process
On Process
People get confused, companies get confused. When they start getting bigger, they want to replicate their initial success, and a lot of them think that somehow there’s some magic in the process that they’ve created. And so they start to institutionalize process across the company. And before very long people get very confused that the process is the content.
In my career I’ve found that the best people are the ones who really understand the content. And they’re a pain in the butt to manage. But you put up with it because they’re so great at the content. And that’s what makes great products. It’s not process, it’s content.
Just-in-time manufacturing
Get embedded in the team. Designers should use sprint planning, grooming, standup, and retro as opportunities to provide design to — and receive feedback from — the rest of the team. Designs can take the form of written or verbal descriptions, not just wireframes and high-fidelity mockups.
Only design what’s needed. Use constant communication between engineering and product partners to understand what your collaborators will need next. Then, plan on delivering only what is needed, and nothing more. Use the agile process — grooming, planning, and retro — to find any shortfalls or excesses.
Avoid creating a backlog of designs. Designs don’t age well. In the time between finishing design and shipping code, it’s likely that you’ll learn something new that changes your understanding. If you’re producing more design than can be implemented, focus more on the quality of each design.
How beautiful the world would be if there were a procedure for moving through labyrinths
Design skirmishes
it is apparent that the unfolding of the design process assumed a distinctly episodic structure, which we might characterize as a series of related skirmishes with various aspects of the problem at hand.
As the scope of the problem became more determined and finite for the designer, the episodic character of the process seems to have become less pronounced. During this period a systematic working out of issues and conditions took hold within the framework that had been established. This phenomenon is not at all surprising when we consider the fundamental difference between moments of problem solving when matters are poorly defined and those with clarity and sufficiency of structure.
Within the episodic structure of the process, the problem, as perceived by the designer, tends to fluctuate from being rather nebulous to being more specific and well-defined. Furthermore, moments of "blinding" followed by periods of backtracking take place, where blinding refers to conditions in which obvious connections between various considerations of importance go unrecognized by a designer.
How we can do better
It actually doesn't matter whether you actually have a formal retrospective. It doesn't matter whether you have four or five labels of things on your retro board, or exactly how you do the retro. What does matter is the notion of thinking about what we're doing and how we can do better, and it is the team that's doing the work that does this, that is the central thing.
Holistic and prescriptive technologies
Holistic technologies are normally associated with the notion of craft. Artisans, be they potters, weavers, metal-smiths, or cooks, control the process of their own work from beginning to finish. Using holistic technologies does not mean that people do not work together, but the way in which they work together leaves the individual worker in control of a particular process of creating or doing something.
The opposite is specialization by process; this I call prescriptive technology. Here, the making or doing of something is broken down into clearly identifiable steps. Each step is carried out by a separate worker, or group or workers, who need to be familiar only with the skills of performing that one step. This is what is normally meant by "division of labor".
That which requires caring
Today's real world of technology is characterized by the dominance of prescriptive technologies.
The temptation to design more or less everything according to prescriptive and broken-up technologies is so strong that it is even applied to those tasks that should be conducted in a holistic way. Any tasks that require caring, whether for people or nature, any tasks that require immediate feedback and adjustment, are best done holistically. Such tasks cannot be planed, coordinated, and controlled the way prescriptive tasks must be.
Prescriptive technologies eliminate the occasions for decision-making and judgment in general and especially for the making of principled decisions. Any goal of the technology is incorporated a priori in the design and is not negotiable.
Direct management
Direct Management does not include or permit the concept of profit to occur. The management is fee-based, or based as a fixed salary, and all construction costs are fixed ahead of time, and the building design is modified during construction, to make up any over-runs. The manager is not able to move money around at will, or put it in their pocket. At the same time, the design is approximately fixed, but with the understanding that it may be changed, during the evolution of the building, so that subtle adaptations can be included in the emerging building. In the Direct Management method it is the architect themselves and the direct manager who together manage the building works and all on-site construction for the owner.
Manifesto for Agile Software Development
A DefinitionWe are uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it and helping others do it. Through this work we have come to value:
- Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
- Working software over comprehensive documentation
- Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
- Responding to change over following a plan
That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more.
Deadlines are bullshit
An ArticleIn software development deadlines are a necessary evil. It is important to understand when they are necessary, and it is important to understand why they are evil.
- External vs. internal deadlines
- Why are internal deadlines evil?
- Engineers who love their work
The Design Diagram
An Idea by Charles Eames & Ray EamesThis Eames drawing, often referred to as the Design Diagram, was created for a 1969 exhibition at the Louvre entitled, What is Design? Charles and Ray mailed it to the exhibition curator to augment their answers to a series of questions she had posed.
In Defence of Intuition
An Essay by Boris MüllerDesign, it seems, is not only becoming more methodical but also more scientific. This is not surprising. Design as a discipline has moved from “product beautification” to being a central part of product development. It has incorporated methodologies from human-computer interaction, sociology, and anthropology as well as advertising and management. And with the rise of design thinking, a wider range of professional disciplines are using creative methods.
I don’t want to criticize design methodologies. But against the backdrop of an overly structured design process, it is important to remind our community that there is one fundamental aspect to design that cannot be formalized in a methodology. And that is intuition.
Why we need to stop over-complicating UX
An Article by Hugo FroesMany have become so focused on the process and methodologies that they’ve forgotten the fundamentals of why we started focusing on the user and what we hope to achieve with that focus.
Beyond Artboards
An Essay by Chuánqí SunThe Pursuit of Lossless Design-Development Handoffs.
Just-in-time Design
An Article by Matthew StrömThere is a disconnect between product design and product engineering.
The Hot Potato Process
An Article by Dan MallThe big misconception I’ve seen designers and developers often fall victim to is believing that handoff goes one way. Designers hand off comps to developers and think their work is done. That puts a lot of pressure on the designer to get everything perfect in one pass.
Instead, great collaboration follows what Brad Frost and I call “The Hot Potato Process,” where ideas are passed quickly back and forth from designer to developer and back to designer then back to developer for the entirety of a product creation cycle.
Building Momentum
An Article by Dan MallFight the Waterfall
Start all of the pieces of work a little bit earlier. The key to starting work early is not succumbing to the pressure of having to finish the work. Don’t worry about finishing. If you’re a developer, you can start doing things while your design or information architect are working because a lot of your work actually isn’t dependent on their work. Some of it is, so you probably won’t be able to finish, but that shouldn’t stop you from starting.
Share Work-in-Progress Early and Often
When you share work-in-progress, share it with the caveat that no feedback is needed at this point. You’re simply sharing it to let people know where you are. For example, if you have to make 12 wireframes, share it when you finish 2 or 3. Rather than spending a whole week to drop 12 wireframes, share 2 – 3 wireframes every 2 days. The more often you do this, you start to build rhythm, and rhythm builds momentum.
The care and feeding of software engineers (or, why engineers are grumpy)
An Article by Nicholas ZakasWe do say “no” very quickly, not just to designs, but to everything. That led me into thinking about the psychology of software engineers and what makes us the way we are.
The art of taking
A Quote"By making it possible for the photographer to observe his work and his subject simultaneously, and by removing most of the manipulative barriers between the photographer and the photograph, it is hoped that many of the satisfactions of working in the early arts can be brought to a new group of photographers. The process must be concealed from—non-existent for—the photographer, who by definition need think of the art in taking and not in making photographs. In short, all that should be necessary to get a good picture is to take a good picture, and our task is to make that possible."
— Edwin H. Land, co-founder of Polaroid
Painting With the Web
An Article by Matthias OttSo much about [Gerhard Richter's painting process] reminds me of designing and building for the Web: The unpredictability, the peculiarities of the material, the improvisation, the bugs, the happy accidents. There is one crucial difference, though. By using static wireframes and static layouts, by separating design and development, we are often limiting our ability to have that creative dialogue with the Web and its materials. We are limiting our potential for playful exploration and for creating surprising and novel solutions. And, most importantly, we are limiting our ability to make conscious, well-informed decisions going forward. By adding more and more layers of abstraction, we are breaking the feedback loop of the creative process.
Technical debt as a lack of understanding
An Article by Dave Rupert"If you develop a program for a long period of time by only adding features but never reorganizing it to reflect your understanding of those features, then eventually that program simply does not contain any understanding and all efforts to work on it take longer and longer.” — Ward Cunningham
The Death and Life of Great American Cities
Dead cities
If you can understand a city, then that city is dead.
The dishonest mask of pretended order
There is a quality even meaner than outright ugliness or disorder, and this meaner quality is the dishonest mask of pretended order, achieved by ignoring or suppressing the real order that is struggling to exist and to be served.
The plan must anticipate all that is needed
Ebenezer Howard set spinning powerful and city-destroying ideas: He conceived that the way to deal with the city’s functions was to sort and sift out of the whole certain simple uses, and to arrange each of these in relative self-containment.
And he conceived of good planning as a series of static acts; in each case the plan must anticipate all that is needed and be protected, after it is built, against any but the most minor subsequent changes.
The city's most vital organs
Streets and their sidewalks, the main public places of a city, are its most vital organs.
They serve many purposes besides carrying vehicles, and city sidewalks—the pedestrian parts of the streets—serve many purposes besides carrying pedestrians. These uses are bound up with circulation but are not identical with it and in their own right they are at least as basic as circulation to the proper workings of cities.
Eyes on the street
You can’t make people use streets they have no reason to use. You can’t make people watch streets they do not want to watch. Safety on the streets by surveillance and mutual policing of one another sounds grim, but in real life it is not grim. The safety of the street works best, most casually, and with least frequent taint of hostility or suspicion precisely where people are using and most enjoying the city streets voluntarily and are least conscious, normally, that they are policing.
The Great Blight of Dullness
Equipped to handle strangers
A city street equipped to handle strangers, and to make a safety asset, in itself, out of the presence of strangers, as the streets of successful city neighborhoods always do, must have three main qualities:
- First, there must be a clear demarcation between what is public space and what is private space.
- Second, there must be eyes upon the street, eyes belonging to those we might call the natural proprietors of the street.
- And third, the sidewalk must have users on it fairly continuously.
The sight of people attracts still other people
This last point, that the sight of people attracts still other people, is something that city planners and city architectural designers seem to find incomprehensible. They operate on the premise that city people seek the sight of emptiness, obvious order and quiet. Nothing could be less true—People’s love of watching activity and other people is constantly evident in cities everywhere.
This trait reaches an almost ludicrous extreme on upper Broadway in New York, where the street is divided by a narrow central mall, right in the middle of traffic. At the cross-street intersections of this long north-south mall, benches have been placed behind big concrete buffers and on any day when the weather is even barely tolerable these benches are filled with people at block after block after block, watching the pedestrians who cross the mall in front of them, watching the traffic, watching the people on the busy sidewalks, watching each other. Eventually Broadway reaches Columbia University and Barnard College, one to the right, the other to the left. Here all is obvious order and quiet, no more stores, no more activity generated by the stores, almost no more pedestrians crossing—and no more watchers. The benches are there but they go empty in even the finest weather. I have tried them and can see why. No place could be more boring. Even the students of these institutions shun the solitude. They are doing their outdoor loitering, outdoor homework and general street watching on the steps overlooking the busiest campus crossing.
Without effective eyes to see, does a light cast light?
Street lights can be like that famous stone that falls in the desert where there are no ears to hear. Does it make a noise? Without effective eyes to see, does a light cast light? Not for practical purposes.
I know the deep night ballet and its seasons best
This order is all composed of movement and change, and although it is life, not art, we may fancifully call it the art form of the city and liken it to the dance—not to a simple-minded precision dance with everyone kicking up at the same time, twirling in unison and bowing off en masse, but to an intricate ballet in which the individual dancers and ensembles all have distinctive parts which miraculously reinforce each other and compose an orderly whole. The ballet of the good city sidewalk never repeats itself from place to place, and in any one place is always replete with new improvisations.
Togetherness
“Togetherness” is a fittingly nauseating name for an old ideal in planning theory. This ideal is that if anything is shared among people, much should be shared. “Togetherness,” apparently a spiritual resource of the new suburbs, works destructively in cities. The requirement that much shall be shared drives city people apart.
When an area of a city lacks a sidewalk life, the people of the place must enlarge their private lives if they are to have anything approaching equivalent contact with their neighbors. They must settle for some form of “togetherness,” in which more is shared with one another than in the life of the sidewalks, or else they must settle for lack of contact. Inevitably the outcome is one or the other; it has to be; and either has distressing results.
City residential planning that depends, for contact among neighbors, on personal sharing of this sort, and that cultivates it, often does work well socially, if rather narrowly, for self-selected upper-middle-class people. It solves easy problems for an easy kind of population. So far as I have been able to discover, it fails to work, however, even on its own terms, with any other kind of population.
Self-appointed public characters
The social structure of sidewalk life hangs partly on what can be called self-appointed public characters. A public character is anyone who is in frequent contact with a wide circle of people and who is sufficiently interested to make himself a public character. A public character need have no special talents or wisdom to fulfill his function—although he often does. He just needs to be present, and there need to be enough of his counterparts. His main qualification is that he is public, that he talks to lots of different people. In this way, news travels that is of sidewalk interest.
If children are transferred from a lively city street
In real life, what significant change does occur if children are transferred from a lively city street to the usual park or to the usual public or project playground?
In most cases (not all, fortunately), the most significant change is this: The children have moved from under the eyes of a high numerical ratio of adults, into a place where the ratio of adults is low or even nil. To think this represents an improvement in city child rearing is pure daydreaming.
They act on their environment
Little tots are decorative and relatively docile, but older children are noisy and energetic, and they act on their environment instead of just letting it act on them. Since the environment is already “perfect” this will not do.
Men are not an abstraction
Placing work and commerce near residences, but buffering it off, in the tradition set by Garden City theory, is fully as matriarchal an arrangement as if the residences were miles away from work and from men. Men are not an abstraction. They are either around, in person, or they are not. Working places and commerce must be mingled right in with residences if men, like the men who work on or near Hudson Street, for example, are to be around city children in daily life—men who are part of normal daily life, as opposed to men who put in an occasional playground appearance while they substitute for women or imitate the occupations of women.
Wide sidewalks
The narrower the sidewalks, the more sedentary incidental play becomes.
Sidewalks thirty or thirty-five feet wide can accommodate virtually any demand of incidental play put upon them—along with trees to shade the activities, and sufficient space for pedestrian circulation and adult public sidewalk life and loitering. Few sidewalks of this luxurious width can be found. Sidewalk width is invariably sacrificed for vehicular width, partly because city sidewalks are conventionally considered to be purely space for pedestrian travel and access to buildings.
The boon of life and appreciation
Conventionally, neighborhood parks or parklike open spaces are considered boons conferred on the deprived populations of cities. Let us turn this thought around, and consider city parks deprived places that need the boon of life and appreciation conferred on them.
Indeterminate land oozes
City people would have to devote themselves to park use as if it were a business (or as the leisured indigent do) to justify, for example, the plethora of malls, promenades, playgrounds, parks and indeterminate land oozes afforded in typical Radiant Garden City schemes.
City districts with relatively large amounts of generalized park, like Morningside Heights or Harlem, seldom develop intense community focus on a park and intense love for it.
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.
Sentimentality plays with sweet intentions
Neighborhood is a word that has come to sound like a Valentine. As a sentimental concept, “neighborhood” is harmful to city planning. It leads to attempts at warping city life into imitations of town or suburban life. Sentimentality plays with sweet intentions in place of good sense.
We shall have something solid to chew on if we think of city neighborhoods as mundane organs of self-government. Our failures with city neighborhoods are, ultimately, failures in localized self-government. And our successes are successes at localized self-government.
The doctrine of salvation by bricks
When we try to justify good shelter instead on the pretentious grounds that it will work social or family miracles we fool ourselves. Reinhold Niebuhr has called this particular self-deception, “The doctrine of salvation by bricks.”
City neighborhoods cannot be self-contained
Whatever city neighborhoods may be, or may not be, and whatever usefulness they may have, or may be coaxed into having, their qualities cannot work at cross-purposes to thoroughgoing city mobility and fluidity of use, without economically weakening the city of which they are a part. The lack of either economic or social self-containment is natural and necessary to city neighborhoods—simply because they are parts of cities. Isaacs is right when he implies that the conception of neighborhood in cities is meaningless—so long as we think of neighborhoods as being self-contained units to any significant degree, modeled upon town neighborhoods.
City districts
Districts have to help bring the resources of a city down to where they are needed by street neighborhoods, and they have to help translate the experiences of real life, in street neighborhoods, into policies and purposes of their city as a whole. And they have to help maintain an area that is usable, in a civilized way, not only for its own residents but for other users—workers, customers, visitors—from the city as a whole.
To accomplish these functions, an effective district has to be large enough to count as a force in the life of the city as a whole. The “ideal” neighborhood of planning theory is useless for such a role. A district has to be big and powerful enough to fight city hall. Nothing less is to any purpose.
The "ideal" neighborhood
The “ideal” neighborhood of planning and zoning theory, too large in scale to possess any competence or meaning as a street neighborhood, is at the same time too small in scale to operate as a district. It is unfit for anything. It will not serve as even a point of departure. Like the belief in medical bloodletting, it was a wrong turn in the search for understanding.
Such places are forever way stations
Neighborhood accommodations for fixed, bodiless, statistical people are accommodations for instability. The people in them, as statistics, may stay the same. But the people in them, as people, do not. Such places are forever way stations.
The blind men who felt the elephant
It is so easy to fall into the trap of contemplating a city’s uses one at a time, by categories. Indeed, just this—analysis of cities, use by use—has become a customary planning tactic. The findings on various categories of use are then put together into “broad, overall pictures.”
The overall pictures such methods yield are about as useful as the picture assembled by the blind men who felt the elephant and pooled their findings. The elephant lumbered on, oblivious to the notion that he was a leaf, a snake, a wall, tree trunks and a rope all somehow stuck together.
Half as many people will not support half as many enterprises
In a given geographical territory, half as many people will not support half as many such enterprises spaced at twice the distance. When distance inconvenience sets in, the small, the various and the personal wither away.
Exuberant diversity in a city's streets
To generate exuberant diversity in a city’s streets and districts, four conditions are indispensable:
- The district, and indeed as many of its internal parts as possible, must serve more than one primary function; preferably more than two. These must insure the presence of people who go outdoors on different schedules and are in the place for different purposes, but who are able to use many facilities in common.
- Most blocks must be short; that is, streets and opportunities to turn corners must be frequent.
- The district must mingle buildings that vary in age and condition, including a good proportion of old ones so that they vary in the economic yield they must produce. This mingling must be fairly close-grained.
- There must be a sufficiently dense concentration of people, for whatever purposes they may be there. This includes dense concentration in the case of people who are there because of residence.
Primary uses
Any primary use whatever, by itself is relatively ineffectual as a creator of city diversity. If it is combined with another primary use that brings people in and out and puts them on the street at the same time, nothing has been accomplished. In practical terms, we cannot even call these differing primary uses.
Secondary diversity
Secondary diversity is a name for the enterprises that grow in response to the presence of primary uses, to serve the people the primary uses draw.
If secondary diversity flourishes sufficiently and contains enough that is unusual or unique, it seemingly can and does become, in its accumulation, a primary use itself. People come specifically for it. This is what happens in good shopping districts or even, to a humble extent, on Hudson Street.
A city's chessmen
One land-use economist, Larry Smith, has aptly called office buildings chess pieces. “You have used up those chess pieces already,” he is said to have told a planner who was trying to revitalize an unrealistic number of spots with dreamy plans for new office buildings. All primary uses, whether offices, dwellings or concert halls, are a city’s chessmen. Those that move differently from one another must be employed in concert to accomplish much. And as in chess, a pawn can be converted to a queen. But city building has this difference from chess: The number of pieces is not fixed by the rules. If well deployed, the pieces multiply.
Frequent streets are not an end in themselves
Frequent streets are not an end in themselves. They are a means toward an end. If that end—generating diversity and catalyzing the plans of many people besides planners—is thwarted by too repressive zoning, or by regimented construction that precludes the flexible growth of diversity, nothing significant can be accomplished by short blocks.
New ideas must use old buildings
Old ideas can sometimes use new buildings. New ideas must use old buildings.
The economic value of old buildings
But the economic value of old buildings is irreplaceable at will. It is created by time. This economic requisite for diversity is a requisite that vital city neighborhoods can only inherit, and then sustain over the years.
highdensityandovercrowding
They hated both equally, in any case, and coupled them like ham and eggs, so that to this day housers and planners pop out the phrase as if it were one word, “highdensityandovercrowding.”
Dwelling densities and diversity
The reason dwelling densities can begin repressing diversity if they get too high is this: At some point, to accommodate so many dwellings on the land, standardization of the buildings must set in. This is fatal, because great diversity in age and types of buildings has a direct, explicit connection with diversity of population, diversity of enterprises and diversity of scenes.
Among all the various kinds of buildings (old or new) in a city, some kinds are always less efficient than others in adding dwellings to the land. A three-story building will get fewer dwellings onto a given number of square feet of land than a five-story building; a five-story building, fewer than a ten-story building. If you want to go up far enough, the number of dwellings that can go onto a given plot of land is stupendous—as Le Corbusier demonstrated with his schemes for a city of repetitive skyscrapers in a park.
But in this process of packing dwellings on given acreages of land, it does not do to get too efficient, and it never did. There must be leeway for variety among buildings. All those variations that are of less than maximum efficiency get crowded out. Maximum efficiency, or anything approaching it, means standardization.
Scenes of thoroughgoing sameness
In places stamped with the monotony and repetition of sameness you move, but in moving you seem to have gotten nowhere.
North is the same as south, or east as west. Sometimes north, south, east and west are all alike, as they are when you stand within the grounds of a large project. It takes differences—many differences—cropping up in different directions to keep us oriented.
Scenes of thoroughgoing sameness lack these natural announcements of direction and movement, or are scantly furnished with them, and so they are deeply confusing. This is a kind of chaos.
Googie architecture
Where uses are in actual fact homogeneous, we often find that deliberate distinctions and differences are contrived among the buildings. But these contrived differences give rise to esthetic difficulties too. Because inherent differences—those that come from genuinely differing uses—are lacking among the buildings and their settings, the contrivances represent the desire merely to appear different.
Some of the more blatant manifestations of this phenomenon were well described, back in 1952, by Douglas Haskell, editor of Architectural Forum, under the term “googie architecture.” Googie architecture could then be seen in its finest flowering among the essentially homogeneous and standardized enterprises of roadside commercial strips: hot-dog stands in the shape of hot dogs, ice-cream stands in the shape of ice-cream cones. These are obvious examples of virtual sameness trying, by dint of exhibitionism, to appear unique and different from their similar commercial neighbors. Mr. Haskell pointed out that the same impulses to look special (in spite of not being special) were at work also in more sophisticated construction: weird roofs, weird stairs, weird colors, weird signs, weird anything.
Art is the one medium in which one cannot lie successfully
When we build, say, a business area in which all (or practically all) are engaged in earning their livings, or a residential area in which everyone is deep in the demands of domesticity, or a shopping area dedicated to the exchange of cash and commodities—in short, where the pattern of human activity contains only one element, it is impossible for the architecture to achieve a convincing variety—convincing of the known facts of human variation. The designer may vary color, texture and form until his drawing instruments buckle under the strain, proving once more that art is the one medium in which one cannot lie successfully.
The air doesn't know about zoning boundaries
Work uses suggest another bugaboo: reeking smokestacks and flying ash. Of course reeking smokestacks and flying ash are harmful, but it does not follow that intensive city manufacturing (most of which produces no such nasty by-products) or other work uses must be segregated from dwellings. Indeed, the notion that reek or fumes are to be combated by zoning and land-sorting classifications at all is ridiculous. The air doesn’t know about zoning boundaries. Regulations specifically aimed at the smoke or the reek itself are to the point.
The greatest flaw in city zoning
Raskin, in his essay on variety, suggested that the greatest flaw in city zoning is that it permits monotony. I think this is correct. Perhaps the next greatest flaw is that it ignores scale of use, where this is an important consideration, or confuses it with kind of use.
But then the knoll was gone
These banks were making the same mistake as a family I know who bought an acre in the country on which to build a house. For many years, while they lacked the money to build, they visited the site regularly and picnicked on a knoll, the site’s most attractive feature. They liked so much to visualize themselves as always there, that when they finally built they put the house on the knoll. But then the knoll was gone. Somehow they had not realized they would destroy it and lose it by supplanting it with themselves.
So many tactics, so well entrenched
I am going to deal with several subjects that, in themselves, are already well recognized as within the province of city planning: subsidized dwellings, traffic, city visual design, analytical methods. These are all matters for which conventional modern planning does have objectives and therefore does possess tactics—so many tactics, so well entrenched, that when their purposes are questioned they are generally justified in terms of the conditions laid down by still other tactics (e.g., We must do this for the purpose of getting the federal loan guarantees). We become the prisoners of our tactics, seldom looking behind them at the strategies.
A warning against the limitations of my own prescriptions
It is always necessary to check tactics against the specific needs that become evident in specific places. We should always be asking, “Does this device do the job needed here? And if not, what would?” Deliberate, periodic changes in tactics of subsidy would afford opportunity to meet new needs that become apparent over time, but that nobody can foresee in advance. This observation is, obliquely, a warning against the limitations of my own prescriptions in this book. I think they make sense for things as they are, which is the only place ever possible to begin. But that does not mean that they would make the best sense, or even good sense, after our cities had undergone substantial improvement and great increase in vitality.
Choked by their own redundancy
We went awry by replacing, in effect, each horse on the crowded city streets with half a dozen or so mechanized vehicles, instead of using each mechanized vehicle to replace half a dozen or so horses. The mechanical vehicles, in their overabundance, work slothfully and idle much. As one consequence of such low efficiency, the powerful and speedy vehicles, choked by their own redundancy, don’t move much faster than horses.
A city cannot be a work of art
There is a basic esthetic limitation on what can be done with cities: A city cannot be a work of art.
The order of life
Like the housers who face a blank if they try to think what to do besides income-sorting projects, or the highwaymen who face a blank if they try to think what to do besides accommodate more cars, just so, architects who venture into city design often face a blank in trying to create visual order in cities except by substituting the order of art for the very different order of life.
Complex systems of functional order
To see complex systems of functional order as order, and not as chaos, takes understanding. The leaves dropping from the trees in the autumn, the interior of an airplane engine, the entrails of a dissected rabbit, the city desk of a newspaper, all appear to be chaos if they are seen without comprehension. Once they are understood as systems of order, they actually look different.
Think better of it
This is, of course, the best way to salvage any kind of sorted-out project, up to the time it is actually built: Think better of it.
Places, services, techniques
It is not enough for administrators in most fields to understand specific services and techniques. They must understand, and understand thoroughly, specific places.
Nature, sentimentalized
Nature, sentimentalized and considered as the antithesis of cities, is apparently assumed to consist of grass, fresh air and little else, and this ludicrous disrespect results in the devastation of nature even formally and publicly preserved in the form of a pet.
The kind of problem a city is
Dr. Weaver lists three stages of development in the history of scientific thought: (1) ability to deal with problems of simplicity; (2) ability to deal with problems of disorganized complexity; and (3) ability to deal with problems of organized complexity.
The history of modern thought about cities is unfortunately very different from the history of modern thought about the life sciences. The theorists of conventional modern city planning have consistently mistaken cities as problems of simplicity and of disorganized complexity, and have tried to analyze and treat them thus.