🥐 ➡️ ⛩ From street cafes to sacred sites: using A Pattern Language

What this design bible can teach us about the internet

For architects, designers, and in recent decades, coders and digital entrepreneurs, there is one reference book that is invoked probably more than any other: A Pattern Language. This 45-years-old encyclopedic tome is comprised of 253 “patterns,” each of which examines a specific dynamic between people and the environments where they work, play and live. Some patterns, as you’ll see below, are as simple as the classic “street cafe,” and others require a bit more unpacking.

But Christopher Alexander, and his co-authors at Berkeley’s Center for Environmental Structure in the 1970s,¹ based the 1000+ pages of A Pattern Language on a theory: people have an evolving relationship with the environment they live in, and they reciprocally shape each other. 

If this idea feels familiar, or even basic, it might be because we’ve been living with it for a half century. When it came out, the book was simultaneously reacting to changing gender roles and racial consciousness, and it has what the architecture critic Alexandra Lange calls a “vegetarian-stew earnestness.” At the time, this stance put off the architectural establishment, namely modernists. 

An example of a typical diagram from A Pattern Language

In the years since, other design theories have come into prominence, a number of which have overlapped with the theories of A Pattern Language. The book is not just the “most widely read architectural treatise ever published,” as an architecture research review puts it, but it’s also an inspiration for modern urbanism and open source coding. One could say A Pattern Language’s greatest contribution was not really architectural, but rather the idea of the “pattern” as an organizing principle. Just this week, a web3 project called “Pluriverse” invoked A Pattern Language:

Pattern languages are modular, structured without being prescriptive, and for the purpose of practical design—the original pattern language had the aim of giving ordinary people, not merely professionals, the ability and vocabulary to shape their lived environment for increased community viability. 

These modular units of relationship suggest a layered framework for iteration and reuse. And as we’ve discovered in our explorations of the work here at New_ Public, the original patterns can be really fun to think about in terms of analogous examples on the internet. So let’s tour through a few patterns!

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Common areas at the heart

Create a single common area for every social group. Locate it at the center of gravity of all the spaces the group occupies, and in such a way that the paths which go in and out of the building lie tangent to it. (A Pattern Language, No. 129)

What is it? Starting at the scale of a single building, this pattern refers to rooms that facilitate “constant informal contact” between people who use the building. So in a single family home, this might be a welcoming kitchen or a family room. In a workplace, this could be a lounge or communal eating place.

Why do people use this? Often these answers can seem obviously straightforward, but they’re worth close consideration. In the case of common areas, A Pattern Language says it’s important that they’re accessible to all. They shouldn’t be a destination you have to go to, but an optional location where you can pause for a moment of socializing or linger and settle in for a longer hangout.

What would it be online? Rarely is there a perfect 1:1 example of an architectural pattern manifesting in a digital public space, but it’s an interesting challenge to try and find something that feels close. For common areas, we thought perhaps a community forum with deep roots and lots of longtime members would be a good fit. Metafilter has a purposeful system for introducing friction and slowing things down. They charge a $5 fee and require a waiting period before posting, which results in a far different feel than the constantly churning, live-wire feeling of larger discussion boards like Reddit.

Street Cafe

Encourage local cafes to spring up in each neighborhood. Make them intimate places, with several rooms, open to a busy path, where people can sit with coffee or a drink and watch the world go by. Build the front of the cafe so that a set of tables stretch out of the cafe, right into the street. (A Pattern Language, No. 88)

What is it? A street cafe can be a special place. Alexander and co. note that a true street cafe is a bit more than a neighborhood coffee shop. It’s not only a well-known, local place, but it should also have a variety of spaces for different uses, and change in character throughout the day. 

Why do people use this? A cafe like this is a safe place to relax, but also it’s a chance to be on-view and watch the world go by. The opportunity to people-watch is important, but a street cafe differs from a front stoop or porch in how public and busy it is — there’s a greater variety of people to gaze at.

What would it be online? In some cases, the live chat of a broadcast can become a place to socialize in front of a crowd. On Twitch, some livestreams are dedicated to studying or chatting. While Twitter aspires to have this quality, and still sometimes does for some users, it mostly is a cacophonous mess. In some gaming communities, such as Roboblox, kids meet to just hangout and socialize in public, as opposed to intentionally playing.

Necklace of local community projects

Allow the growth of shop-size spaces around the local town hall, and any other appropriate community building. Front these shops on a busy path, and lease them for a minimum rent to ad hoc community groups for political work, trial services, research, and advocate groups. No ideological restrictions. (A Pattern Language, No. 45)

What is it? Zooming out a bit, Alexander and the other Pattern Language writers see democratic virtue in small grassroots groups, with little money, situated in well-trafficked areas and highly visible to the community. While these aren’t always present in every community, an example could be the downtown office of a fringe candidate or political cause.

Why do people use this? For the authors, “critical opposition to established ideas” is essential in pushing forward free speech and democracy. Looking back, I see this as less about the “marketplace of ideas” and more of a countercultural check on entrenched norms in a post-Watergate and Vietnam era.

What would it be online? In tech, this has a lot of overlap with the libertarian “builder” mentality. Some platforms are premised on the ability of strange, or unexpected ideas to bubble up and go viral. On Reddit, there’s a strange joy in seeing something unusual and unexpected make it to the main front page from some very weird subreddit.

Sacred Sites

Whether the sacred sites are large or small, whether they are at the center of the towns, in neighborhoods, or in the deepest countryside, establish ordinances which will protect them absolutely so that our roots in the visible surroundings cannot be violated. (A Pattern Language, No. 24)

What is it? Sometimes a distant mountain, or a central garden, is held apart and has special public meaning. These sites are preserved carefully, and only accessible through a complicated approach: a winding mountain path or a series of outer, protective gardens. This place is a kind of inner sanctum of spiritual, and ultimately civic, importance. 

Why do people use this? People want to sustain their roots to what has come before, and leverage a shared history towards greater trust and camaraderie. If we neglect sacred sites, we lose some connection to the region, and to our neighbors.

What would it be online? It’s difficult to consider what is sacred on the social internet, a vast place that’s only a couple decades old. One interpretation might be Wikipedia — a common resource, decades in the making, that is actively protected and fiercely guarded by volunteer moderators. Alternatively, some of our oldest memes, only approached through a contextual understanding (like Know Your Meme provides) have a kind of sacred quality in a way specific to the internet. Similarly, the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine could be a sacred site.

Degrees of Publicness

Make a clear distinction between three kinds of homes - those on quiet backwaters, those on busy streets, and those that are more or less in between. Make sure that those on quiet backwaters are on twisting paths, and that these houses are themselves physically secluded; make sure that the more public houses are on busy streets with many people passing by all day long and that the houses themselves are relatively exposed to the passersby. The in between houses may then be located on the paths half-way between the other two. Give every neighborhood about equal numbers of these three kinds of homes. (A Pattern Language, No. 36)

What is it? This is more of a concept for understanding of how different people like to live different distances from the central hubbub of a community. For the authors, this has to do with various degrees of introversion and extroversion, and the diversity of lifestyle preferences.

Why do people use this? Some people like to live (or their economic circumstances dictate that they live) right on top of the action, so they can run to a corner store or grab a bus. Others prefer to live a little off of busy roads constantly full of traffic and people.

What would it be online? Some users thrive among the noisiness and messiness of social platforms like Facebook, and they spend a lot of time there. Others, burned by these places, move to quieter online realms. Personally, after years of spending hours on these platforms, I now do a lot more of my online socializing with my close friends on a private Discord, which feels much safer and calmer.

Do you have a pattern you’d like to share with us? Have a better digital example in mind for one of these? Leave us a comment below and maybe we’ll feature it in a future newsletter!

You know, I am one of the people who, just about 10 years ago exactly, would have confidently predicted that in the year 2022 we would have had this smorgasbord of rich, living books — the idea that the screen of the phone, and especially the tablet, has this perfect canvas. It's like well, of course there's going to be fantasy novels with orcs marching across the screen. And obviously textbooks are going to be completely reinvented. And basically none of that happened. And, I mean, I guess on some level I'm a little disappointed. But especially when it comes to technology, and this has changed for me over the years, I want to believe that the world is sometimes telling us things. It's not always a market failure, or you're in the wrong splintered timeline when the world doesn't match your cool expectations from a decade ago. 

Just as a small example, one of the things that I remember I just finally clicked into: Many, many years ago, I was on an airplane. And I, of course, was kind of peeking over someone's shoulder and I saw someone reading on, I am sure it was a Kindle, and they had the font size jacked up so high, that basically four words fit on every page. So they just were happily cruising through these pages reading this little gulp of text at a time. Now, of course, it was an older person, and I realized that they must have had some visual impairment. And for them, the ability to do that — that thing that seems so simple, and of course to me a little aesthetically gross — for them it was total liberation, and I mean, total happiness, I presume. 

And it made me think like, oh, actually, maybe that is actually what ebooks were for. This whole time I imagined it was about having little animations on this magical page, this sort of magically illuminated book. Nice try. What ebooks are for is for truly letting anyone read, with visual impairment or not. And I feel like that humbled me a little bit when it came to those theories and imaginations of what ebooks are supposed to do in the world. Maybe they've done it with flying colors.

– Robin Sloan, author of Mr. Penumbra’s 24‑Hour Bookstore

The above is an excerpt of my interview with Robin, who wrote our first book club book. He has generously agreed to attend the first half hour of our March 8 Open Thread, where you can ask him anything you like about the book or his many professional and personal interests.

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Missing street cafes,

Josh

Illustration from A Pattern Language, page 165. Photo of street cafe by Siyuan via Unsplash. Photo of shrine by Nicki Eliza Schinow via Unsplash. Photo of Los Angeles by Alexis Balinoff via Unsplash.

1. We’ve talked about this time and place recently, in the context of the Community Memory project.