Wednesday 2 October 2019

Guldize Seed Thought - The } Quality

It is a little known fact that our modern digital world is massively indebted to a little known theoretical (physical) architect.  My work is as an I.T. or Digital Architect.

This architect was Christopher Alexander https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/106728.The_Timeless_Way_of_Building  who was in turn influenced by Taoist theory.

There are a few places where you can see his influence in the physical world – the Café at https://www.westdean.org.uk/ and Oregon University in addition to a few others.

Whenever you use or engage with the digital, world be it a website to fill out a form or complete a service like renewing your insurance, and at any time you use your smartphone.  Then you use two things that Christopher Alexander articulated:

1.       Design Patterns – taken from his book ‘A Pattern Language’.  This applies not only to the user experience/interface (UX/UI) but also to the way that computer systems are developed

2.       Object Orientation (OO) – which is based upon ‘A Pattern Language’ and ‘The Timeless Way of Building’.  Most modern computer languages have some basis in OO.

Whilst the passage below is rooted in Taoist terminology this applies, as a universal wisdom, to Gewessi (Druidic Heathen) thought.  It explains why it is hard to define what is wrong with a design – a missing ‘un-named quality’.  I’ve taken a part of his seminal work and replaced the architectural language with the more abstract word design in the text below to clarify why it was used in Computer Programming…

 

"THE WAY

 

What looks at first sight like an accidental quality which marks the designs (towns and villages) of the past, turns out to be the most fundamental physical property of the world we live in.

This is simply the character of design (buildings) which reflect the forces in them properly.

 

The prismatic design of our own time, the design built with the simple geometry of cubes, and circles, spheres, and spirals, and rectangles; this geometry is the naive order, created by the childish search for order. We happen to think of this order as the proper order for a design (building), because we have been taught to think so; but we are wrong.

 

The proper order for a design, which comes about when designs are correctly fitted to the forces in them, is a much richer order, with a far more complex geometry. But it is not merely rich and complex; it is also very specific.

And it will show itself, under any circumstances, where designs are actually correct.

Whenever anyone manages to make a design which is alive, it will have this specific character, because that is the only character which is compatible with life.

 

When I myself first started to make designs with this character 'the un-named quality', symbolised as }, the character amazed me.

At first, I was afraid that I must really be a conservative at heart and that I was unconsciously striving to re-make the past.

 

ITS AGELESS CHARACTER

 

But then I read a passage in an ancient Chinese painting manual — the Mustard Seed Garden manual of painting — which made the situation clear to me.

 

The writer of that manual describes how, in his search for a way of painting, he had discovered for himself the same central way that thousands of others like him had also discovered for themselves, throughout the course of history. He says that the more one understands of painting, the more one recognizes that the art of painting is essentially one way, which will always be discovered and rediscovered, over and over again, because it is connected with the very nature of painting, and must be discovered by anybody who takes painting seriously. The idea of style is meaningless: what we see as a style (of a person or of an age) is nothing but another individual effort to penetrate the central secret of painting, which is given by the Tao, but cannot itself be named."

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