildly different result. This represents a huge bottleneck to progress, with the perennial one-more-thing threatening to torpedo any nascent plan. While theoretically sound, Alexander's method, as initially described, would be too fragile to put into practice. Nevertheless, as a prolific architect, he's figured it out somehow. Luckily he left a hint.

In the preface to the paperback edition of Notes, Alexander stressed the importance of the diagrams that riddled the text, and how they were actually more important than the math. I didn't understand what he meant until I got my hands on all 15 pounds of his magnum opus, The Nature of Order, which was after reading Hutchins, Norman, Simon, and Hofstadter. The key is repeated all over the text: it's the geometry, stupid. And then it hit me:

Alexander is using the building site itself
as a computational medium.

Consider this: a building, when complete, is every bit a representational artifact as it is a gadget for keeping off the rain. It encodes a set of constraints and affordances that literally program how human beings interact with one another. Architects have known about and harnessed this effect for various ends since the first buildings. Alexander's interest is in creating structure that supports the widest range of freedom in ordinary human life. To achieve this, he uses the current representational—that is to say, geometric—state of the system, on the ground, to compute the next step in the construction process, itself a recursive application of a carefully-selected set of fundamental morphisms. Christopher Alexander has amortized the computation of the requirements gathering, and their processing, and the decomposition pattern, and the construction program, through a set of morphisms which are acted out, by people, in real, physical space. The Nature of Order is a four-volume, 2165-page instruction manual.

If you can do this with a geometry problem, you can do it with a topological one. In fact, Alexander's original thesis is ultimately a topology problem. The morphisms he defines embed semiotic structure into the definite geometry of a building. When applied, the building process yields meaningful structure. Abstract relations between social concerns literally become concrete. This implies that this technique should be easier to implement, when you don't even have to pour any.

I don't yet know how well Alexander's fundamental geometric properties translate directly to abstract topological structure, but they all have to do with contrast, symmetry, proportion, continuity, recursion, and self-similarity. Indeed, Alexander has demonstrated what Hutchins has called for. If philosophers, linguists, mathematicians, anthropologists and designers saw fit, we wouldn't have to wait another fifty years for a generalization of this process.

Alexander has found a way to create buildings—at a competitive cost—without a master plan. Rather, he uses a protocol that sequentially applies discrete, structure-preserving transformations to a region of space, all the while taking continual input from the users, the surroundings, and the partially-computed product. The result is a building which is considerably better adapted to the real environment in which it needs to function.

Why the buildings are better adapted are because they shape and give definition to physical space without imposing upon it. The structure affords certain patterns of social interaction, rather than prescribing them. The people who use Alexander's buildings report an unprecedented sense of freedom and belonging. What's more, the process to create these buildings causes them to exhibit a conspicuous geometric pattern, which becomes a signal to people that the structure behaves this way.

I submit, once again, that if you can get these results with buildings, you can get them with systems that aren't buildings. Alexander's original doctoral thesis was about the abstract meta-problem of solving design problems, irrespective of specialist domain. His solution, matured over half a century, is as elegant as it is profound. The work of people like Hutchins, Norman, Hofstadter, Simon, etc., not only corroborate just how sophisticated it is, but also indicate that the approach isn't limited to buildings. They provide the theoretical basis to show that the potentially alien-looking things we'll have to do to implement this generalized process are deliberate, and that we actually have some idea about what we're doing.

This is important, because as Alexander wrote in his latest book, which carries the unassuming title, The Battle for the Life and Beauty of the Earth, there will be pitched opposition to these new methods, if for no other reason than they look unusual. Leave aside the fact that the incumbents will have a lot of retooling to do if these new methods catch on. To keep from being interfered with, we'd have to be able to show at every turn that the method is working, and the method should take no more time or money than the incumbent to execute. That part is going to be hard.

Any structure or process we can simulate on a computer, whether physical or virtual, whether made of bits or bricks or people, either is a formal sytem, or corresponds to an analogous one. Mastering formal systems means recognizing them as first-class entities, and even implementing them in non-traditional media, i.e., not a conventional computer. Declare up front to every stakeholder that you're using whatever your equivalent of the building site is, on purpose, to compute the next step in the process. And if people understand what a cognitive artifact✱ is for, it doesn't look like a digression or waste of effort to make one.

This process, as I've argued elsewhere, is going to entail a new kind of service, by a new kind of professional, mediated by a new kind of contract—likely several of each. The common thread in these services is, roughly, to transit business and institutional entities from a paradigm of mechanistic master planning, to one of stepwise, structure-preserving transformations. The vehicle is whatever proximate thing you actually do. To find willing participants, I suggest looking in places where the incumbent method hasn't worked out very well, and everybody knows it. If you've put up with these 3000 words so far, I'd wager the incumbent method isn't working so hot for you either.

I embarked on this odyssey because I'm fed up with working in an ecosystem that selects for garbage. In the quaternary industrial sector, which is all about information and design, the risk of the process, and the agreements around it, still makes it safer and more lucrative to look like you solved a problem than actually solving it. In other words, the easiest way to win commercially as a designer is still to fail at design. I resolved that if I want to earn a living doing good design, I'm going to have to bootstrap what is ultimately a social system—a protocol—that rewards good design.

You can scarcely compress the time it takes to do good design. The best you can do is arrange the process so that progress is conspicuous and the partially-completed result has its own intrinsic value. Alexander has figured this process out for buildings; we can use the work of these other gentlemen to figure out how far it extends.