Sense of Livingness
Refine your ability to sense the vitality or livingness of designs.
According to Felt Senses, you have many, many senses beyond the five basic senses we often think about, but there is one sense that deserves its own pattern because it’s critical to creating a better world.
Elegantly ordered, complex systems have a quality of life that we can detect, but we’ve forgotten how to access it.
“The fact is that the difference between a good building and a bad building, between a good town and a bad town, is an objective matter. It is the difference between health and sickness, wholeness and dividedness, self maintenance and self-destruction.” (Christopher Alexander, A Timeless Way of Building, p.25)
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Even the use of the word “elegant” to describe more evolved, complex systems hints at the idea that we have the ability to sense this quality. In his book Lila, Robert Pirsig struggles with what “quality” is. I would argue that a system with a high degree of livingness, is both elegant and has a high level of quality.
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When Christopher Alexander wrote A Pattern Language, he travelled and looked for examples of architecture, art and handicraft that had what he called “the quality without a name.” As he found them, he analyzed them and eventually was able to discern 15 properties that these artifacts possessed in different combinations and to different degrees.
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A clear sense of this quality is important because we are all trying to move the world toward greater livingness. In a situation where we’re trying to create something that has never been created before, a sense of livingness can help ensure that we are pushing in the right direction. A designer can ask whether they feel that a particular transformation will move the project in the right direction, and later they can use the same question to determine if it actually worked.
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When I worked as graphic designer, my primary technique for working a design was to move stuff around on the page, trying different configurations until something clicked and it felt right. I would continue to make minor adjustments, often reverting to a previous version when it felt like I was going in the wrong direction. At the time, I thought I was kind of cheating because I rarely had a “vision” of the final product in mind when I started, but I was using an iterative technique that was based in my sense of livingness.
Therefore:
Strengthen your sense of vitality or livingness in systems (objects, organizations, people) by paying attention when you find something compelling or beautiful; work to identify what it is about that system that is activating that sense of livingness in you.
When designing—Design—use this quality to help your decide what Small Steps to take in a given situation