Notes on the Synthesis of Form

What is Design?

  • A diagram for forces whose field we do not understand.

  • Expect to see the process of achieving good fit between two entities as a negative process of neutralizing the incongruities, or irritants, or forces, which cause misfit.

  • There is no intrinsic way of reducing the list of requirements to a few. Otherwise, we would be in possession of a field description of the context, which would trivialize the problem of creating fit i.e it’s no longer a problem of design.

Task of Design

  • The purpose is not to create form which meets certain conditions, but to create such an order in the ensemble that all the binary misfit variables take the value 0.

  • The part of the ensemble that we have control is taken to be the form.

  • It is only through form that we can create order in the ensemble.

Unselfconscious vs Selfconscious

  • A culture is unselfconscious if its form-making is learned informally through imitation and correction.

  • A culture is selfconscious if its form-making is taught academically according to explicit rules.

  • No complex adaptive system will succeed in adapting in a reasonable amount of time unless the adaptation can proceed subsystem by subsystem with each subsystem being relatively independent of the others.

  • Form-builders in unselfconscious cultures respond to small changes in a way that allows the subsystems of the misfit system to work independently, but since the selfconscious response to change cannot take place subsystem by subsystem, its forms are arbitrary.

  • The directness of the response to misfit ensures that each failure is corrected as soon as it occurs, and thereby restricts the change to one subsystem at a time.

  • The tradition of resisting needless change holds steady all the variables not in the relevant subsystem, and prevents those minor disturbances outside the subsystem from taking hold.

Concepts

  • Every concept can be defined and understood in two complementary ways.

  • Define a concept in extension when all the elements of the class it refers to are specified.

  • Define a concept in intension when trying to explain its meaning analytically in terms of other concepts at the same level.

  • The arbitrariness of the existing verbal concepts is not their only disadvantage, for once they are invented, we lose the ability to modify them.

Conditions to Solve a Problem by Selection

  • It must be possible to generate a wide enough range of possible alternative solutions symbolically.

  • It must be possible to express all the criteria of the solution in terms of the same symbolism.

Constructive Diagram

  • A form diagram is a description of formal characteristics.

  • A requirement diagram summarizes a set of functional properties or constraints i.e. a notation for the problem.

Misfit

  • A misfit is defined to be any state of affairs in the ensemble which derives from the interaction between form and context and stresses the ensemble.

    1. Actual World: C1 (Context) <–> F1 (Form)

    2. Mental Picture: C1 -> C2 <–> F2 -> F1

    3. Formal picture of mental picture: C1 -> C2 -> C3 <–> F3 -> F2 -> F1

Elements of the Ensemble

  • Properties of the elements of the ensemble.

    1. They must be chosen to be of equal space.

    2. They must be chosen to be as independent of one another as is reasonably possible.

    3. They must be chosen to be as small in scope as possible i.e. as specific and detailed and numerous as possible.

  • Two variables in the ensemble interact if and only if the designer can find some reason (or conceptual model) which makes sense to him and tells him why they should do so.

Component

  • Every component has a two-fold nature: it is first a unit, and second a pattern.

  • A unit makes an entity distinct from its surrounding.

  • A pattern specifies the arrangement of its own component units.

Decomposition Algorithm

Let misfit be represented by a binary stochastic variable equal to 1. Let each variable be associated with a probability \(p\) of taking on the value of \(0\). Denote the relationships between each variable as \(-1, 0, 1\) for negative, zero, and positive influence.

Partition the set of variables to minimize the information transfer between subsystems. The resulting two groups represent acceptable misfits (0) and misfits (1). Recursively partition over the subsystems until one system emerges.

References

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Christopher Alexander. Notes on the Synthesis of Form. Volume 5. Harvard University Press, 1964.