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patterns

Close
  • Only when it has ceased to be a pattern

    Here I would like to append three lines in praise of muji:

    A pattern that is not a pattern is a true pattern.
    Create patterns until they are no longer patterns.
    The true pattern is a patternless pattern.

    When creating a pattern, one’s heart must also be muji. A pattern must be followed through until it is no longer a pattern. It is a true pattern only when it has ceased to be a pattern.

    Yanagi Sōetsu, The Japanese Perspective
    • zen
    • patterns
  • Dwelling in ritual

    Even a dwelling is a device that generates a distinct pattern of daily activities and their relationships. Some buildings are explicitly built for ritual, but the repetition of any activity, either mundane or religious, tends to ritualize them, and by facilitating this, an architectural structure can turn gradually – sometimes even unnoticeably – into an instrument of ritual.

    Robert McCarter & Juhani Pallasmaa, Understanding Architecture
    1. ​​White cloth​​
    • ritual
    • patterns
    • religion
  • Rain Chains & Musical Drains

    Image from 99percentinvisible.org on 2020-10-02 at 10.30.32 AM.jpeg
    Image from 99percentinvisible.org on 2020-10-02 at 10.30.39 AM.jpeg
    Image from 99percentinvisible.org on 2020-10-02 at 10.30.43 AM.jpeg
    Image from 99percentinvisible.org on 2020-10-02 at 10.30.32 AM.jpeg

    A rain chain in winter; Dresden Kunsthof Passage; Drainage planters near Pike Place Market in Seattle.

    If there is a larger takeaway here perhaps it is about paths of least resistance, with regards to both the actual flow of water and design decisions. On the one hand, it is easy to blindly follow regional precedents and traditions with long histories (or grab whatever is handy at the hardware store). On the other hand, sometimes it makes sense to take a step back and decide consciously how to reveal (or conceal) a natural process.

    Roman Mars & Kurt Kohlstedt, 99% Invisible
    99percentinvisible.org
    1. ​​Rain chains​​
    • water
    • architecture
    • details
    • patterns
  • Intricacy, centering, sun, enclosure

    Parks intensely used in generalized public-yard fashion tend to have four elements in their design which I shall call intricacy, centering, sun and enclosure.

    Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities
    • patterns
    • parks
  • The scale of resolution determines what is seen

    The patterns of Truchet's tiles appear at first glance as variously shaped interlocked regions of black and white, the boundaries between the square tiles being submerged whenever the two regions flanking them have the same color, just as in a real floor the air or cement between the tile edges is not perceived—until one looks closely. The scale of resolution determines what is seen.

    Cyril Stanley Smith, The Tiling Patterns of Sebastien Truchet and the Topology of Structural Hierarchy
    1. ​​Levels of Scale​​
    • patterns
    • scale
  • Fabric

    And finally, the things which seem like elements dissolve, and leave a fabric of relationships behind, which is the stuff that actually repeats itself, and gives the structure to a building or a town.

    Christopher Alexander, The Timeless Way of Building
    • connection
    • urbanism
    • patterns
  • Simple variations of the parts

    Symmetry, indeed, has been grossly overemphasized in both art and science: its main value is in giving meaning to its absence, dissymmetry, without which there could be no hierarchy.

    The eye is repulsed by complexity if no order is detected, but it can be delighted by repetition, translation, rotation, reflection, magnification, and other simple variations of the parts.

    Cyril Stanley Smith, A Search for Structure
    • geometry
    • patterns
  • patternsof.design

    A Website by Nick Trombley
    patternsof.design
    Screenshot of patternsof.design on 2020-08-26 at 2.30.29 PM.png
    1. ​​A Pattern Language​​
    2. ​​The Timeless Way of Building​​
    • patterns
    • microsites
  • Drawing pictures of cities

    An Article by Noah Smith
    noahpinion.substack.com
    Image from noahpinion.substack.com on 2021-07-24 at 1.33.54 PM.jpeg

    This is a famous picture by the artist Imperial Boy (帝国少年), who works in the anime industry. I sometimes claim that the entire genre of solarpunk is simply a riff on this picture.

    If it’s not just “trees on buildings”, where does the Imperial Boy picture get its magic? Looking at it carefully and trying to analyze what I like about it, I think that much of it is about architecture, and even more of it is about the use of urban space — about how the structures in the picture shape the kinds of things you’d do if you were there. For example, here are five things I like:

    1. Open, walkable multi-level retail
    2. River with low bank
    3. Walkable streets
    4. Varied architecture
    5. Shade
    1. ​​251. Different Chairs​​
    2. ​​Suburban Nation​​
    3. ​​Towers in the Village​​
    • urbanism
    • patterns
    • streets
  • Collaborative Information Architecture at Scale

    An Article by Brandon Dorn
    www.viget.com

    Here I describe an approach for defining new information architectures for large organizational websites managed by many stakeholder groups.

    Broadly speaking, there are four general phases to the approach:

    1. Auditing. Begin by immersing yourself in existing content and encourage stakeholders to adopt a critical, audience-minded perspective of their content.
    2. Diagramming. Work with stakeholders to develop new conceptual categories that better serve audiences and organizational direction.
    3. Elaborating. Think through content in detail and test new categories against specific instances and edge cases.
    4. Producing. Prepare content teams for production using a shared database of new sitemap pages and editorial considerations that you’ve developed incrementally.
    1. ​​Half of design is facilitation​​
    1. ​​The Ladder of Abstraction​​
    2. ​​A Pattern Language​​
    • decisions
    • organization
    • patterns
    • analytics

    The process Dorn describes here reminds me a lot of Alexander's process for developing a pattern language. Also uses Airtable, which is an automatic win in my book.

  • The design systems between us

    A Talk by Ethan Marcotte
    www.youtube.com

    In the early days, design systems promised us more consistent interfaces, more collaborative teams, and improved shipping times. While they’ve certainly delivered on some of those fronts, they’ve introduced new challenges too. Let’s talk through what’s working well—and what could be working better—as we take a closer look at the systems between us and our work.

    1. ​​Systems, Mistakes, and the Sea​​
    2. ​​A Pattern Language​​
    3. ​​The Real World of Technology​​
    • www
    • systems
    • patterns
    • design

See also:
  1. urbanism
  2. ritual
  3. religion
  4. geometry
  5. connection
  6. microsites
  7. scale
  8. parks
  9. water
  10. architecture
  11. details
  12. www
  13. systems
  14. design
  15. decisions
  16. organization
  17. analytics
  18. zen
  19. streets
  1. Cyril Stanley Smith
  2. Robert McCarter
  3. Juhani Pallasmaa
  4. Christopher Alexander
  5. Nick Trombley
  6. Jane Jacobs
  7. Roman Mars
  8. Kurt Kohlstedt
  9. Ethan Marcotte
  10. Brandon Dorn
  11. Yanagi Sōetsu
  12. Noah Smith