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  11. Anderson, Gretchen 7
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  28. blogging 23
  29. body 11
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  33. Botton, Alain de 38
  34. Brand, Stewart 4
  35. Bringhurst, Robert 16
  36. Brooks, Frederick P. 22
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  38. brutalism 7
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  40. bureaucracy 12
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  43. Byron, Lord 14
  44. Cagan, Marty 8
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  50. chance 11
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  53. childhood 6
  54. Chimero, Frank 17
  55. choice 8
  56. cities 51
  57. Cleary, Thomas 8
  58. Cleary, J.C. 8
  59. code 20
  60. Coelho, Paulo 31
  61. collaboration 18
  62. collections 31
  63. color 23
  64. commonplace 11
  65. communication 31
  66. community 7
  67. complexity 11
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  69. constraints 25
  70. construction 9
  71. content 9
  72. Corbusier, Le 13
  73. Coyier, Chris 4
  74. craft 67
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  76. crime 9
  77. Critchlow, Tom 5
  78. critique 10
  79. Cross, Nigel 12
  80. Cross, Anita Clayburn 10
  81. css 11
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  84. cycles 7
  85. Danielewski, Mark Z. 4
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  90. Debord, Guy 6
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  94. destiny 6
  95. details 31
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  103. Drucker, Peter F. 15
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  115. euphony 38
  116. Evans, Benedict 4
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  176. intuition 9
  177. invention 10
  178. Irwin, Robert 65
  179. Isaacson, Walter 28
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  181. iteration 13
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  183. Jackson, Steven J. 14
  184. Jacobs, Jane 54
  185. Jacobs, Alan 5
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  192. Keller, Jenny 10
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  224. material 39
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  227. meaning 33
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  229. melancholy 53
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  232. metrics 19
  233. microsites 49
  234. Miller, J. Abbott 10
  235. Mills, C. Wright 9
  236. minimalism 10
  237. Miyazaki, Hayao 30
  238. Mod, Craig 15
  239. modularity 6
  240. Mollison, Bill 31
  241. morality 8
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  246. names 11
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  248. nature 51
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Evolution & Change

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  • The role of history in structures

    Although the ideal crystal lattice of a substance at equilibrium depends only on its composition and temperature, all other aspects of the structure of a given bit of polycrystalline matter depends upon history…the manner in which the crystals impinge to produce the grain boundary as a new element of structure which itself changes shape in accordance with its properties and the particular local geometry resulting from historical accidents. Far more complex, but in principle similar, things occur in biological and social organizations.

    Structure, Substructure, and Superstructure
    • evolution
    • growth

    And designed systems/objects?

  • Form follows failure

    Imagining how the form of things as seemingly simple as eating utensils might have evolved demonstrates the inadequacy of a "form follows function" argument to serve as a guiding principle for understanding how artifacts have come to look the way they do. Reflecting on how the form of the knife and fork has developed, let alone how vastly divergent are the ways in which Eastern and Western cultures have solved the identical design problem of conveying food to mouth, really demolishes any overly deterministic argument, for clearly there is no unique solution to the elementary problem of eating.

    What form does follow is the real and perceived failure of things as they are used to do what they are supposed to do. Clever people in the past, whom today we might call inventors, designers, or engineers, observed the failure of existing things to function as well as might be imagined. By focusing on the shortcomings of things, innovators altered those items to remove the imperfections, thus producing new, improved objects. Different innovators in different places, starting with rudimentary solutions to the same basic problem, focused on different faults at different times, and so we have inherited culture-specific artifacts that are daily reminders that even so primitive a function as eating imposes no single form on the implements used to effect it.

    Henry Petroski, The Evolution of Useful Things
    1. ​​Against form follows function​​
    2. ​​Form follows function​​
    • evolution
  • Deliberate acts

    I do not know what one should call the landscape of a long cultivated countryside, or the enchanting pattern of lights which shows at night time in a modern city seen from overhead. Are these not works of art? It is scarcely justifiable to say that these things have taken shape by chance. Each part of them has been made as it is by what seemed a deliberate act, and it need not necessarily be assumed to be a matter of chance that the results of many acts of many men over a considerably period of time should harmonize together aesthetically.

    David Pye, The Nature and Aesthetics of Design
    1. ​​The Timeless Way of Building​​
    2. ​​A Pattern Language​​
    • evolution
    • urbanism
  • It must constantly be re-created

    A language is a living language only when each person in society, or in the town, has his own version of this language.

    To reach this deeper state, in which each person has a pattern language in his mind as an expression of his attitude to life, we cannot expect people just to copy patterns from a book. A living language must constantly be re-created in each person’s mind. As he modifies his language, and improves it, depends it, throughout his life - he does it, always, by creating, and improving rules which he invents.

    Once people share a language in this way, the language will begin evolving of its own accord. The language will evolve, because it can evolve piecemeal, one pattern at a time. As people exchange ideas about the environment, and exchange patterns, the overall inventory of patterns in the pattern pool keeps changing.

    Of course, this evolution will never end.

    Christopher Alexander, The Timeless Way of Building
    • evolution
  • Big things and little things

    It is hardly possible that human beings could have decided logically that they needed to develop language in order to communicate with each other before they had experienced pleasurable interactive communal activities like singing and dancing. Aesthetic curiosity has been central to both genetic and cultural evolution.

    All big things grow from little things, but new little things will be destroyed by their environment unless they are cherished for reasons more like love than purpose.

    Cyril Stanley Smith, A Search for Structure
    • aesthetics
    • evolution
    • words
  • To evolve the language itself

    So in the process of talking, we might say we are putting words in slightly new contexts, and then testing them against our peers to see if our experiment in juxtaposition had ‘meaning. If we succeed, we have introduced new contexts for the words we use. These contexts will be taken up by our listeners, and will gradually become clearly enough defined to be thought of as referents. Once our words gain new referents, they start affecting the underlying phonosemantic structure of the language, the clustering patterns, the network of semantic relations. That is, the purpose of talking in the long run is to evolve the language itself.

    Margaret Magnus, Gods of the Word
    • evolution
  • A gradual refinement

    IMG_3421.jpeg

    The steel rail is an artifact whose form has been carefully optimized. This gradual refinement of the design was done not by a single brilliant engineer but by more than a century of industrial evolution. The rail was never meant to be an object of beauty, but its cross section has all the elegance of fine typography.

    Brian Hayes, Infrastructure: A Guide to the Industrial Landscape
    • elegance
    • typography
    • transportation
    • evolution
    • change
  • Mechanisms and organisms

    "Kant described a mechanism as a functional unity, in which the parts exist for one another in the performance of a particular function.

    An organism, on the other hand, is a functional and structural unity in which the parts exist for and by means of one another in the expression of a particular nature.

    This means that the parts of an organism – leaves, roots, flowers, limbs, eyes, heart, brain – are not made independently and then assembled, as in a machine, but arise as a result of interactions within the developing organism."

    — Brian Goodwin, How the Leopard Changed His Spots

    Ursula M. Franklin, The Real World of Technology
    • nature
    • evolution
    • growth
    • design
    • function
  • Stepping stones in possibility space

    An Article by Gordon Brander
    subconscious.substack.com

    If we try to cross this lake by following only the stepping stones that lead toward our objective, we’ll soon get stuck. But what if we let go of our objectives? What if we focused on trying to find new stepping stones instead? This is novelty search. Instead of looking for something specific, you look for something new.

    Novelty search isn’t just random, it’s chance plus memory. Together, these ingredients do something interesting.

    ...Stepping stones are also combinatorial. Each new stepping stone we discover expands our potential to find even more stepping stones. Collecting stepping stones is a luck maximization algorithm. By collecting and combining stepping stones, we might arrive at our destination by accident, or somewhere more interesting!

    • chance
    • knowledge
    • progress
    • novelty
    • evolution
    • invention

See also:
  1. growth
  2. urbanism
  3. aesthetics
  4. words
  5. elegance
  6. typography
  7. transportation
  8. change
  9. nature
  10. design
  11. function
  12. chance
  13. knowledge
  14. progress
  15. novelty
  16. invention
  1. David Pye
  2. Christopher Alexander
  3. Cyril Stanley Smith
  4. Margaret Magnus
  5. Brian Hayes
  6. Ursula M. Franklin
  7. Henry Petroski
  8. Gordon Brander