Connecting to the World: Christopher Alexander's Tool for Human-Centered Design, by Nikos A. Salingaros
(From https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2405872620300666)
Beauty connects us viscerally to the material universe. Life forms evolved to experience biological connectedness as an absolute necessity for survival. Starting one century ago, however, dominant culture deliberately reversed the mechanism responsible for visceral connection. The resulting disconnection from the material world will continue to have long-lasting negative consequences for human well-being. Christopher Alexander describes how to revive the visceral connecting process, creating conditions for human-centered design in our times. Biological connectedness arises from an organic projection of the designer's self
onto the material reality of the object being designed, and to its physical context. Exploring multiple scenarios using informational feedback avoids letting the designer's ego or imposed images exert a controlling influence. Implementing Alexander's connecting method could revolutionize design, with the potential to produce a new, nourishing art and architecture. Recent developments in biophilia and neuro-design help to better understand Alexander's ideas, using results not available at the time he was developing his theory.
... [W]hatever happened to beauty as an essential factor in healing environments? Why did this feature of human-centered design disappear?
Simplified building shapes, and the extensive use of smooth glass façades and other conspicuous consequences of prevailing modernist design ideals have led to confusion about beauty in a wider sense. As the present study is concerned with architecture, it is essential to state at the outset why the canonical 20th century design tradition is inadequate. Donald Norman explains this point very well, describing how architectural design became focused on abstraction, formalism, and surface appearance to the exclusion of human adaptive factors.
There was little emphasis upon the people for whom the objects were being designed, no discussion about practicality or everyday usage. Even in architecture, the emphasis was form, not the people who had to suffer living and working in the clean, sterile environment that the architects championed.
The British Government recently set up the Building Better, Building Beautiful Commission to re-align new building activity towards this goal. Its extensive report links beauty directly to human physiological and psychological well-being, to stewardship of the earth, and to an organic form of sustainability. Downplaying purely aesthetic questions, the report emphasizes that beauty includes everything that promotes a healthy and happy life. . . . It is not merely a visual characteristic, but is revealed in the deep harmony between a place and those who settle there.
Those goals and that kind of language were unthinkable a few years ago.
Fortunately, we possess a method for creating beauty and implementing human-centered design. Architect and design theorist Christopher Alexander links beauty to the profound nature (notion or quality) of inner feeling, which we connect to unconsciously. This experience cannot exist detached from the human perceptual system, since the effect depends upon sensory connection. Our body responds viscerally to certain signals and informational input coming from our immediate environment. A feeling takes place on both experiential and physical planes, and is the basis of our survival through the three-way set of autonomous responses: fight, flight, or freeze.
At the same time, beauty is deeper than opinion-based aesthetics, and is even independent of humans. This conclusion follows because the configurations that turn out to be beautiful
—those we respond to viscerally in a positive sense, and unconsciously seek out for comfort and pleasure—were present long before humans evolved. Those examples arise in nature from generative processes related to the organization of matter, and from biological development. All of this occurred before our bodies and sense of aesthetics evolved.
Although the focus here is on architecture, the discussion might be useful to other design disciplines including industrial and product design as well. Here I will outline Alexander's theory of human-environment connection and its background to enable architects and designers alike to understand and apply that theory in a practical manner. The method combines scientific, psychological, and at times mystical actions to achieve connectivity. Alexander's Mirror-of-the-Self test (described in a later section) supports the connecting process, because it gives consistent results for choosing between a pair of similar examples.
The objective is to set a special emotional stage that privileges human-centered design over all other possible choices. Central aspects of Alexander's work in his book The Nature of Order are placed in the context of contemporary work on human-centered architectural design, as well as Don Norman's well-known work on emotional design. Biological connection automatically orients the design process towards human-centered design. As an underlying assumption, nourishing (not intellectual) beauty resonates with our body precisely because it is adapted to human biology. Different moods of the designer affect the ability to implement user-centered design.11 By establishing a specific mood that focuses on design that adapts to human sensibilities, consequently, a positive mood will be experienced by the users of the designed object.
The Need for a New Design Discipline
Human-centered design relies upon beauty as a visceral phenomenon. The notion of beauty, however, does not fit into any established explanatory context. This omission occurs despite the effect playing a major role in our lives. Beauty linked to biology and the mechanisms necessary for life nourishes us when present, and degrades our existence when it is absent. Beauty in architecture needs its own model, related to but distinct from biology, physics, systems theory, and so on. To consistently create a tangible feeling of what might be called
visceral beauty
in buildings and cities, we require a pragmatic theory for understanding the world based on observation and repeatability.Art historians have argued about beauty for centuries, yet discussions in the standard literature lack practical guidelines for today's design professionals. Attention is sidetracked into historical debates, leading away from useful design principles. Empirical findings that underlie human-centered design have arisen instead in advertising and product design, outside official architectural and artistic theories of beauty. Recent results from neurobiology validate practicing designers' intuitive understanding of which factors influence human-centered design.
Don Norman has said that creating useful products depends upon cognitive design principles, which make it possible to implement human-centered design to design all things: artifacts, buildings, and even cities. Cognitive design—relying upon how our brain engages with form and information—has been successfully applied to product design, but, so far, has not influenced architecture.
In addition, human-centered design depends upon affordance, context, dimension, ergonomics, interaction, shape, signifiers, usability, and more, which require the designer to be extremely sensitive to a user's physiological and psychological requirements. Cognitive design together with recent scientific discoveries helps a designer to select design typologies that lead to adaptation, and to identify its opposite—detached design based on abstractions—which ignores accumulated empirical evidence about human use.
Norman points out that deciding among distinct design choices, especially if they all seem equally sound, is based on emotion. Applying logic and intellectual reasoning takes far longer and sometimes leads to a mental block of indecision. Emotional design is more efficient, but could go both ways—it may be pulled towards branding (an attractive image) and away from adaptivity (which fits human use and creates a healing environment). Alexander's visceral connecting is emotion-based, but it is effective because it is driven by identifying the living structure
within the thing being designed. The focus is on a specific group of emotions; otherwise we get lost in our own sentimentality. Adapting to human needs prevents emotional decisions from being influenced by irrelevant factors such as what outside influences persuade us to like, what we have been taught to prefer, and so on.
Connecting the Self
to the Physical World
Creating living architecture—in the sense of directly experienced visceral beauty and emotional nourishment—is a process of connecting with our inner self. In biology, connectedness is an imperative for life; here, we seek to link ourselves to a piece of the physical world. Alexander uses philosophical and poetic language to explain this process of discovering the designer's self
in whatever they are trying to make. He refers to establishing as deep and intuitive a connection to the emergent design and its physical context as possible. Before any design can be conceived as visual form, or even in order to consider its practical implications, Alexander looks for a vague but strongly-perceived emotional quality that will connect his own self with whatever he's making. He delays making procedural decisions until he has established some deeply felt connection with the amorphous virtual object. He then uses this felt sense of connection to guide the creative process. This very personal emotional link is essential because it helps designers discern among the overwhelming range of possibilities present at each step of the development cycle.
Lacking such a visceral connection leads the design process astray, however. When designers have no aid to guide them in taking sequential design decisions, they default to a facile, one-step standard—copy from a pre-existing vocabulary of forms. Those ready-made solutions can range from barely adequate to totally inappropriate; they can never truly adapt to the specific requirements of the current problem. But that's what has been happening for the past century! A generic design process has no step-wise selection, thus automatically ruling out any adaptation. It does not bring users any closer to connecting emotionally to the finished result.
It is absolutely essential to have a system of practical constraints in place to guide and underlie all of design. We should not be misled to believe that we are creating pure fine art. In architecture, such a system for organizing complexity exists in the Pattern Language, which helps to implement previously discovered solutions. Interacting design patterns distill proven socio-geometric solutions that can be reused with adaptive changes according to the situation at hand. Without some such ordering framework, our emotions can draw us toward impractical excursions that work against functionality.
Alexander essentially proposes that designers establish an intuitive connection with the prospective artifact as a precondition to design. The method is a mental exercise that engages an experience of physical healing. (A positive visceral/emotional connection triggers physiological and psychological reactions that generate a positive feeling, and which—by reducing stress—boosts health over the long term). The emotional link to that sense of healing guides each subsequent step in the design process—the designer uses their feelings, triggered by that viscerally felt sense of connection, to assess each design decision. Feedback should not be forced towards something that the designer wants—the design will develop based on empathy and harmony. This approach helps to keep the designer from making choices that lead away from human-centered design, as it insulates the process from externally imposed fashionable or formalistic influences.
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Enjoying Life's Freedom by Belonging to the World
In The Nature of Order, Alexander advances the thesis that the geometry of the environment influences our life either negatively or positively. Whenever spaces and surfaces possess the correct affordances, then we perform all of life's activities fluently without noticing the environment at all. Nevertheless, those actions are enabled because—and only when—we connect to surrounding details and dimensions, which boost our physiology and thought. This process is unconscious. If, by contrast, we find ourselves in a psychologically hostile environment, that impacts our actions and we have to force ourselves to accomplish even the most basic everyday functions under stressful conditions.