Past Forces
Understand the forces that formed the current system so you can better design an alternative.
in the design process, you’re looking for how you can move a system from where it is now to your Preferred State, but it also helps to know how the system got that way in the first place.
It is much more difficult to explain why a system has the specific properties it does if we don’t understand how it developed over time.
“[Christopher] Alexander views everything in nature as being in the state of becoming, of change, of development, of unfolding. The why and how of these processes is not easy to understand, but, according to Alexander, there is a simple way to access its secrets: by looking at nature. If we do that, we can almost always find the reason why one of the 15 properties of life developed. It is much more difficult to explain why a system has a particular property when its development has not been under observation.” — Helmut Leitner, Pattern Theory
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This is really about researching the history of a system. Where did it come from? What did it’s earlier iterations look like? And most importantly, what forces caused it to change, especially in ways we don’t prefer now?
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A simple example of this would be the heart-shaped watermelon. If someone presented you with a perfectly-formed heart-shaped watermelon, you might really wonder how that happened. Was it a fluke? A miracle? You might be willing to pay a lot of money for that melon. But if you saw that the young melon was placed in a plastic, heart-shaped mold and allowed to conform to the shape of the mold as it grew, it wouldn’t seem quite so miraculous. When you understand the forces that change a system, you understand why the system is the way it is.
Therefore:
Understand the forces that formed the current system so you can better design an alternative.
If this is part of an Open Artifacts project, make sure you document what you learn for others