Beautiful Software

Beautiful Software 2023-24 is a seminar provided to computer people taking the Building Beauty Core Course

It is also a research group that grows larger each year

Participants in Beautiful Software devote an additional 4 hours a week to applying the ideas from the Core course to the world of computing. It consists of a once-a-week 2-hour meeting where the material is discussed, and the group self-manages projects and research. We are part of a network that creates software to help with environmentally-sensitive construction. People in the seminar often help, when they are so inspired, but this is not required.

After many decades where Christopher Alexander’s work on the built environment repeatedly influenced the world of computing, the hope is that people in technology fields will want to examine the material in its original context, in a well-structured course with colleagues of Alexander’s. All it takes is eight months’ effort within the Building Beauty Core course.

The Beautiful Software seminar serves as a place where those technologists -- who’ve joined Building Beauty -- can sort through their thoughts with their peers, concerning the ramifications for computing. Additionally, they can participate in research work on software projects that will help more people to use this material to improve the built environment.

Goal

We’re trying to create a group of software people who have taken the core building beauty course. It’s our experience so far that it’s very hard to even have conversations with computer people about this material, which has been heavily digested by many thousands, but not quite understood. People need to directly experience working with this approach to custom, step-wise adaptive construction, where ‘good fit’ is judged by our innate feelings for the properties of living structure.

The Building Beauty Core Course clearly leads people to this sensibility. We are happy to be growing this group with the requisite combined training and abilities to meet the difficult challenges Christopher Alexander presented to the computer industry in the late 1990s. 

People

The beautiful software graduates from the previous year’s Core Course are now graduate tutors and form a research group that will work with the first-year students. We would like this working group to grow, because we have many specific questions about beauty in the world of computing that need answers. 

Program

This year, we have planned more interactions with the outside world: guests will join us, we’ll host an online conference, we’ll issue project calls, write papers, and host a monthly interaction with the public. 

Working Group Projects

Now that we’ve established a small research group, we will—with the voluntary assistance of first-year students (who will be quite busy with the core course)—work on four projects:

  • Interactive, participatory lessons that attempt to invoke an understanding of, and a feeling for, centers and the 15 properties.

  • Integrating those lessons with the mirror of the self test, an application which one of our graduate tutors has built.

  • Study, improve and update Gatemaker in various contexts.

  • Build tools that aid the creation of Feeling Maps.

To express your interest in joining us, please write to software@buildingbeauty.org.

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Christopher Alexander made sure that his colleagues, no matter their background, went through fundamental, practical training on the nature of beauty. We've continued that tradition at the Building Beauty program. Now, in parallel, within our new Beautiful Software initiative, we’ll get everyone up-to-speed regarding ambitious technology that can assist in the spread of beauty. The first lesson is that putting nature, beauty, and feeling in the center of processes and practices will engender positive, revolutionary changes in the world we live in.  

The Case For Beautiful Software 

There are three strange facts that force us to consider good software to be (among other things) beautiful and natural, compelling us to examine closely what these mean. 

  1. People can tell the difference between something that is natural -- that is, not man-made -- and something that is a human artifact.

  2. However it's measured, nature makes more complex products than we can. Of course, the human species is an 'artifact' of nature, so we can never win that game.

  3. Among the products of nature and humans, we judge the best to be 'natural and 'beautiful'.

If you work in computing, we invite you to study this material with us in its original form, for the built environment -- and join in parallel seminars, projects, and conferences to explore a disciplined, rigorous, and authentic recasting of this material within the world of technology. We will pursue research in the natural sciences and explore the nature of engineering, while growing beautiful projects that move us towards a better world. 

Videos & Conversations

Computer people have been keenly interested in Christopher Alexander's work for decades. But they might consider studying it in its original context, as applied to the built environment. The point of his work is not to be found in technical details, but in the nourishing of one's core intuition or feeling, with a perspective and sensibility from which to produce work that is good, beautiful, comfortable, natural, and helpful for the world.



Christopher Alexander on his disappointment with A Pattern Language, how the “Mirror of the Self“ shifted his ability to get people to see life, and the basis for The Nature of Order.

Greg Bryant presentation of the core ideas behind the first year of Beautiful Software at the PUARL + Building Beauty 2020 Virtual Symposium

Regarding (1) -- of course it’s possible to fool people: with a photograph, for example. But when we do so, we are merely re-emphasizing that there is a perceptual faculty that reacts to impressions of natural structure. 

Regarding (2) -- nature produces beauty and adaptation wonderfully. It's enviable. But nature's precise physical and chemical mechanisms are terribly complex and hard to uncover, while the mechanisms behind good software must be clear, consistent, and comprehensible. So why study natural processes? Because nature doesn't only work at a single, low-level scale. Nature works with overlapping layers of means and ends, which we can make immediate use of, it turns out, when we direct our efforts towards beauty and feeling. We don't need to copy nature exactly. We just need to do better, and natural processes provide the clues. 

Regarding (3) -- there are many human artifacts and processes, even extremely 'popular', 'successful', and 'productive' ones, that are neither beautiful nor natural. This may be a good indication of a harmful product or process. Things that are popular, dominant, and stimulating are not necessarily good. But, unfortunately, by habit, and power projection through our society, bad results are often called 'best practices'. Learning to question dogmas is one of the most important skills one can develop in life and in the sciences -- along with an ability to piece together theories that displace the dogmas. This process of enlightenment, in the broad sense, should never end. 

Finally, even the most beautiful and natural software will do harm if it was not created freely and cooperatively, for the purpose of healing and helping people and nature. Responsibility is rarely practiced in the creation of any technology, but we need it: we won't survive unless we become truly, doggedly responsible. 

The architect and urbanist Christopher Alexander, and his coworkers, produced a body of insights, practical methods, and research results, which inspired countless movements and products in the computer world -- from structured programming to design patterns to the Hillside Group; from extreme programming to the wiki to the sims."

But these were side-effects. His major drive was to understand the nature of beauty, and the processes that create life and beauty in nature, so people could make beautiful things. 

Anyone who wants to build beautifully, and anyone interested in resolving the countless troubles and problems in the world of computing, would benefit from understanding Alexander’s underlying research program.  

The most direct way to do that, and the most engaged approach, is to study the material with a network of people who worked closely with Christopher Alexander, and who are continuing to develop his approach to theory and practice. 

To express your interest in joining us, please write to software@buildingbeauty.org.