Pattern Languages

Towards a Fourth Generation Pattern Language: Patterns as Epistemic Threads

The evolution of pattern languages can also be understood from this perspective. Alexander’s meticulous study of recurrent structural patterns in vernacular architecture while constructing the first ever Pattern Language, provided a wide set of case studies, with demonstrated capacity to maintain fitness, from which to formalize knowledge in the relevant domain. The second generation built upon the format thus developed, in order to allow successful transfer and production of adaptive knowledge across different domains. This allowed exploration and optimization of solutions over an extremely wide and diverse range of users and problems. The third generation introduces self-referential processes that reconnect the structures being designed to the systems they produce, in real time and easy to observe at human scale. It thus creates an iterative loop that is both generated by the structure (relational) and generative of it, and so brings reflexivity about social processes to center stage.
This understanding is fundamental for work in domains changing so rapidly that past change in similar systems cannot alone provide the information necessary to inform effective strategies. Even if we are able to define the quality without a name as an end, we have to reintroduce processes of orientation and attention to telos, evident in Alexander’s original thinking, in order to create frameworks for guiding unpredictable dynamic processes.
Once the dimension of orientation is acknowledged and actively iterated, the broad plurality of active agency and the multiplicity of approaches discussed earlier allow a wide-ranging exploration of the landscape of possibilities that can orient the search for functionally sound generative interventions. The next step is to reveal the potential for active and adaptive knowledge development and transfer across wide and heterogeneous networks, and monitoring and orientation of the development of the systems thus generated.