More notes on A Pattern Language (also see November 19th below).
- Patterns make up a living language that should evolve with use.
- “The Timeless Way of Building” says that every society, and even every individual, will have its own pattern language, shared but distinct. So our effort should not be to find the best language for a particular field but the best language for our own work.
- Our present language is framented and brutal, hindering our communication and design process.
- Though in use the user will follow a sequence of larger (more general) to smaller (more specific) patterns, the language itself is a network, with many connections in all directions.
- Patterns can be combined with more or less density as we would a spoken language, creating design more like prose or more like poetry.