From the introduction:

> Indeed, since the book was published, a whole academic field has grown up around the idea of "design methods"-and I have been hailed as one of the leading exponents of these so-called design methods. I am very sorry that this has happened, and want to state, publicly, that I reject the whole idea of design methods as a subject of study, since I think it is absurd to separate the study of designing from the practice of design. In fact, people who study design methods without also practicing design are almost always frustrated designers who have no sap in them, who have lost, or never had, the urge to shape things. Such a person will never be able to say anything sensible about "how" to shape things either. Poincare once said: "Sociologists discuss sociological methods; physi- cists discuss physics." I love this statement. Study of method by itself is always barren.

Most people know "A Pattern Language" because of the design patterns, but it's _this_ book that every software engineer (and everyone in the space of designing solutions) should read.

That book is fantastic! It's absolutely thrilling design joyride through the most surprising of concepts - and yet it manages to send a very concrete message to designers of all disciplines who are required to build something novel that needs to meet real world requirements.

Minsky, vernacular architecture, graphs, old houses, how to design complex systems...