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Comment by oldmancoyote | Hacker News Reader

I have been an admirer of Alexander's A Pattern Language book on architecture for 40 years.

Even then, this is new to me. I recommend you read this article, even though it's deep and difficult. It can be read as a fundamental criticism of UI/UX as it's practiced today. In particular it could be seen as a rejection of Jonathan Ive's (Apple's) design principles, principles which I have increasingly found disturbing and lacking in human relevance.

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There’s a book specifically applying the “pattern pattern” to UX, namely Jennifer Tidwell’s Designing Interfaces (O’Reilly)

It’s 10 years old or so by now, but has held up better than most technical books of its age.

I think it went out in 2012, so that makes it 6 years old. The field has developped enormously since then but the principles probably hold quite well.

An interesting question would be: after 40+ years, what happened? Has the book positively impacted how we build homes, neighborhoods, cities? (I'd say very little)

His main theme is: build for humans (can apply to anything, software also).

But today we are all about status. We think what we possess is who we are. This is a lie created by marketing. But it's very hard to change this in our cultures.

We now see movements like the tiny house movement, minimalists, healthy food movement and so on.

Imho those are all anty riactions to the marketing we are now hearing for years.

So even if Christopher is right about how to build it can be very hard to change the way we think (about building).

Alexander himself agrees with you. The pattern language approach in his hands and in the hands of some architects was a tool that produced wonderful buildings. In many hands, the patterns were there and the buildings were still miserable. The patterns were necessary but not sufficient. I posted a comment elsewhere in the thread referring to his recent work, 'The Nature of Order', where he thinks, after forty years of work, that he's figured out the sufficient part as well.

Here is an impressive review of a huge number of scholarly critiques of Christopher Alexander's work: https://cityterritoryarchitecture.springeropen.com/articles/...

Personally, I've never been able to take him seriously enough to work up the patience to analyse his work to anything like that level of depth. His project is hubristic.

I got half way through that article, and everything up to that point had been strawmen, so I gave up.

As for hubris, what is hubristic about trying to figure out how to build well?

I used Alexander's book to design (and build) 3 homes. I feel they were exceptionally nice homes.

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