Notes on: The Nature of Order – Prologue

Building is a process of imposing some sort of “order” on the world. This is done on a grand scale but we don’t really understand the order we create on any kind of deep level. However from the scientists perspective we do have a narrow understanding of some aspects of order as it occurs in nature and this understanding molds our understanding of the world.

“Human feeling is mostly the same, mostly the same from person to person, mostly the same in every person. Of course, there is that part of human feeling where we are all different. Each of us has our idiosyncrasies, our unique individual human character. That is the part people most often concentrate on when they are talking about feelings, and comparing feelings. But that idiosyncratic part is really only about ten percent of the feelings which we feel. Ninety percent of our feelings is stuff in which we are all the same and we feel the same thing. So from the very beginning, when we made the pattern language, we concentrated on that part of human experience and feeling where our feeling is all the same. That is what the pattern language is — a record of that stuff in us, which belongs to the ninety percent of our feeling where our feelings are all the same”

– Christopher Alexander (2002) The Nature of Order, book one, pp. 3-4.