permaculture

["Lawrence F. London, Jr." <lfl@intrex.net>]

This would be useful for permaculture systems designers as well as teachers 
of the design process.

Synthesis of Form
by Christopher W. Alexander

* Paperback: ; Dimensions (in inches): 0.62 x 8.22 x 5.34
* Publisher: Harvard Univ Pr; (June 1970)
* ISBN: 0674627512
$17.95 from Amazon.com
http://ez2find.com/go.php3?site=book&go=0195037537


Here's one of several very interesting reviews from the Amazon page for this 
book:


Customer Reviews
A summary, September 14, 2001
Reviewer: wayne-oh (see more about me) from Sudbury, MA United States

(Below is a series of quotes from the book, some of them slightly modified, plus a 
small number of "glue" sentences I've added to make
transitions smoother. My goal was to distill the key ideas in this 
exceptional book.)

"Every design problem begins with an effort to achieve fitness between two 
entities: the form in question and its context. The form is the
solution to the problem; the context defines the problem. We want to put the 
context and the form into effortless contact or frictionless
coexistence, i.e., we want to find a good fit.

For a good fit to occur in practice, one vital condition must be satisfied. 
It must have time to happen. In slow-changing, traditional,
unselfconscious cultures, a form is adjusted soon after each slight misfit 
occurs. If there was good fit at some stage in the past, no
matter how removed, it will have persisted, because there is an active 
stability at work. Tradition and taboo dampen and control the rate of
change in an unselfconscious culture's designs.

It is important to understand that the individual person in an 
unselfconscious culture needs no creative strength. He does not need to be
able to improve the form, only to make some sort of change when he notices a 
failure. The changes may not always be for the better; but it
is not necessary that they should be, since the operation of the process 
allows only the improvements to persist. Unselfconscious design is
a process of slow adaptation and error reduction.

In the unselfconscious process there is no possibility of misconstruing the 
situation. Nobody makes a picture of the context, so the picture
cannot be wrong. But the modern, selfconscious designer works entirely from a 
picture in his mind - a conceptualization of the forces at
work and their interrelationships - and this picture is almost always wrong.

To achieve in a few hours at the drawing board what once took centuries of 
adaptation and development, to invent a form suddenly which
clearly fits its context - the extent of invention necessary is beyond the 
individual designer. A designer who sets out to achieve an
adaptive good fit in a single leap is not unlike the child who shakes his 
glass-topped puzzle fretfully, expecting at one shake to arrange
the bits inside correctly. The designer's attempt is hardly as random as the 
child's is; but the difficulties are the same. His chances of
success are small because the number of factors which must fall 
simultaneously into place is so enormous.

The process of design, even when it has become selfconscious, remains a 
process of error-reduction. No complex system will succeed in
adapting in a reasonable amount of time or effort unless the adaptation can 
proceed component by component, each component relatively
independent of the others. The search for the right components, and the right 
way to build the form up from these components, is the
greatest challenge faced by the modern, selfconscious designer. The 
culmination of the modern designer's task is to make every unit of
design both a component and a system. As a component it will fit into the 
hierarchy of larger components that are above it; as a system it
will specify the hierarchy of smaller components of which it itself is made."


--
L.F.London
lfl@intrex.net
http://market-farming.com
http://www.ibiblio.org/ecolandtech