Designed as Designer Expanded

8/9/2019 Designed as Designer Expanded

1/17

1

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-

Share Alike 3.0 United States License. To view a copy of this license, visit

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/

or send a letter to

Creative Commons

171 Second Street, Suite 300

San Francisco, California, 94105, USA.

Abstract

Conceptual integrity arises not (simply) rom one mindor rom a small number o agreeing resonant minds, butrom sometimes hidden co-authors and the thing designeditsel.

Categories and Subject Descriptors A.0 [General]General Terms Design

Keywords Conceptual integrity, design

t

Morning oods Firenzethe sun stains roos, heat andsmoke clog the sky in red. Noise starts at dawn or just be-ore; the smell never stops.

Pippo is long up, and beore his mother begins cookinghes halway to the build site where he sees bricklayers, cart-ers, and leadbeaters already gathering, carrying their toolsand leather bags o rough meals. Coals are being ued

to blacksmoke fres and then burning hell or the black-smiths orge and another day o repairing tools. Stealthycooks steal the blacksmiths ames with tapers to start theircookstoves to eed the cratsmen throughout the loomingmidsummers day.

Pippo joins a parade o oxcarts bearing bags o sand andlime, and next to him a merchant lugs a wicker rucksacko wine on his back. Pippos urge is to watch the treadmillhoists and cranes lit their frst loads o the day to the topo the nave. The great cathedral o Firenze.

t

The central problemis to get conceptual integrity

in the design itsel

Fred Brooks told us in his sweet southern voiceMon-tral, OOPSLA 2007, during his keynote [1]. I recalled a

Designed as Designer

comment I heard at Bread Loa back in the 90s, ater LarryBrown readthe late fction writer rom Oxord, Mississip-pithat anything sounds 10 times more true when spokenby someone with a southern accent. As Brooks spokemostly o the cuand paced slowly away rom the podium

and back, I ell under his spellas I suppose did most o hisaudience. He went on:

I we look back then at the 19th century and thethings that happenedthe cartwright and the tex-tile machinery, Stephenson (the train), Brunelsbridges and railway, Edison , Ford, the Wright broth-ers, etcthese were very largely the designs o sin-

gle designers or, in the case o the Wright brothers,pairs. [1]

Read that paragraph aloud and youll hear the rhythm ohis speaking. I wanted very much to believe every word hesaidhes Fred Brooks ater all. The Mythical Man Month.

OS/360. And why not?nothing sounds o, and its certainhes done his homework. Ill quote him at length now:

Now i we look back at the history o human pro-duction and culture, most works o art have not been

made [by teams]. And thats true whether we look at

literature, whether we look at musicalthough wehave Gilbert and Sullivan; notice that one did thewords and one did the musicBrunelleschis dome,

Michelangelos tremendous works, the paintingsthere are some paintings by two painters; one didthe creatures and one did the landscape kinda thing,

this careul division o laborand the exceptions

to the notion that most o the great works we knowo were done by one mind are in act done by twominds and not by teams. [1]

Fred Brooks imagines an ideal when he thinks o design:conceptual integrity arising rom a single mind creatinga design. Brooks once wrote conceptual integrity is themost important consideration in system design, [2] andby conceptual integrity he means one set o design ideas.

Every part must reect the same philosophies and the same

Richard P. Gabriel

IBM Research

Hawthorne, New York USA

dreamsongs.com

us.ibm.com

{rpg@


2/17

2

balancing o desiderata [2]. Conceptual integritydictatesthat the design must proceed rom one mind, or rom a smallnumber o agreeing resonant minds [2].

modern scholars now recognize that the workso Homerarethe works o one mind.[T]he im-

portant poem Beowul isa literary worko onemind.

As I say the exceptions are two, and two is a magic

number. There are many, many jobs in the worldthat are designed or two people: the carpenter andthe carpenters helper, the electrician and the elec-tricians helper. And I think our Lord knew what Hewas doing when He made marriage work or two.

But now lets look at some o these magnifcentworks.

Brunelleschis domeand many o you have read

the bookwas a tremendous creation, technicallybeyond what people believed possible. He had to pro-

duce a working scale model beore the people buyingthe project would even believe that it could be built.

And notice the scale o this building in comparisonwith the surrounding buildings. [1]

Fred Brooks went on to speak o why we need to designin teams. He gave three reasons: the frst is that engineer-ing is now sufciently sophisticated that specialists are re-quired to create the designs. The third is that many handsmake light workthat is, it helps to break up an enormoustask into smaller ones that are more readily achieved. Hereis how he phrased the second reason:

Now, the second major reason why we do thingsin teams is hurry to get to market. We all know therule that the rst person to market with a totally

new innovation tends to stabilize out with 40 or45 percent o the share, and the rest is divided upamong the come latelys. [1]

When Brooks said this it tweaked a memory rom the days

when I was creating arguments or and against a theoryI whimsically proposed in 1991, now known as worse isbetter. That theory argues that the best and most endur-ing productsand their designsarise rom producing an

adequate design and implementation, and then making itavailable and putting it to use so its users have an opportu-nity to contribute to its uture refnement. In short its a wayto learn the real requirements beore its too late.

While working out the arguments, I became interestedin the arc rom conception to usage or all sorts o thingssotware, consumer goods, and even works o art. Whileexploring this I stumbled across the work o Gerard J. Tel-lis and Peter N. Golder, two business researchers who con-cluded that the dictumfrst to marketis really a myth [3].

A myth created by poor research methodology and impre-cise defnitions.

First the shocking truth: looking at 66 categories o busi-nesses, Tellis and Golder ound that the mean market shareo the pioneer companies is 6% (as o the year 2000) . O the36 categories where the pioneer entered their market beore

1940, the market share is 6%; or categories frst entered be-tween 1940 and 1974, it is 10%; and a ter 1974 it is 4%. Thisis a long way o rom 40 to 45 percent.

Now the reasons. Studies beore Tellis and Golder made3 atal errors. First, even when they tried to be objective, in-vestigators usually ignored pioneers who ailed completelyor let the market. For example, many consider Gillette thepioneer in saety razors, but in act Gillette is merely theoldest surviving player in that market. The saety razorhad been patented and was sold by several companies de-cades beore Gillette was ounded, and an early design orthe saety razor had been created a century beore Gillettecame on the scene.

Second, many studies suer rom sel-report bias. Inves-tigators in such studies survey companies currently in themarket and rely on those companies telling the researchers

who the pioneers are/were. Procter & Gamble, or example,claims to be the disposable diaper pioneer: P&G reports it

literally created the disposable diaper business in the U.S.[4]. Yet, or decades beore Pampers came along, other com-panies sold disposable diapers: the pioneer was a companycalled Chux, which introduced disposables in 1934. Pampersentered the market in 1961.

Third, there are defnitional problems with some surveystrying to determine frst-to-market advantage. For exam-

ple, Wang dominated the word processor market or a longtime, where a word processor was defned as a dedicatedword processing machine. Another is to defne as pioneera company that entered a market early in its history. Thisis why Gillette is considered a pioneer in the saety razorbusiness.

Brookss statement also seemed odd because I knew thathe knows about this eect. In the 20th anniversary editionoThe Mythical Man-Month, he wrote:

One o the most impressive developments in sot-ware during the past two decades has been the tri-umph o the Windows, Icons, Menus, Pointing in-

terace. This concept was frst publicly displayedby Doug Engelbart and his team rom the Stanord

Research Institute at the Western Joint Computer

Conerence o 1968. From there the ideas went to Xe-rox Palo Alto Research Center, where they emergedin the Alto personal workstation, developed by BobTaylor and team. They were picked up by Steve Jobs

or the Apple Lisa, a computer too slow to carryits exciting ease-o-use concepts. These concepts

Jobs then embodied in the commercially success-


3/17

3

ul Apple Macintosh in 1985. They were later ad-opted in Microsot Windows or the IBM PC andcompatibles. [2]

O course, this history ignores Sketchpad [5] and possi-bly even earlier ideas, as well as contemporaries o the Alto

like the MIT Lisp Machine.But getting back to Brookss talk: the seed was plant-

edthe seed o doubt. Maybe Fred Brooks could be w rong.Not wrong, really, but incomplete. Incomplete in hisscholarship or depth o analysis. Or maybe heas many ous dolooks a little too optimistically or the real world toconfrm his ideas. Or he is not wrong but in situ examplesare too messy to be perect. As G. B. Shaw could have said,they are too true to be good.

t

Pippoback home and over breakastasks his ather totell him again the story o the cathedral. Breakast: his

mothers prepared his avoritesalt pork ried in orangeand lemon with sugar and cinnamon sprinkled over. Hisather tells him againthe 40th time?about the immenseand immensely beautiul design o Arnolo di Cambio, andhow they razed the old church and even another to makeroom, how they brought in slaves to remove the corpsesrom the old cemetery, how the workers stopped and thecathedral was abandoned ater the sickness came, how thenave and aade stood out in the rain every winter or morethan 10 years. Over the bleats o sheep and goats and clucksand honks o chickens and geese Pippo hears the shouts oorders rom the work site.

But why has it taken so long, Pippo asks. Its almost 100years and its not hal done. His ather answers: We mustalways await the gits rom God that show us the way or-

ward.

t

My experiencewriting poems, writing stories, doing pho-tography, working on small graphics and drawing projectsis that design and art are rarely the product o a single mind.I take that back; they never are. There are two ways that thesingle mind idea doesnt work with art and poetry. The easyone to understand is the ways that others are constantlyhelping. As a writer I encounter help in all sorts o ways.

Ive never published anything in a serious venue withoutsome riend or colleagueand usually severalhaving readand commented on it. I take the comments seriously, andthere are several riends whose recommendations I adoptessentially without question. The typical nonfction bookis ul l o acknowledgements that indicate a co-author-typerelationship, and thats true or my writings.

And even when an artist seems to be creating somethingcompletely newartists like da Vinci, van Gogh, or Beck-

ettit usually turns out there are hidden, unconscious in-uences even they cant recognize.

One o the more well-known examples o this sort ohelp is the relationship between T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound.Roughly around 1920, Eliot started work on his best-knownpoem and masterpiece, called The Waste Land. At that time

both Pound and Eliot were expatriatesEliot in England,Pound in Francewho on occasion worked together, withPound generally playing the role o mentor. Pound was asort o talent scout, and had helped Eliot get his frst poemspublished a ew years earlier. On his way to Switzerland ora rest cure, Eliot took his Waste Landmanuscript o about1000 lines to Pound in Paris or comments, and he stopped in

Paris again on his trip back. There were undoubtedly manyconversations, but also there are marked up manuscriptsin the Berg Collection in the New York Public Library thattell us the story o the collaboration.

Pound ound the heart o Eliots manuscript and directedhim in paring it down to the 434 lines we see today. Dont be

ooled: Pound did not merely scrape away words, lines, andstanzas (though thats what he mostly did); Pounds com-ments are extensivei cryptic to readers not accustomed to

artists talking to each otherand not particularly subtle. He

pointed out weaknesses and suggested changes. Eliot wrotethis about the role Pound played in The Waste Land:

It was in 1922 that I placed beore him in Paristhe manuscript o a sprawling, chaotic poem called

The Waste Land which let his hands, reduced toabout hal its size, in the orm in which it appearsin print. I should like to think that the manuscript,

with the suppressed passages, had disappeared ir-recoverably: yet on the other hand, I should wish theblue penciling on it to be preserved as irreutableevidence o Pounds critical genius.

T. S. Eliot, Erza Pound[6]

A hypothetical programming language example withlots o deletions and some revision to think about: suppose,in a world with nothing like Lisps, someone designing aprogramming language came up with essentially a messyversion o what we would call Common Lisp. The Poundor this Eliot might well identiy a subset o the language

which, when cleaned up and revised a bit, would turn out

to be what we would call Scheme. Common Lisp is verylarge, even rambling, and Scheme is small and elegant; themajor undamental dierence between them is that Com-mon Lisp has separate namespaces or unctions and values

while Scheme has a single namespace. A particular subseto Common Lisp is not ar o at all rom Schemethe revi-sions to make it Scheme would encompass only some smallsyntactic changes, the namespace collapsing, and the ad-dition o continuations. Suppose our sotware Eliot madethose revisions on the advice o our sotware Pound: would


4/17

4

this Eliot be the genius who came up with the masterpieceknown in our world as Scheme? Be the sole author o itsconceptual integrity?

Collaboration o authorship is not always or mostly aboutpruning. Richard Woodhouse played a similar but less ex-tensive role or his riend, John Keats. In several important

poems, the revised wording o lines come either ater sug-gestions by Woodhouse or using the words Woodhouseproposed [7].

Copyeditors can make substantial contributions to amanuscript. Changes beyond grammar are not uncommon.Such changes were made to some o the most importantKeats poems by his publisher, John Taylor, including in re-sponse to directions rom Keats to Taylor, which Woodhouse

reported as ollows:

accept which [readings] they pleased, & re-vise the Whole. [6]

Other poets practice what could be called creative pla-giarism. Samuel Taylor Coleridge seems sometimes to havetaken another poets poem as a very detailed starting pointor his own. It is well researched that some o the materialin his most amous prose piece,Biographia Literaria, was acomposite o several passages taken rom Leibniz [7].

Technical books almost always go out to reviewers whooccasionally propose major changes. In the past Ive pro-posed to book authors radical organizational and even the-matic revisions that were adopted. Ive also reviewed dratso novels and poetry manuscripts where my substantialchanges have been adopted, sometimes word or word.

Many writers even in technical felds use writers work-shops to improve their manuscripts. Some published pieceshave been workshopped many times. In a writers workshop,a more-or-less ormal process is used to go deeply into amanuscript in such a way that the writer is inclined to lis-ten careully to the suggestions, and the fnalsometimescrucialstep o the process produces concrete suggestionsor improvement. Its not uncommon or a member o a

workshop to oer detailed wording, structural, and evenundamental what-is-this-piece-about suggestions.

t

Pippo drinks his milk and wonders how anyone but God

could design such a large and most beautiul cathedral.Arnolo was a great man, a great mason, his ather says.

He and the other masons knew how to build great buildings.Arnolo created a model that all who came ater ollowedand this model was the design o the cathedral. Its saidthat model had a great dome so that the cathedral would bemore grand than any other ever built, in order to honor Godand Firenze. But the model crumbled away during the sick-ness. Beore you were born, the capomaestro started a newmodel or the dome, but the guild o wool merchants was

not certain and asked Neri di Fioravanti to build a second,and they would choose. This was wise because Giovannidi Lapo Ghini, the capomaestro, built an abomination toGod and Firenzea great beast such as are the churchesto the north. Ugly buttresses held up the dome; they aremakeshits and the tools o the weak mind. Neris dome

a great octagon with a perect quinto acuto archwas saidto be like Arnolos model, but who am I to say? Neris de-sign was chosen and its model is the one all capomaestrisince then have sworn and all who come ater must swearto ollow. All the citizens o Firenze voted, even I. Perhaps

youll live to see it built; perhaps by some miracle revealedin Firenze by God, a great man will come to know how tobuild the dome, and you will see the cathedral consecrated,my son, Filippo Brunelleschi.

t

When I sit down to write a poem, which I do every day, itstrue I work alone, but I dont work in isolation. The mate-

rials I use or my work come rom centuries o other writ-ers and artists. The wall o poetry in my library containsabout a thousand books, most o which Ive read and allo which Ive dipped into extensively. Frequently when I

write, I have several o these books open in ront o me, orother work open in a web browser or some other contrap-tion. I use other poems as triggers, I take other poems and

write them mysel, I argue with other writers and poets, Irun their poems through (bad) automated translators andother sotware to get starting points, I google to seek outstrange results pages and write starting rom them (a newpoetic orm calledfar). These are orms o internet age

bricolage, collage, pastiche, and oulipo (OUvroir de LIttra-ture POtentielle or workshop o potential literature), whereliterature is created rom what happens to be around usingcut-and-paste, hodge-podge, and various (usually artifcial)constraints or automatic transormations.

More than that, I write within a tradition o poetry andas part o a western, 21st century culture. I rarely invent

words and I almost as rarely make up grammar. I rely on thewords in my pieces to conjure specifc reerences in readersminds, I expect them to look up the words they dont knowin dictionaries. I expect them to know or be able to fgureout, i they like, the cultural or media reerences I use. I ex-pect them to know when Im writing a sonnet and to have

read lots o them. I am alone, not isolated.Triggers play today the role that God and the muses did

in the past. Artists and what we would today call engi-neers await a revelation or spark rom a mysterious source,and that spark would start and shape the process o cre-ation. Richard Hugo, 20th century poet and teacher o po-etry, wrote:

A poem can be said to have two subjects, the ini-tiating or triggering subject, which starts the poem


5/17

5

or causes the poem to be written, and the real orgenerated subject, which the poem comes to say ormean, and which is generated or discovered in the

poem during the writing. Thats not quite right be-cause it suggests that the poet recognizes the realsubject. The poet may not be aware o what the real

subject is but [has] only some instinctive eeling thatthe poem is done.

Richard Hugo, The Triggering Town [8]

For many poets, poetry is a conversation with other po-etsa dialog o themes, words, images, structures, stories,and sometimes (but rarely) meanings. One quick example.

Orpheus in Greek mythology has many unctions androles, but the top ones are being poet and musician, inven-tor or master o the lyre, and teaching humanity medicine,

writing, and agriculture. His wie, Eurydice, was snakebitand died, and went to the underworldand no one comesback rom the underworld. Orpheus wrote and sang such

sad songs the gods wept and suggested he go there to makehis case. His songs melted the hearts o Hades and Perse-phone who agreed to let Eurydice return with him to theupper worldon one condition: that Orpheus walk in ronto Eurydice and not look backnot onceuntil both o them

made it back to the upper world. He agreed. They traveled insilence up through the passages, and when they were nearlyout he had to know that she was there behind him, and sohe glanced back and right at that moment she was snatchedawaydying a second time. Eurydice didnt blame him andcalled her arewell, but the sound only almost reached him.The story goes on but this is enough.

I dont know how many Eurydice poems there are. Hereare parts o three o them.Eurydice by the poet H. D. is written rom the point o

view o Eurydice, who is none too pleased at Orpheus. Part IIbegins like this:

Here only ame upon ameand black among the red sparks,streaks o black and lightgrown colorless

why did you turn back,that hell should be reinhabitedo mysel thusswept into nothingness?

why did you turn back?why did you glance back?why did you hesitate or that moment?why did you bend your acecaught with the ame o the upper earth,above my ace?

In this poem, Eurydice moves rom despising the un-derworld and longing or the upper, to anger at Orpheus

or blowing the rescue, to almost an arrogance at how hersituation in the underworld is better than his in the upperbecause in the end she locates within hersel all the earthlybeauty she at frst misses; moreover, the underworld mustopen like a red rose to let her back in.

In Margaret Atwoods version, also calledEurydice, Eu-

rydice has grown content with being in the underworld andthough she loves Orpheus she wonders whether his love istoo dierent rom hers because he needs a real person tosatisy his carnal interests while Eurydice doesnt. The po-ems ends like this:

He cannot believe without seeing,and its dark here.Go back, you whisper,but he wants to be ed againby you. O handul o gauze, littlebandage, handul o coldair, it is not through himyou will get your reedom.

Jorie Graham seems to like writing Eurydice poems. Oneis in her 1987 collection called The End o Beauty and an-other in Swarm rom 1999. Graham is never easy to fgureout (or me), but my reading oOrpheus and Eurydice rom1987 is this: its a poem rom Eurydices point o view rightat the point where Orpheus is about to turn back to her. Sheis thinking about Orpheuss about-to-happen glance, andhow it will erase her, as his glance has always erased her. Ashe turns to glance she at frst (or he at frst) wants to stopthe glance, and then she (he) wants to take it in. She seesthe real world up ahead, but she and the real world cannot

be merged by Orpheus. Here is a bit rom the heart o thepoem, about where it turns:

(Now the cypress are swaying) (Now the lake in the distance)(Now the view-rom-above, the aerial attack o do youremember?)

now the glance reaching her shoreline wanting only to be recalled,now the glance reaching her shoreline wanting only to be taken in,

(somewhere the castle above the river)

(somewhere you holding this piece o paper)

Visits to the underworld like Orpheuss appear in theJapanese myth o Izanagi and Izanami, the Akkadian/Sum-erian myth o Inannas descent to the underworld, and theMayan myth o Ix Chel and Itzamna. The m(yth) eme o notlooking back is also ound in the story o Lots wie whenescaping Sodom and in Hansel and Gretel.

Something else, though, is going on here beyond the con-versation between poets. In both Eurydice poemswrittenat dierent times by very dierent poetswe are witnessing


6/17

6

a known structure with dierent decorations, with dier-ent points o view, with dierent lessons, with dierentaesthetics, but with an underlyingshall we call itcon-ceptual integrity. Not rom a single mind, really, and notrom a small number o agreeing resonant minds. Whatis common is that the thing being createdeach poem

participated in its own creation. This is the other way thatthe single mind idea doesnt work with art and poetrytheharder one to understand.

In these cases, the Eurydice story orms a rame that di-rects where and how the poet can extend and use it. Built-in understandings and explanations, and already defnedmoods and images come to mind when the story is retold,and these orm suraces against which the meanings, im-ages, moods, thoughts, and emotions o the new materialbounce and reect. The underlying story imposes a strongsense o what would be in keeping with it. And approach-ing the Eurydice story rom any direction, the story itseldoes its own reracting.

t

Filippo is secretive; he works in isolationperhaps becauseo his looks: short, long nose, recessed chin, thin lipsandhis dress doesnt help: he is typically messy and dirty. Aterlosing the competition or the Baptistry doors to LorenzoGhiberti, he and his young riend Donatello travel to Rometo study Roman art and architecture. Filippo would stayon and o or 13 years.

Rome is a mess. Those let live across the river rom StPeters. The rest o Rome is an urbanized wilderness. GreatRoman buildings serve as markets, pens, storehouses. Fil-

ippos not here or the Christian sites, not the relics likefngers and legbones, not the cribs or heads. Neither is hehere or the hucksters, the beggars. He is here or Rome, orthe greatness that was once Rome. Romans could buildthings that cannot now be built, buildings whose senseand beauty and proportion cannot now be matched. Theirart was not over-elaborated; it was clean and precise. It wasaustere but not at.

And how did they build? Like Neris model their domesdidnt need supports like sticks holding up a bad roo. Fil-ippo spends months observing, measuring, taking notesin his secret wayin his code. He and Donatello dig orremnantsor pots, or utensils, or coins and medals. He

returns every ew days to the domesspecially to the Pan-theon. Neris dome would be about this size, he reckons.Taller but about this big around. How did the Romans doit? Those crackswhen did they appear? The coersarethey or decoration or to make the dome lighter?

They sleep under any overhang. They eat what comesalong.

t

A designer struggles to create a frst drat o a design, then,

not to be merely an important step in the design process, butin order to create a collaborator that will make the remain-der o the design process easiernot a literal collaborator

with a brain, sharp wit, and unny hair, but a concrete thing(almost some sort o being) that helps direct the thoughtsand actions o the designer. A collaborator that triggers

thoughts and directions that would never occur to the de-signer were the artiact not sitting there, staring back. Tomany outside the arts this statement is a proound surpriseand enduring mystery. Eliot wrote:

In a poem which is neither didactic nor narra-

tive, and not animated by any other social purpose,the poet may be concerned solely with expressing inverseusing all his resources o words, with theirhistory, their connotations, their musicthis ob-scure impulse. He does not know what he has to sayuntil he has said it ; and in the eort to say it he is not

concerned in making other people understand any-

thing. He is not concerned, at this stage, with otherpeople at all: only with fnding the right words or,anyhow, the least wrong words. He is not concernedwhether anybody else will ever listen to them or not,

or whether anybody else will ever understand themi he does. He is oppressed by a burden which he

must bring to birth in order to obtain relie.

T. S. Eliot, On Poetry and Poets [9]

There is something inside that needs its birth. There areright words or least wrong ones to express what it is. The

poet is not constructing something in Eliots description, but

ndingthe words to go with this obscure thing. It is as i thething itsel is directing the blind poet; as i the thing itselis designing itsel or at least designing its expression.

But it isnt just poetry that leads its creator by the nose.Here is what Robert Boswell says about writing short sto-ries:

I have grown to understand narrative as a ormo contemplation, a complex and seemingly incon-

gruous way o thinking. I come to know my storiesby writing my way into them. I ocus on the char-

acters without trying to attach signicance to theiractions. I do not look or symbols. For as long as I

can, I remain purposeully blind to the machin-ery o the story and only partially cognizant o theworld my story creates. I work rom a kind o hal-knowledge.

In the drats that ollow, I listen to what has made

it to the page. Invariably, things have arrived that Idid not invite, and they are oten the most interest-ing things in the story. By reusing to ully know theworld, I hope to discover unusual ormations in the

landscape, and strange desires in the characters.


7/17

7

By declining to analyze the story, I hope to keep itopen to surprise. Each new drat revises the worldbut does not explain or dene it. I work throughmany drats, progressively abandoning the amiliar.What I can see is always dwared by what I cannotknow. What the characters come to understand

never surpasses that which they cannot grasp. Theworld remains hal-known.

There can be no discovery in a world where ev-

erything is known. A crucial part o the writing en-deavor is to practice remaining in the dark.

Robert Boswell, The Half-Known World [10]

For Boswelland or most writersthe story acts as ateacher or a guide, a sort o Virgil as in Dantes The DivineComedy. A mistake a writer can make, Boswell claims, is toorce the guide away, to try to control the story too much,because the writer might be astonished to discover what

the story might reveal i let hal-known.In my book on the writers workshop I recalled what I

heard many times in workshops and in the classroom. Itwent like this:

In the creative writing workshop, you oten hearcomments like these: What is this piece trying tobe? and What is the center o this work? Thesecomments aim at an attitude in which the pieceexists on its own in the world and the reviewersare trying to get at its essence and make the besto whatever it is.

Richard P. Gabriel, Writers Workshops [11]

Stephen King says the same sort o thing when he arguesthat there is not much planning in the kind o writing hedoes (which cant easily be mistaken or poetry):

You may wonder where plot is in all this. Theanswer is nowhere. I believe plotting and thespontaneity o real creation arent compatible. Iwant you to understand that my basic belie aboutthe making o stories is that they pretty much makethemselves. The job o the writer is to give them a

place to grow.

Stephen King, On Writing [12]

This reminds me a little o the ideas o Christopher Alex-ander, maybe ater a bit o a stretch. Alexander believesand this is pretty clear rom his recent book (in 4 volumescollectively called The Nature o Order[13])that lie(which is both a literal term as well as a term that reers tothat quality o built objects that are whole, lively, wonderul,comortable, bittersweet, and generally where people wantto live their lives) emerges rom the geometric characteris-

tics o the eatures that make up (things in) space. He defnes

a concept he calls centers and 15 characteristics o themalone and in combinationand he argues that i somethinghas a sufciently strong set o centers as measured by thenumber and richness o their characteristics, then it is wholeor alive. In earlier work on patterns and pattern languages,he called this quality the quality without a name.

An essential part o Alexanders thoughts on centers isthat their existence is objectivenot the result o an in-the-eye-o-the-beholder theory. His view is (almost) thatsomeday a computer program with sensors could be usedto fnd themand the ones thus mechanically ound wouldbe precisely the ones just about every person rom just aboutevery culture would fnd. Spiritual to the end, Alexander

sees centers as the I, an underlying Godstu:

It is ultimate, beyond experiencethe core o allliving structuresthe driving orce behind whatmust be done. It lies in me and beyond me, is without

orm and name, lies behind matter, is connected toall living structure and thereore is impersonal.a

Center: A center is any place in a poem that attracts attention; cen-ters can arise rom the action/interaction o these crat elements:stress/unstress; sound; unit o syntax; rhyme; repeated words andsounds; line; frst word in a line; last word in a line ; stanza; image;metaphor and other fgures; title ; the poem itsel; historical or po-litical elements; revealed metaphysics; meaning

Levels of Scale: centers at all levels o scale

Strong Center: a center related to many other centers

Boundaries: separates a center rom other centers, ocuses atten-tion on the separated center, is itsel made o centers

Alternating Repetition: strong centers repeated with alternatingcenters; not simple repeating ; pattern with variation

Positive Space: a center that moves outward rom itsel, seeminglyoozing lie rather than collapsing on itsel

Good Shape: a center that is beautiul by itsel

Local Symmetries: a center with another nearby which is some-

how an echo

Deep Interlock and Ambiguity: centers that are hard to pull apart;

centers that derive power from surrounding centers; centers that

cannot be removed without diminishment; centers that are part oseveral others

Contrast: dierentiation, distinctness, discernible oppositesGradients: sotness; qualities vary subtly, gradually, slowly

Roughness: a certain ease; the inessential is let messy

Echoes: amily resemblance not exact replication

The Void: stillness or literally a quiet point

Simplicity and Inner Calm: all irrelevant parts are gone; it is assimple and spare as it can be and still retain its lie; nothing morecan be removed; each part seems simple and simply made

Not-Separateness: at one with the world, and not separate from

it


8/17

8

kind o light.the spirit which animates, but a ma-terial or physical spirit.the ace o God.

Christopher Alexander, The Nature of Order[13]

A ew years ago I used Alexanders ideas to construct ahypothesis to explain what poetry isnamely, how poetic

writing diers rom ordinary writingand a method or re-vising poems by identiying weaknesses in them. In essence,the method works by fnding places to revise and suggest-ing avenues or revision. Ater listening to Brookss talk, Istarted examining how Alexanders theories can be used toexplain the process by which an artiact participates in itsown design and how conceptual integrity springs rom thestrengths o the thing designed. I began this examination

with my theory o poetry.To start to see what we think o this idea, lets take a quick

look at the concept o centers and the 15 characteristics, andsee how they apply to the process o writing poetry. Ive putall the material on centers in a box up and to the right; you

can skim it or skip it and use just the gestalt o my poetryexample to get the idea.

For Alexander, the process o design and building is aniterative process. The frst two steps, in their original sim-plifed orm, are as ollows:

At every step o the processwhether con-1.ceiving, designing, making, maintaining, or

repairingwe must always be concernedwith the whole within which we are makinganything. We look at this wholeness, absorbit, try to eel its deep structure.

We ask which kind o thing we can do next2. that will do the most to give this wholenessthe most positive increase o lie.

The remaining steps ask us to make thechange and assess its eectivenesscontinuingor undoing, depending. The kinds o things thatcan be done to increase lie are to add centers(where there are only latent centers), strengthencenters, or apply (structure-preserving) trans-ormations that introduce or strengthen thecharacteristics listed above.

t

Back rom Rome, Filippo is engrossed in the ca-thedral. A competition or how to build Nerisdome had been announced, and he is prepar-ing his model with his riend Donatello and thesculptor Nanni di Banco, son o the late capo-maestro. Hes worked out a way to build thedome without internal scaolding or other sup-port. Filippos short temper and mistrust wontlet him reveal al l his ideasjust enough to win.

He smiles, though, when his beautiully sculpted, gilded, and

painted modelspanning 6 eet and 12 eet talltips thecontest in his direction, mostly, and his plan is chosenheis named capomaestro. Along with his chie rival in thecontest, Lorenzo Ghibertiand two others. The wardens othe Opera del Duomo will let his plan go orward or O o

the height, and then the plan must be revisited.The cathedral has its new name, now, and all Firenze is

in a tizzy over it: Santa Maria del Fiore. And Filippo walksproudly through the city because he has been chosen tobring the people o Firenze Neri di Fioravantis dome, theone they have always wanted. Neris perect designto capArnolo di Cambios perect design or the cathedral. ForOur Lady o the Flower.

t

To see exactly how an artiact might be a collaborator,Ive pulled out an example rom my MFA studies. BillKnott is an important but ultimately minor poet. He

writes unny poems that in many cases have their ownbrand o rationality. Knotts poems are short, which suitsmy purpose, andabsolutely most importantlyhis pub-lished work contains a poem and its revision. The poem iscalled Lourdes, and it frst appeared in his 1976 collection,

Rome in Rome [14]. The revision appeared in another collec-

Lourdes

There are miracles that nobody survives

Observers of to remember where or when

And these are the only true miracles

Since we never hear about them


It increases their chance of being common

Everyday things without witness without

Us even how absently close we brush

Teeth sneeze cook supper mail post

Cards in contrast ocial miracles take

A far o locale veriable visitable

Some backwater never heard before of since

Not pop the map but part the pilgrims lips it

Springs up hospitals hotdog stands pour in

Testeroniacs pimple victims evenFor credentials cripples pour in

Their limbs hung all whichway on them

Signslats nailed on a slanting

Direction-post at a muddy crossroads

In the boondocks of a forgotten place

Strong Center

sense?

Alternating Repetition & Echoes (miracles)

sing-songnot RoughContrast(miracles/common)

weak centers(them)

miracles

are hopeful

Boundary &

Deep Interlock

and Ambiguity

Gradient&

Contrast(hopefulhopeless)

Echoes(...of(f))

weak/ambiguity

Local Symmetry(without...without)

Alternating

Repetition (wit)

enjambment

Boundary (without/us)

confusing enjambment

Boundary (post/cards)

Strong Center

Echoes

Strong Center Roughness(head before of)Alternating

Repetition &

Local Symmetries([tpp] [ptp] [tpp])

noise(line)

Contrast(springs up

pours in)

boring

AlternatingRepetition(pour in)

not a word

Roughness

Local Symmetry & Echoes(Signslatsslanting)

Echoes (D t p t dd d)

Echoes (crossroadsboondocks)weaker center than previous stanza

image of hopelessness

Echoes

Echoes(sounds of pimple

and cripples)

(v and able)

Echoes(stresses)

Extreme Poetry


9/17

9

tion,Becos [15], in 1983. Just below is the frst othese, marked up with an analysis o its centersand their relationships. Beore you try to readit, some advice. First, poems are not necessarilyor making total sense oand Knotts poetry isoten very nonsensical. Second, or the purposes

o our exploration, its not required that you un-derstand the poem or even the deep meaning ocenters and the characteristics as they relate topoetryall thats needed is to see how the in-herent strengths and weaknesses o this poemdirected its revision (maybe). [see Note A]

Take a quick look at the poem and its analysis.The black (dark) marks indicate strong centersand red (lighter) indicate weak centers. A centeris anything a reader notices, along with its con-nections to other, related centers. For example,imagine a simple 4-line poem that rhymes inthe pattern a-b-a-b. A reader will notice the last

word in each line, and also that the end wordso lines 1 and 3 rhyme. The end word in line 1 isthereore a center, and its strength derives bothrom its appearing at the end o a line and alsorom the word that Echoes its sound at the endo line 3. And because the rhymes o the poemintertwine, the poem demonstrates AlternatingRepetition along with Deep Interlock and Ambi-guity, making the poem itsel a strong center.

The poem is about miracles, and how realones are private while the ofcial ones have somethingnot so wonderul about them, or at least where they take

place are either leveraged or are not so easily oundnoteasy to locate and not easy on the soul and senses to do so.Thats a not ridiculous way to read the poem, but thats notimportant.

First lets look at some o the strong centers and confgu-rations o them.

The frst stanza has connections to two others via mir-acles, which is repeated, either as an Echo or a sort o Al-ternating Repetition. It orms a Gradient and Contrast withthe last stanza, the ormer being about hope while the lastis about hopelessnessand whats in between is in betweenhopeulness and hopelessness. Miracles in the frst stanzaContrasts with common in the second. There are Echoes

in the phrases Observers o, chance o, beore o, andar o, which link the frst stanza to the next two. Centersare things that we notice, are drawn to over and over as weread a poem. We notice these Echoes, partly because someo them are so unusual, and once weve noticed the unusualones, similar-sounding phrases are lumped into the group.The Boundary between the frst and second stanzas is clearcut because the lines are repeated; the repeated lines arealso Deep Interlock (because it locks the two stanzas to-gether) and Ambiguity (because it isnt clear whether the

line belongs in the frst or second stanzaKnott solves thatby putting it in both).

There is a very strong center in the second stanza

without witness without. This is a Local Symmetry (x y x

)and also Alternating Repetition (witwitwit) . Morethan that, there is a strong enjambment (line break split-ting the sensein this case its without / Us), and thiscreates a Boundary.

The frst line o the third stanza is also a Strong Center.It contains the Echo o the ee sound, and has 6 strong beatsout o 7 syllables. There is a nice Echo o noise (noise inpoetry speak is the sound the words make totally divorcedrom the sense o the wordsas i an animal were makingthe sounds) in verifable visitable, which Echo v and

able. The last line o the stanza is interestingan exampleo Knott compressing language so that it still retains sense

or seems to. Some backwater never heard beore o sinceis perhaps a little dyslexic turn or a unny sort o compres-sion or Some backwater never heard o beore or since.Its strangeness (important in post-19th century poetry), itscontainment o the center beore o mentioned earlier, andits Roughness make it a Strong Center. One could argue thatKnott wrote this phrase to make beore o a center thatwould link it to the earlier o centers.

The ourth stanza has lots o strong centers. The frstline contains the Alternating Repetition o the ts and ps;


Observers of to remember where or when





Everyday things without witness without

Us even how absently close we brush

Teeth sneeze cook supper mail post

Cards in contrast ocial miracles take

A far o locale veriable visitable

Some backwater never heard before of since

Not pop the map but part the pilgrims lips it

Springs up hospitals hotdog stands pour in

Testeroniacs pimple victims even

For credentials cripples pour in

Their limbs hung all whichway on them

Signslats nailed on a slanting

Direction-post at a muddy crossroads


Lourdes

sense?

sing-song

not Roughweak centers(them)

weak/ambiguity

confusing enjambment

Boundary (post/cards)

boring

AlternatingRepetition(pour in)

not a word

weaker center than previous stanza


10/17

10

In short, most o the weaknesses are about not makingsense or using weak words at the ends o lines. The major

weakness is the last stanza, which just doesnt have as many

arrows and black comments.Lets look at the revision (just above). (Parts not revisedare in grey.) All but two o the weak centers have been re-paired (and one o them was strengthened). Better endwords in general strengthen existing centers, and even whensentences and phrases remain the same, dierent lineation(line breaks) strengthens the centers. Subtle rhythm changes

improve the centersor example changing hear to heartell adds a spondee (two stresses or beats in a row), whichis a strong center, and also gives the frst stanza this (nice)beat pattern: 4, 5, 4, 5 (number o stresses per line).

The real news is the last stanza, which is newly packed with centersthe intertwining and reinorcing o them

within the stanza would take too long to describe com-pletely here. Notice how misled, skewed, and point ev-erywhere bounce o each other and also o o crisscross,

which bounces o o crossroads, which links to roadsigns,

which links to signpost, which links to postcards. etc.The noise is much better, its clearer, and this stanza is nowthe Strong(est) Center in the poem. Even small things likechanging muddy to weedy improve the sound and alsomake the image cleaner: a muddy crossroads is actually busy,

while a weedy one is abandoned. And its imageo a quiet,

its also Local Symmetries because o the patterno them ([tpp] [ptp] [tpp]). The line also has lots ogood noisetry reading it out loud. Springs upand pour in orm a Contrast in two ways: upversus in (which in the case o pouring is actu-allydown) and something that can spring is solid

while something you can pour is liquid. And youcould say also that something that springs up actson its own while something that is poured is actedupon. Hospitals hotdog contains Echoes o hoand o. pimple and cripples on adjacent linesorm a sonic Echo and also can be considered aDeep Interlock and Ambiguity o the two lineslinking them / locking them together. pmple,

vctim, and ven are also Echoes because theyshare a stress pattern.

The last stanza has some good centers, butnot as many as the previous two. limbs hung all

whichway is Roughness. Signslats and slant-

ing are Echoes because o their sounds (ess andsla), and Local Symmetries because they occurat the start and end o a line. Direction-post ata muddy crossroads contains Echoes o d and

p. crossroads and boondocks Echo.This leaves a number o weak centers or just

plain not many o them. Compared to the others,the last stanza orms a weak center.

Thats how a centers-based analysis goes. Nowlets ocus on the weak centers in the poem. Ive put just them

in a diagram at the top o the previous page.The frst stanza starts with a sentence thats hard to

make sense o: There are miracles that nobody survives /observers o to remember where or when. The enjambmentmakes this extra-jarring. The frst line alone makes perectsense, but the second line alone makes no sense at all. Thephrase remember where or when is a bit sing-songy, asis the last line Since we never hear about them, and thismakes those parts weak. Ending the second line with whenis weak, especially since there is a stress on it. (Usually thefrst and last words are the places in a line that attract themost attention, and thereore should be strong words or atleast important ones.)

The second stanza has the peculiar allout rom enjamb-ment rom the previous line: Us even how absently close

we brush. Though some could argue the line as it standshas its charm, the phrase Us even how is weak.

The third stanza has a conusing Boundary with the en-jambed post / Cards, and the end words, take and sinceare weak fllers o important slots in the poem.

The ourth stanza has the boring Alternating Repetitiono pour in, and the non-word Testeroniacs.

The fth stanza, in addition to just not having a lot ocenters, has a weak end word, them.


No one comes screaming of where what when


Since we never hear tell about them

Since we never hear tell about them


Everyday events without witness without

Us evenhow absently close we brush

Teeth sneeze cook supper mail postcards

In contrast ocial miracles take a far

O locale some backwateror podunk

Which although unveriable is visitable

Not pop the map but part the pilgrims

Lips it springs up hospitals hot dog

Stands pour in testosteroniacs pimple

Victims but most of all cripplestheir

Limbs misled and skewed and crisscross

Likeroadsigns that point everywhere

On a signpost bent over a weedy crossroads


Lourdes

sense fixed

sing-song fixed

sense fixedconfusing enjambment

Boundary fixed

weak end word now

embedded

Echoes retained,

better end words,

better sense

weak end words

remain (added)

weak end word

wrapped

weak end words

gone

closer to real word

better weak

end word

many Echoes, better noise, Strong Center, Void?

}


11/17

11

conused, and conusing nowhere with a Jesus-miracle-likequalitygives it a hint o The Void.

Most o the the weak centers o the frst version oLourdes

have been addressed. I a centers-based analysis is objec-tiveas Alexander believesthen it would seem the poemhas helped with its own revision and hence creation.

t

Consecration dayMarch 25, 1436, the Feast o the Annun-ciationthough the cathedral is not fnished, not even thedome which is near its ull height, Pope Eugenius IV hasjust consecrated Santa Maria del Fiore. Still let are thetop o the domeclosing its skyward-gazing eye with an8-sided cap shaped a bit like a chapel to let light inandthe red tile acing on the dome itsel. During the ceremony,the Pope laid all the cathedrals relics on the altar. One byone, the Cardinal christened the red crosses held in thehands o the wooden statues o the twelve apostles spreadin a hal circle around the altarone by one, their spirits

entered the cathedral, flling it with Gods love. Not fnishedas a building, at that moment Santa Maria was completeas a cathedral.

Every bell in the city is ringing out.The day is cruel cold. Filippo, his ears flled with cries

o genius and dome maker, walks across the bridge and upthe hill to the meadow where he looks backtears in hiseyes rom joy, pride, and cold windback at the dome, atthe cathedral. Clouds enclose the sky but cloudbreaks lightup the city, catch the smoke rising up and quickly away. Hefghts an urge elt as an impulse rom the uture to raise hisarms up and shout Im the king o the world. Instead he

begins composing in his brilliant and ertile mind a sonneto insult to those who doubted him.

t

Poetry: why oh why poetry to explore design? Cant yougive us sotware source code? Indeed I could. Easily. Po-etry, though, is the Queen o Arts according to the poetThomas Sprat [16], and one o the arts most obviously sub-ject to creativity and individual talent and expression. I ar-gue: i even a poem helps direct its own creation, why notthe artiacts in a mundane discipline like sotware design?You want code examples? Read Martin Fowlers book onreactoring [17]. Here is how he begins his description o

that book on his website:

Reactoring is a controlled technique or improv-ing the design o an existing code base. Its essenceis applying a series o small behavior-preservingtransormations, each too small to be worth do-ing. However the cumulative e ect o each o these

transormations is quite signicant . By doing themin small steps you reduce the risk o introducing er-rors. You also avoid having the system broken while

you are carrying out the restructuringwhich al-

lows you to gradually reactor a system over an ex-tended period o time.

Martin Fowler [18]

The original designhowever it came to beguides the

reactoring, just as the weak centers guide at least whereand sometimes how to strengthen them. The design col-laborates in its urther refnement.

The centers-based analysis o poetry shows one way thedesigned can act as designerin this case by using a methoddevised to elicit direction rom the poem. Alexander believes

that centers and their structure are how any geometricaldesign converses with its human designers [13]. In Space:The Final Frontier, Jim Coplien applies the idea o centersto sotware and the creation o design patterns [19].

t

Though Brunelleschi had enemies in Florence, he also had

great admirers who managed to make him only one o twopeople buried in the cathedraland the other is a Floren-tine saint. Brunelleschi is buried under a marble slab thatreads:

Corpus Magni Ingenii Viri Philippi BrunelleschiFiorentini

which translates roughly to here lies the body o the greatmechanical genius Filippo Brunelleschi o Florence. Hisepitaph, written by Carlo Marsuppini, reads:

The architect D. S. Quantum Philippus will beconsidered worthy in the arts o Daedalus becauseboth the marvelous dome o this most renownedtemple as well as many other things were possiblethrough this example o machines invented by di-vinely inspired genius; whereore, because o the ex-

ceptional gits and singular virtues o this soul, onxv. Kal. May 1446 a grateul country commandedthat his [well-deserving] body [o blessed memory]be buried hereunder in this soil..

translation by Guy L. Steele Jr.

Ater Brunelleschis death and beore his burial, there was

a plan to decorate his tomb site with pictures in marble ohis mechanismsand perhaps this explains the wording othe epitaph, where it says this example. So why this em-phasis on his mechanical ingenuity? Today Brunelleschi isknown as a great architect and his masterpiece is the domeo Santa Maria del Fiore.

Most o what Brunelleschi did during the 16 years it tookto build the dome (minus its acing) was to concoct devicesor this or that: some large and impressive cranes and hoists,a barge to bring the gigantic logs and blocks o marble up the


12/17

12

Arno (though it sank on the way to Florence), and a varietyo mechanisms to make building the dome possible. Theseare not what we think o as architectural design but ratherclever engineering. His model o the domewith whichhe won the competition to build itwas either just likeor mostly like Neris beore him. The ingenuity he brought

to bear thought up a number o mechanisms that enabledthe dome to be built without centering (scaolding thatsupports the bricks while the mortar sets and the dome iscompleted). In any dome the two main problems stem romthe downward pull o gravity; the frst is that the top o

the dome would preer to be pulleddown to the ground, and the secondis that the orce o gravity down onthe center o the dome causes hooporces that would like to spread thebase o the dome outward, and inthis case o o its supports.

Brunelleschi used 4 mechanisms to counter these prob-

lems. First is a double domeone inside the otherwhichorms a box. Some believe the box-like structure accountsentirely or the dome being able to stand. Second is a se-ries o stone and metal chains to keep the hoop orces nearthe bottom o the dome in check;though these were part o Nerisdesign, Neri did not design thechains in detail. The third is a seto circles embedded between thetwo domeseach circle ormsa circular arch (parallel to theground) which supports the in-

ward orces where the inward slopeo the dome is too great: just as an arch holds up a wall soa passageway can be made through it, a circle o bricks orother material can keep an inward-leaning dome rom col-lapsing while it is being constructed. And fnally there is aherringbone pattern or the bricks, which orms a numbero smaller sel-supporting sections o the dome as its beingbuilt. One researcherMassimo Ricci [20]has proposeda slightly dierent theory o the mechanisms; the pictureo the herringbone pattern above is o the model Ricci builtin Florence to test that theory.

Ah, Brunelleschi diddesign the lantern, though he diedjust as its construction was beginning. The lantern is the

structure on top o theoculus (the hole at thetop o the dome), thatserves as a source olight or the cathedral,a place to hang out orthe rich and amous(and now or peoplelike us), and some-thing real pretty. This

was his primary or only architectural contribution to thecathedraland it was o a pure Gothic style, not a Roman-inspired style as was the hallmark o Renaissance archi-tecture in Italy.

Most o the cathedral was designed and built beoreBrunelleschi was even born. He had the model o the dome

that Neri di Fioravanti produced and which was acceptedas defnitive (when Brunelleschi was a child) by the wardenso the Opera del Duomo. And Brunelleschi had as collabo-rators the buildings in Rome and perhaps techniques romthe Middle East that he studied with Donatello. (I shouldmention that ancient Rome was more technologically ad-vanced than Florence in the Renaissancethe Romans hadaqueducts, could build large arches and domes, and had es-sentially real cement and concrete.)

Most importantly, like all the other capomaestros, ma-sons, and cratsmen beore him (or 140 years), he had thecathedral itsel in ront o him acting as a designers helper.The wardens, when they accepted his model o the dome, im-

posed milestones when the design and construction meth-ods would be revisited. They remarked that at those mile-stones, the dome itsel and what had been learned thus ar

would instruct them how to proceed.The idea that the artiact can direct its design and con-

struction is well established in biology, where its calledstigmergy, which its discoverer, Pierre-Paul Grass, defnedas stimulation o workers by the perormance they haveachieved. Workers reers to individuals in social insectsocieties [21]. Stigmergy is perhaps more prevalent thanbiologists believe.

Suppose you buy all thissuppose you buy that there is

typically no such thing as a single mind behind conceptualintegrity, and only rarely are as ew minds as two behind it.Suppose you believe that the thing being built is a collabo-rator in its own design and construction. Suppose you seethat the ancient Greeks and the story o Eurydice helpedH. D., Atwood, and Graham write their poems, that the in-herent structure oLourdes helped Knott revise it. Suppose

you are happy that Eliot needed Pound to help him writeThe Waste Land. Finally, that you admit that Brunelleschionly contributedto the conceptual integrity o Santa Ma-ria del Fiore. Then why would it be so easy or someone assmart as Fred Brooks to believe that conceptual integritysprings rom and requires a single mind? Or that the frst

to market with something new and innovative will almostsurely come away with the bulk o the market? And why isit so easy to believe this when the evidence that those thingsare not true is so trivial to fnd? Most o the inormation Iprovided about Brunelleschi came rom Ross Kings book,Brunelleschis Dome: How a Renaissance Genius Reinvent-ed Architecture [22]. This book inormed Fred Brooks, andits pretty clear Ross King, like Brooks, attributes more othe beauty o the dome to Brunelleschi than is deservedbrilliant as Brunelleschis devices and techniques might be,

cross-section, viewed from the side


13/17

13

he didnt design the dome in the sense o providing itsconceptual integrity: he merely (merely!) fgured out howto build it and directed its building, thereby preserving inits execution the conceptual integrity o what appears tohave been Neri di Fioravantis design. Its as i King didnteven read his own book.

(And ractal-style we couldno doubtcontinue thehistorical investigation and fnd all the ways that the con-ceptual integrity o Neri di Fioravantis dome arose rommultiple authors, including Roman models, as well as romthe dome itsel mediated by the laws o physics and existingconstruction materials.)

Brooks was ooled. Weve all been this same way. Manybelieve Ronald Reagan single-handedly deeated commu-nism, Tim Berners-Lee single-handedly invented (every-thing about) the World Wide Web, Louis V. Gerstner, Jr.single-handedly rescued IBM in the early 1990s, Michael

Jordan single-handedly won 6 NBA championships, Gilletteinvented the saety razor. The list o people (and compa-

nies) given more credit than is due could go on, perhaps aslong as you like.

Theres something about our culture that seems to loveheroes, that looks or the genius whos solved it all, thatseems to need to believe the frst to marketthe best in-ventorreaps justly deserved rewards.

Two actors combine to manuacture this love o heroes:a ailure to perceive the eects o randomness on real lieand a need or stories. A name and story are less abstractthan an intertwined trail o ideas and designs that leadsto a monument.

Randomness aects our perceptions two ways: When

someone achieves something that seems rare, perhaps unde-servedly rare, we seem unable to see the accidents o chanceassociated with it ; and, second, we tend to ascribe to talentor skill alone a measure commensurate with reward, disre-garding the role o randomness in the outcome.

In 1961 Roger Maris exceeded Babe Ruths home run re-cord o 60 in one season, hitting 61 that year. Maris was ina tight race with Mickey Mantle at the time, Mantle beingthe sentimental avorite. Maris was a good home-run hitter,but ater his record season, he never hit more than 33 homeruns. Many were puzzled (and greatly disappointed) thatmerely a good home-run hitter broke the dominating BabeRuths record. People examined Mariss stats and lie to see

why he deserved the recordthey tried to construct a storyto make his achievement coherent. How human.

Deserve probably has nothing to do with it. In 1960,Maris hit 39 home runs in 499 at bats. That means he hit ahome run every 12.8 at bats or once every 3.7 games. Natu-rally, because o randomness, there can be streaks o moreand less requent home runs. Using a simulation to look atthe probabilities, I fgured a batter with Mariss 1960 skills

would hit more than 60 home runs about one year out o28. I read that a batter with Mariss 1960 stats comes along

every 3 years. The question then is how likely is it that somebatter between 1927 (Ruths record year) and 1961 wouldbreak Ruths record. I ran a simulation o that: a million 34-

year stretches with a batter like Roger Maris appearing onaverage once every 3 years. The distribution o home runsor the simulated Maris showed a nice, but narrow, normal

distributionnormal as in the bell-shaped curveso thequestion is not whether it was possible some batter couldbreak the record, but what the likelihood is. The revealed

probability that someone would break Ruths record turnedout to be a little overN. When I looked at the 81-year periodrom 1927 to 2008, the probability rose to 62%. SimulatingRoger Maris or about a million years o baseball, I oundthat in his best years he might hit a little over 80 home runs,making Barry Bondss 73 (the current record) seem puny.

Roger Maris was unglamorous and tightlipped abouthis game, so we dont know where he put the credit or hisrecord year. But its easy to imagine it being skill and tal-ent plus a bit o luck. More likely that than luck plus a bit

o skill and talent.Its a bit silly, then, to worry what it means or Roger

Maris to have broken the record (frst). In an importantsense, it had nothing (much) to do with him. But we are

wired to not be able to appreciate or perhaps even see that.Looking at Brunelleschi, the question occurs: Was he theRoger Maris o his time? O the hundreds o cathedralsand their buildersmany perhaps attempting to achievesomething marvellouswere Santa Maria del Fiore andBrunelleschi simply outliers: just the right at bats duringthe right year?

Skill and talent play a role. Probability tells us that ev-

ery batter has a normal distribution o hitting achievement.The skil l o the batter dictates where the mean (high point)o that distribution lies. For someone o Roger Mariss skill,achieving 61 home runs in a year takes a lot o luck. I in-stead o Mariss talent, we take Babe Ruthswith one homerun every 11.3 at bats (instead o 12.8 or Maris)then weresomeone like Ruth to come along every 3 years, the chanceso breaking the 60 home run record in the 34 years between1927 and 1961 would be 99.7%. For disciplines like writingpoetry where talent seems to be at work, the practitioner can

improve through practice, which has the eect o shitingthe normal distribution to the right, increasing the aver-age achievement.

The other side o misperceiving randomness is how weassess the talent or skill o someone with achievements.The answer is inormed by an experiment conducted by Mi-chael J. Lerner in the early 1960s [23]. In it, observers wereled to believe they were listening to 2 people (Tom and Bill)

working together to solve anagrams. In addition, they weretold that, because o a budget problem, only one o the twoanagram solvers was being paid, and that one by randomselection. Beore watching Tom and Bill, though, the observ-ers were broken into two groups. One group was told that


14/17

14

Tom had been randomly chosen to receive payment, and theother was told that Bill had been randomly chosen. Insteado listening to an actual anagram-solving session, the ob-servers listened to a script being read that careully showedthe two solvers equally adept at the task. The observers ineach group were then asked to state which person (Tom or

Bill) demonstrated the better eort, creativity, and successat the task. Overwhelming the groups chose the one they

were told was paid, even though they knew that the choiceo who was paid was random.

This means that judging whether someone is a herodepends substantially on their reward or apparent achieve-ment, and not so much on actual skill or talent. This is why,I claim, people generally consider the CEOs o successulcompanies as geniuses when their eects on their compa-nies are usually minimal or insignifcant. This is why RogerMaris must be better than Babe Ruth.

Stories are the rest o it. Stories contain lessons or at leastsignposts you can ollow. Not that a trail cant be ascinating,

but with no protagonist, interest tends to ade ast. Some-one to put yoursel in the head o; someone you can pretendto be. When you have a living (or once living) protagonist,

you can engage in biography, and rom biography you canpinpoint acts and turns that strike you as signifcant, stuyou can emulate. Want to save the world?become a B actor;

want to win a slam-dunk contest?put on Air Jordans.Maybe Fred Brooks paints chie designers with paint im-

bued with the brightness o their achievementsLerner says

that many o us do. Maybe Brooks fnds it hard to attributeto luck and other actors the creation o the extraordinaryrandomness has that eect on us. No matter; he remains a

hero to melet him be human.Then theres this: when one mind can be solely respon-sible or a masterpiece or success, you have hope. With alittle luck, possibly, you can be that special mind. Like a

winning lottery ticket oating downlike the eather atthe start oForrest Gumpalling at your eet waiting onlyto be picked up and won with, that great idea could popinto your heard, turn up on your notepad, come out o yourmouth while youre just listening to yoursel (this is where

worse is better came rom). Maybe its not that easy, butmaybe its possible. Then youd be set, your career made,ortune gathered or ame cemented. Market share wouldbe yours and. We crave heroes as an existence proo o

our own potential.Or maybe we crave heroes to give us an excuse. When

someone else is the hero, you dont have to be. When some-one else will be the genius, you can just be who you are. Noneed to try extra hardyoure not that Turing Award win-ner, that MacArthur Fellow, that writer with a publishednovel. And you never will be.

t

The question, though, is conceptual integritydoes it re-quire a single mind or something like it?

A single mind, i anything, is likely to be too uncontrol-lable to produce conceptual integrityat least in the arts.Recall T. S. Eliot: He does not know what he has to say untilhe has said it. Conceptual integrity comes rom examin-

ingin the case o poetrywhat you wrote and fnding itsbeating heart, fnding its center, its core, and making every-thing around it support it or else disappear. Many times in

writing, the eye and ear that can see clearly that heart aresomeone elses. Or else the thing created itsel steps up,says hey, look here, I mean here.

The heart oThe Waste Landwas there to be ound inEliots original manuscript, but that heart was obscuredby 600+ other lines and the mistakes and weaknesses thatPound pointed out. The conceptual integrity o the poemdid not come rom Eliots mindwhat he produced wasconceptually diuse (Pound wrote in the margin: verse notinteresting enough as verse to warrant so much o it, too

loose, and rhyme drags it out to diuseness [24]). Thepoems conceptual integrity was hidden within the dratembedded in gubbish, and when that was cleared away theremainder was rawand Eliot with Pounds help discoveredand strengthened it.

The artiact supplies conceptual integrity more than anyother collaborator, including the artist. The artist is the ve-hicle or noticing what the artiact shouts. The artistasany designer isis as great as his or her ability to be a greatand expert observer and craty reporter.

Christopher Alexander observed this when he was de-signing the oot trafc through Bay Area Rapid Transit

(BART) ticket booths:

What bothered me was that the correct analysiso the ticket booth could not be based purely on [therequirements], that there were realities emerging

romthe system itsel and that whether you suc-ceeded or not had to do with whether you created aconfguration that was stable with respect to theserealities.

Christopher Alexander [25]

Fred Brookss idea that conceptual integrity arises mostnaturally rom a single mind is sometimes called the Ro-

mantic Genius theory o inspiration. During the Romanticperiodwhich began in the second hal o the 18th centuryand lasted though most o the 19ththe prevailing idea wasthat poetry arose rom genius which was the god withinthe poet who provided inspiration.

Christopher Alexander touches on the role o the Roman-tic Genius briey in his recent book, The Nature o Order,

where he writes:


15/17

15

The history o architecture, especially in the pe-riod rom 1600 to the present, and culminating inthe thought o the 20th century, has been based onthe idea that the architects vision arises, almost

spontaneously, and at all events suddenly in thebreast o the architecta vision obtained rom in-

spiration that arrives ully fedged rom thin airand that the quality, depth, and importance o thearchitects vision comes rom this mysterious mo-

ment. Contemporary students tremble as they tryto attain this mystery.

Christopher Alexander [13]

And its not so dierent or sotware. An initial prototypeor frst design/implementation is created that does some othe job. The parts that are useul are selected or in a Dar-

winian sense, and fnally (or next) the code is revised toreect its central eatures, utility, and emerging structure[26]. The whole Alexandrian thing; the whole agile thing.

Designed as designer.

t

The ingredients or conceptual integrity are these: thetalent(s) o the human designer(s)all o them; the thingdesigned; the luck that brought the designer(s) (and every-thing they needed) to the right place(s) at the right time(s);the luck o the thing designed to have the right ingredi-ents.

Eliot and Pound had talent; Eliots studies, travels, expe-riences, riendship with Pound, and Eliot and Pound beingin France at the same time were ortuitous; Eliots drat

was ortunate that enough good stu was there or Poundto see. Luck and randomness go against the grain o humancognition; its hard to see the role o the thing designed inits own design; and thus typically only talent is given creditor great achievement.

t

Morning oods Firenzethe sun stains roos, heat andsmoke clog the sky in red. Emilio is long awake and beorehis mother begins cooking he turns onto his side in his rough

bed and tries to picture the stucco aade o the Duomo andits aded decorative paintings. How such a cathedraltheglory o Brunelleschicould be allowed to endure 500 years

without a proper ace makes him sad.Today i his mother allows and there is time ater his

chores beore the sun goes down, he will go to the plazaand make some sketchesmaybe make some watercolorslaterget some ideas down.

He hopes someone, one daya great genius perhapswill be able to plan the aade, maybe see it built, and thecathedral will be completed.

t

In 1975, two young computer scientists at MIT began topuzzle out the then-peculiar theory o actors developedby Carl Hewitt [27]. Hewitts model was object-orientedinuenced by Smalltalk ollowing a historic seminar givenby Alan Kay at MIT in November 1972. In the theory, everyactor (object) is computationally active and can send and

receive messages, which themselves are actors. An actor hasa set o acquaintances it can send messages to, includingmessages containing acquaintances.

The two young computer scientists: their methodologywas to construct a tiny Lisp interpreter or a toy Lisp andthen to extend it to create actors and send messages. Thetwo were Gerry Sussman and Guy Steele, and the toy Lispbecame known as Scheme [28]. Because Sussman was study-ing Algol [29] at the time, they decided to build a Lisp withlexical scopingand anyway, this seemed necessary to keeptrack o an actors acquaintances. Here is how the simpleactorial unction was written in their toy Lisp:

(define factorial

(lambda (n)

(if (= n 0) 1 (* n (factorial (- n 1))))))

And here is the equivalent actor:

(define actorial

(alpha (n c)

(if (= n 0) (c 1) (actorial

(- n 1)

(alpha (f) (c (* f n)))))))

Heren

is the (numeric) argument toactorial

, andc

is thecontinuationthe computation to perorm ater the onedescribed in this defnition. The values onand cpassedin via a messagebecome acquaintances o the inner con-tinuation actor created byalpha. Let me now quote GuySteele writing in The Evolution o Lisp [30]:

Then came a crucial discoveryone that, to us,illustrates the value o experimentation in language

design. On inspecting the code orapply, once theygot it working correctly, Sussman and Steele wereastonished to discover that the codes in apply orunction application and or actor invocation were

identical! Further inspection o other parts o theinterpreter, such as the code or creating unctionsand actors, conrmed this insight: the act thatunctions were intended to return values and ac-tors were not made no dierence anywhere in their

implementation. The dierence lay purely in theprimitives used to code their bodies. I the under-

lying primitives return values, then the user canwrite unctions that return values; i all primitivesexpect continuations, then the user can write ac-


16/17

16

tors. But the lambdaandalphamechanisms werethemselves identical, and rom this Sussman andSteele concluded that actors and closures were thesame concept.

Steele & Gabriel [30]

They used the word discover, and thats what its calledin most scientifc disciplines. Perhaps scientists constructstatements in a ormal language to express (an approxima-tion o) each discovery, but nave realism asks us to believethat the truth is there to be ound. Sussman and Steele de-signed and constructed a working programming language.That language and its realization in code running in MacLisp [31] on a PDP-10 [32] taught them about programminglanguage concepts, and helped them refne the language(its design) and its implementation to become one o themore important research languages in computer scienceover the last 30 years.

Perhaps Sussman and Steele knew, somehow, that actors

and closures were the same when they started to write thecode. The code, though, needed to speak to bring it to theirattention. Or maybe, just as Steele said, they didnt know.

That what they write teaches is no news to poets & writ-ers.

t

He won the competition to design the aade in 1871, andoversaw the beginning o its construction. Red, green, and

white marble, neo-gothic, though a bit over-decorated. Hiswas the third aade on the cathedral, the frst designed byArnolo di Cambio, the seconda painting over stuccobyno one worth remembering. He was mild, gentle, unassertive,

and mostly sel educated; many believed his success lay inthe sympathy which every one instinctively elt or his kindly

nature, and in the gentle tenacity with which he adhered tohis opinions while avoiding all open antagonisms [33]. For

years he studied the architecture o the Italian gothic periodand especially the Duomo, and he learnedor should I say,the Duomo taught himwhat the aade needed.

Like Brunelleschi he never saw the construction o hisdesign completed. Emilio de Fabrisdesigner o the west-ern ace o Santa Maria del Fiore, as important as anyoneto the creation o the Duomo in Florence, but someone youlikely have never heard odied on June 28, 1883.

Acknowledgements

In keeping with the theme o this essay, I would like to thankthe ollowing people who acted in the role o co-author: IanRandall Wilson (poet and novelist), Brian Marick (computerscientist), Brian Goetz (computer scientist), Guy L. Steele

Jr. (computer scientist and poet), Richard Schmitt (novelistand fction writer), Andrew Black (computer scientist), andSimon Peyton Jones (computer scientist).

References

[1] Brooks, F., transcript oCollaboration and TeleCol-laboration, a keynote at OOPSLA 2007, Montral,Canada, 2007.

[2] Brooks, F., The Mythical Man-Month, 20th Anniversa-

ry Edition, Addison-Wesley, 1995.[3] Tellis, G., Golder, N., Will and Vision: How Latecom-

ers Grow to Dominate Markets, McGraw-Hill, NewYork, 2002.

[4] Procter & Gamble,Annual Report, 1977.

[5] Sutherland, I., Sketchpad: A Man-machine GraphicalCommunication System, PhD Dissertation, MIT, Janu-ary 1963, also Computer Laboratory, University oCambridge UCAM-CL-TR-574, 2003.

[6] Eliot, T. S.,Ezra Pound, Poetry 68, 1946.

[7] Stillenginer, J.,Multiple Authorship and the Myth o

Solitary Genius, Oxord University Press, 1991.

[8] Hugo, R., The Triggering Town: Lectures and Essayson Poetry and Writing, W. W. Norton & Company,1992.

[9] Eliot, T. S., On Poetry and Poets, Faber and Faber,London, 1957.

[10] Boswell, R., The Hal-Known World: On Writing Fic-tion, Graywol Press, St. Paul, Minnesota, 2008.

[11] Gabriel, R., Writers Workshops and the Work o Mak-ing Things, Addison-Wesley, New York, 2002.

[12] King, S., On Writing, Pocket, New York, 2002.[13] Alexander, C., The Phenomenon o Lie: The Nature o

Order, Book 1An Essay o the Art o Building and theNature o the Universe; The Process o Creating Lie:The Nature o Order, Book 2An Essay o the Art oBuilding and the Nature o the Universe; A Vision o aLiving World: The Nature o Order, Book 3; The Lumi-nous Ground: The Nature o Order, Book 4; Center orEnvironmental Structure, 20032006.

[14] Knott, W.,Rome in Rome, Release Press, Brooklyn,1976.

[15] Knott, W.,Becos, Random House, New York, 1983.

[16] Sprat, T., Upon the Poems o the English Ovid, Anacre-on, Pindar and Virgil, ABRAHAM COWLEY, in Imita-tion o his own Pindarick Odes, http://etext.virginia.edu/kinney/small/varii.htm, 1716.

[17] Fowler, M.,Reactoring: Improving the Design o Exist-ing Code, Addison-Wesley, New York, 1999.

[18] http://martinfowler.com/books.html


17/17

17

[19] Coplien, J., Space: The Final Frontier, C++ Report10(3), pp. 1117, March 1998.

[20] http://members.iinet.net.au/~matteoli/html/Articles/Brunelleschi.html

[21]Grass, P.,La Reconstruction du nid et les Coordina-tions Inter-Individuelles chez Bellicositermes Natal-

ensis et Cubitermes sp. La theorie de la Stigmergie:Essai dinterpretation du Comportement des TermitesConstructeurs, Insectes Sociaux, 6:4181, 1959.

[22] King, R.,Brunelleschis Dome: How a RenaissanceGenius Reinvented Architecture, Penguin Books, NewYork, 2000.

[23] Lerner, M.,Evaluation o Perormance as a Functiono Perormers Reward and Attractiveness, Journal oPersonality and Social Psychology, 1965.

[24] Eliot, T. S., Eliot, V., The Waste Land: A Facsimile andTranscript o the Original Drats Including the Anno-

tations o Ezra Pound, Harvest, New York, 1971.[25] Grabow, S., Christopher Alexander: The Search or a

New Paradigm in Architecture, Oriel Press, Stocks-feld, UK, 1983.

[26] Foote, B.,A Fractal Model o the Liecycle o ReusableObjects, position paper or a variety o workshops,http://www.laputan.org/frameworks/fractal.html, 19911995.

[27] Hewitt, C.,Description and Theoretical Analysis (Us-ing Schemata) o PLANNER: A Language or ProvingTheorems and Manipulating Models in a Robot, MIT,1972.

[28] Sussman, G., Steele, G., SCHEME: An Interpreter orExtended Lambda Calculus , AI Memo 349, MIT, 1975.

[29] Naur, P., et al.,Revised Report on the Algorithmic Lan-guage ALGOL 60, Communications o the ACM, Vol.6, No. 1, pp. 120, January 1963.

[30] Steele, G., Gabriel, R., The Evolution o Lisp, ACMConerence on the History o Programming Languag-es, II, published in ACM SIGPLAN Notices, Vol. 28,No. 3, March 1993.

[31] Moon, D.,MacLisp Reerence Manual, MIT, 1974.

[32] Digital Equipment Corporation, PDP-10 ReerenceHandbook, 1969.

[33] Willard, A.,History o Modern Italian Art, Longmans,Green and Co., London, 1902.

Notes

[A] When I ound multiple versions o a poem, I would notread any o them; then I would perorm my analysis onthe frst version; next I would look at the revision to seehow predictive my analysis was; and fnally I would ana-lyze the revision. etc The analysis o the frst versiono the Knott poem was done beore I read his revision.

Designed as Designer Expanded

Documents

Transcript of Designed as Designer Expanded