1. ⁘  ⁘  ⁘
  2. ⁘  ⁘  ⁘
  3. Abo, Akinori 9
  4. aesthetics 19
  5. agile 30
  6. Albers, Josef 17
  7. Alexander, Christopher 135
  8. Alexander, Scott 5
  9. Allsopp, John 4
  10. Ammer, Ralph 6
  11. Anderson, Gretchen 7
  12. anxiety 9
  13. Appleton, Maggie 5
  14. Aptekar-Cassels, Wesley 5
  15. Arango, Jorge 4
  16. architecture 110
  17. art 86
  18. Asimov, Isaac 5
  19. attention 17
  20. Auping, Michael 6
  21. Aurelius, Marcus 14
  22. Bachelard, Gaston 12
  23. Baker, Nicholson 10
  24. beauty 58
  25. Behrensmeyer, Anna K. 7
  26. Bell, Larry 3
  27. Bjarnason, Baldur 8
  28. Blake, William 5
  29. blogging 22
  30. body 11
  31. Boeing, Geoff 7
  32. boredom 9
  33. Botton, Alain de 38
  34. Brand, Stewart 4
  35. Bringhurst, Robert 16
  36. Brooks, Frederick P. 22
  37. Broskoski, Charles 6
  38. brutalism 7
  39. building 16
  40. bureaucracy 12
  41. Burnham, Bo 9
  42. business 15
  43. Byron, Lord 14
  44. Cagan, Marty 8
  45. Calvino, Italo 21
  46. Camus, Albert 13
  47. care 6
  48. Carruth, Shane 15
  49. Cegłowski, Maciej 6
  50. Cervantes, Miguel de 7
  51. chance 11
  52. change 16
  53. Chiang, Ted 4
  54. childhood 6
  55. Chimero, Frank 17
  56. choice 8
  57. cities 51
  58. Clark, Robin 3
  59. Cleary, Thomas 8
  60. Cleary, J.C. 8
  61. code 20
  62. collaboration 18
  63. collections 31
  64. Collison, Simon 3
  65. color 23
  66. commonplace 11
  67. communication 31
  68. community 7
  69. complexity 11
  70. connection 24
  71. constraints 25
  72. construction 9
  73. content 9
  74. Corbusier, Le 13
  75. Coyier, Chris 4
  76. craft 66
  77. creativity 59
  78. crime 9
  79. Critchlow, Tom 5
  80. critique 10
  81. Cross, Nigel 12
  82. Cross, Anita Clayburn 10
  83. css 11
  84. culture 13
  85. curiosity 11
  86. cycles 7
  87. Danielewski, Mark Z. 4
  88. darkness 28
  89. Darwin, Will 10
  90. data 8
  91. death 38
  92. Debord, Guy 6
  93. decisions 10
  94. design 131
  95. details 31
  96. Dickinson, Emily 9
  97. Dieste, Eladio 4
  98. discovery 9
  99. doors 7
  100. Dorn, Brandon 11
  101. drawing 23
  102. Drucker, Peter F. 15
  103. Duany, Andres 18
  104. Eatock, Daniel 4
  105. economics 13
  106. efficiency 7
  107. Eisenman, Peter 8
  108. Eliot, T.S. 14
  109. emotion 8
  110. ending 14
  111. engineering 11
  112. Eno, Brian 4
  113. ethics 14
  114. euphony 38
  115. Evans, Benedict 4
  116. evolution 9
  117. experience 14
  118. farming 8
  119. fashion 11
  120. features 25
  121. feedback 6
  122. flaws 10
  123. Flexner, Abraham 8
  124. food 16
  125. form 19
  126. Fowler, Martin 4
  127. Franklin, Ursula M. 30
  128. friendship 6
  129. fun 7
  130. function 31
  131. games 13
  132. gardens 26
  133. Garfield, Emily 4
  134. Garfunkel, Art 6
  135. geography 8
  136. geometry 18
  137. goals 9
  138. Gombrich, E. H. 4
  139. goodness 12
  140. Graham, Paul 37
  141. graphics 13
  142. Greene, Erick 6
  143. Hamming, Richard 45
  144. happiness 17
  145. Harford, Tim 4
  146. Harper, Thomas J. 15
  147. Hayes, Brian 28
  148. heat 7
  149. Heinrich, Bernd 7
  150. Herbert, Frank 4
  151. Heschong, Lisa 27
  152. Hesse, Herman 6
  153. history 13
  154. Hoffman, Yoel 10
  155. Hofstadter, Douglas 6
  156. home 15
  157. Hoy, Amy 4
  158. Hoyt, Ben 5
  159. html 11
  160. Hudlow, Gandalf 4
  161. humanity 16
  162. humor 6
  163. Huxley, Aldous 7
  164. hypermedia 22
  165. i 18
  166. ideas 21
  167. identity 33
  168. images 10
  169. industry 9
  170. information 42
  171. infrastructure 17
  172. innovation 15
  173. interaction 10
  174. interest 10
  175. interfaces 37
  176. intuition 8
  177. invention 10
  178. Irwin, Robert 65
  179. Isaacson, Walter 28
  180. Ishikawa, Sara 33
  181. iteration 13
  182. Ive, Jonathan 6
  183. Jackson, Steven J. 14
  184. Jacobs, Jane 54
  185. Jacobs, Alan 5
  186. Jobs, Steve 20
  187. Jones, Nick 5
  188. Kahn, Louis 4
  189. Kakuzō, Okakura 23
  190. Kaufman, Kenn 4
  191. Keith, Jeremy 6
  192. Keller, Jenny 10
  193. Kelly, Kevin 3
  194. Keqin, Yuanwu 8
  195. Ketheswaran, Pirijan 6
  196. Kingdon, Jonathan 5
  197. Kitching, Roger 7
  198. Klein, Laura 4
  199. Kleon, Austin 13
  200. Klinkenborg, Verlyn 24
  201. Klyn, Dan 20
  202. knowledge 29
  203. Kohlstedt, Kurt 12
  204. Kramer, Karen L. 10
  205. Krishna, Golden 10
  206. Kuma, Kengo 18
  207. language 20
  208. learning 30
  209. life 59
  210. light 31
  211. loneliness 12
  212. love 25
  213. Lovell, Sophie 16
  214. Lupton, Ellen 11
  215. Luu, Dan 8
  216. Lynch, Kevin 12
  217. MacIver, David R. 8
  218. MacWright, Tom 5
  219. Magnus, Margaret 12
  220. making 77
  221. management 14
  222. Manaugh, Geoff 27
  223. Markson, David 16
  224. Mars, Roman 13
  225. material 39
  226. math 16
  227. McCarter, Robert 21
  228. meaning 33
  229. media 16
  230. melancholy 51
  231. memory 28
  232. metaphor 10
  233. metrics 19
  234. microsites 49
  235. Miller, J. Abbott 10
  236. Mills, C. Wright 9
  237. minimalism 10
  238. Miyazaki, Hayao 30
  239. Mod, Craig 15
  240. modularity 6
  241. Mollison, Bill 31
  242. morality 8
  243. Murakami, Haruki 21
  244. music 16
  245. Müller, Boris 7
  246. Naka, Toshiharu 8
  247. names 11
  248. Naskrecki, Piotr 5
  249. nature 51
  250. networks 15
  251. Noessel, Christopher 7
  252. notetaking 35
  253. novelty 11
  254. objects 16
  255. order 10
  256. ornament 9
  257. Orwell, George 7
  258. Ott, Matthias 4
  259. ownership 6
  260. Pallasmaa, Juhani 41
  261. Palmer, John 8
  262. patterns 11
  263. Patton, James L. 9
  264. Pawson, John 21
  265. perception 22
  266. perfection 7
  267. performance 17
  268. Perrine, John D. 9
  269. Petroski, Henry 24
  270. philosophy 6
  271. photography 20
  272. physics 6
  273. Pinker, Steven 8
  274. place 14
  275. planning 15
  276. Plater-Zyberk, Elizabeth 18
  277. poetry 13
  278. politics 9
  279. Pollan, Michael 6
  280. practice 10
  281. problems 31
  282. process 22
  283. production 7
  284. productivity 12
  285. products 21
  286. programming 9
  287. progress 16
  288. Pye, David 42
  289. quality 26
  290. questions 8
  291. Radić, Smiljan 20
  292. Rams, Dieter 16
  293. Rao, Venkatesh 14
  294. reading 16
  295. reality 13
  296. Reichenstein, Oliver 5
  297. religion 11
  298. Rendle, Robin 12
  299. repair 28
  300. research 17
  301. Reveal, James L. 4
  302. Richards, Melanie 3
  303. Richie, Donald 10
  304. Rougeux, Nicholas 4
  305. Rowe, Peter G. 10
  306. Rupert, Dave 4
  307. Ruskin, John 5
  308. Satyal, Parimal 9
  309. Saval, Nikil 13
  310. Sayers, Dorothy 32
  311. Schaller, George B. 7
  312. Schwulst, Laurel 5
  313. science 17
  314. seeing 36
  315. Sennett, Richard 45
  316. senses 11
  317. Seuss, Dr. 14
  318. Shakespeare, William 4
  319. Shorin, Toby 8
  320. silence 9
  321. Silverstein, Murray 33
  322. Simms, Matthew 19
  323. Simon, Paul 6
  324. simplicity 14
  325. Singer, Ryan 12
  326. skill 17
  327. Sloan, Robin 5
  328. Smith, Cyril Stanley 29
  329. Smith, Justin E. H. 6
  330. Smith, Rach 4
  331. socializing 7
  332. society 23
  333. software 68
  334. solitude 12
  335. Somers, James 8
  336. Sorkin, Michael 56
  337. sound 14
  338. space 20
  339. Speck, Jeff 18
  340. spirit 10
  341. streets 10
  342. structure 13
  343. Strunk, William 15
  344. Ström, Matthew 13
  345. style 30
  346. Sun, Chuánqí 15
  347. symbols 12
  348. systems 18
  349. Sōetsu, Yanagi 34
  350. Sōseki, Natsume 8
  351. Tanaka, Tomoyuki 9
  352. Tanizaki, Jun'ichirō 15
  353. taste 10
  354. Taylor, Dorian 16
  355. teaching 21
  356. teamwork 17
  357. technology 41
  358. texture 7
  359. thinking 31
  360. Thoreau, Henry David 8
  361. time 54
  362. Tolkien, J.R.R. 6
  363. tools 32
  364. touch 8
  365. transportation 16
  366. Trombley, Nick 44
  367. truth 15
  368. Tufte, Edward 31
  369. Turrell, James 6
  370. typography 25
  371. understanding 32
  372. urbanism 68
  373. ux 100
  374. Victor, Bret 9
  375. Viollet-le-Duc, Eugène 4
  376. vision 7
  377. visualization 34
  378. Voltaire 4
  379. wabi-sabi 8
  380. walking 23
  381. Wallace, David Foster 33
  382. Wang, Shawn 6
  383. war 7
  384. waste 12
  385. Watterson, Bill 4
  386. Webb, Matt 14
  387. Wechler, Lawrence 37
  388. whimsy 11
  389. White, E.B. 15
  390. Wirth, Niklaus 6
  391. wisdom 20
  392. Wittgenstein, Ludwig 7
  393. Woolf, Virginia 11
  394. words 35
  395. work 81
  396. writing 55
  397. Wurman, Richard Saul 18
  398. www 88
  399. Yamada, Kōun 5
  400. Yamashita, Yuhki 4
  401. Yudkowsky, Eliezer 17
  402. zen 38
  403. ⁘  ⁘  ⁘
  404. About
  405. RSS Feed
  406. Source

Evolution & Change

Close
  • 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