Books for Designers: Notes on the Synthesis of Form by Christopher Alexander
Alexander, also the author of A Pattern Language, wrote heady stuff about the way we design and find design solutions for architecture, city planning, tool making and more.
First published in 1964, Notes on the Synthesis of Form is a truly geek-out-worthy exploration on the inner workings of the problem-solving and design process. Don’t expect a how-to.
So here are ten truly memorable quotes from this masterpiece.
- “A design problem is not an optimization problem.”
- “Where a number of issues are being taken into account in a design decision, inevitably the ones which can be most clearly expressed carry the greatest weight, and are best reflected in the form.”
- “Caught in a net of language of our own invention, we overestimate the language’s impartiality.”
- “The right way is the residue when all the wrong ways have been eradicated.”
- “If he is a good designer the form he invents will penetrate the problem so deeply that it not only solves it but illuminates it.”
- “Finding the right design program for a given problem is the first phase of the design process.*”
- “The constructive diagram can describe the context and it can describe the form. It offers a way of probing the context, and a way of searching for a form.”
- “Scientist try to identify the components of existing structures, designers try to shape the components of new structures.”
- “No one has yet invented a scale for unhappiness or discomfort or uneasiness, and it is therefore not possible to set up performance standards for them. Yet these misfits are among the most critical which occur in design problems.”
- “Under the influence of concepts, he not only does things from a biased point of view, but he sees them biasedly as well.”
On number 6, it is worth noting that in the context of the book, the design program is the organization of the elements and criteria into semi-independent subsystems, not to be confused with the computer application that designers nowadays use.
A lot of these quotes have been very useful in the development of my own design craft, which heavily involves hand-drawn constructive diagrams, a process you can learn all about at my 3-hour seminar Oct 1 in Santa Monica.
