tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5148972.post343673350444045714..comments2023-09-15T09:56:16.253-03:00Comments on Composing: Composinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01739889615635395138noreply@blogger.comBlogger1125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5148972.post-83344785652610064432010-10-18T18:40:45.848-02:002010-10-18T18:40:45.848-02:00I was totally floundering at university in the mid...I was totally floundering at university in the mid-1970's; very earnest but lost. For a while I was living in a rented house with too many others. Someone subscribed to a book club with no intention of actually paying. These books got passed around and we would talk together about them.<br /><br />One of the books was "The Oregon Experiment" by Christopher Alexander. Not via the book club, but a book that had also been passed around was Victor Papanek's "Design for the Real World." I read Alexander's book as a political work. It seemed to me to provide a map of the way to go forward.<br /><br />I was studying Child Development, so investigating Alexander more discovered that he had worked in Jerome Bruner's Learning Laboratory. It was only later after I'd dropped out of school that I discovered Alexander's "The Timeless Way of Building" and introduced to the idea of the quality which has no name.<br /><br />Everyone I knew at that time was trying to make a living and this idea seemed laughable rather than essential. I chocked up my interest in Christopher Alexander up to one of my quirks.<br /><br />Meeting you online was the first I knew that "A Pattern Language" had become important for programmers.<br /><br />A couple of pieces of writing you may find of interest. First is a book by Stephen Grabow, "Christopher Alexander: The Search for a New Paradigm in Architecture." The book is a window on Alexander's ideas as of the late 1970's. the second is Jerome Bruner's 1991 article <a href="http://www.semiootika.ee/sygiskool/tekstid/bruner.pdf" rel="nofollow">The Narrative Construction of Reality</a> (PDF).John Powershttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17126222842766191343noreply@blogger.com