With a visit of one week at IBM Research Almaden with @rarar and @jimspohrer , I was invited to give a talk. As an IBM alumnus who was active in pattern language community from the mid-1990s, this was an occasion to surface some history of science about activities inside the company that is otherwise opaque. This history shapes my aspirations and predispositions towards continuing the development of pattern language in new domains.
The high-level agenda aimed to cover three parts:
- 1. 1964 → 1999 → 2012:
Synthesis of Form→OOPSLA 1996→Battle (Eishin) - 2. 1993 →2002→2006→2010:
Hillside Group→IGS Method→AWB→Eclipse - 3. 2014 → … :
Wicked Messes→Service Systems Thinking
Here’s the abstract sent in advance of my arrival:
Pattern language has its origins from architects of built physical environments. The approach was cross-appropriated into software development methods at the rise of object-oriented design, and was influential in the emerging styles with agile practices. The idea has been extended into social change. Are the philosophical foundations from the 1960s-1970s appropriate for the 21st century era of service science, and innovations in augmented intelligence?
The communities of interest on pattern language are coming together (i.e. PLoP and PUARL-Purplsoc are colocating in Portland, OR, in October 2018), coming from three historical subgroups.
The PUARL subgroup is led by former students of Christopher Alexander from the Center for Environmental Structure at Berkeley in the 1970s. They continue to work on “towns, buildings and construction”, with recent interests in large scale incidents (e.g. tsunami preparation and recovery) and human geography (e.g. refugees and migration).
The PLoP subgroup is steered by the Hillside Group that formed coincidentally with the release of 1994 Design Patterns (Gamma, Vlissides, Johnson, Helm) book. They have often colocated with ACM OOPSLA/SPLASH with collaborative sessions following writer’s workshop techniques, and have associated chapters around the world (e.g. EuroPLoP, AsianPLoP, ScrumPLoP).
The Purplsoc subgroup was founded in 2014 in Austria, and alternates conference years with PUARL. The emphasis on social change draws broad participation from practitioners in policy-setting and organizational change, bringing novices up the learning curve.
Pattern language was central to the IBM Global Services Method in the mid 1990s, practitioners tools (i.e. Open Unified Process and the Eclipse Process Framework Composer) and the Architects’ Workbench project at IBM Research Yorktown in the early 2000s. The organizational memory on these initiatives has mostly been lost to the millennial generation, and pattern language is typically a peripheral concept to students today in computer science programs at leading universities.
Using a pattern language approach with service systems has called for a re-examination of some foundational presumptions (e.g. is the quality in the thing, or is the quality in the interaction with the thing). One direction proposed is an affordance language, based in the ecological psychology of J. J. Gibson, the ecological epistemology of Gregory Bateson, and the ecological anthropology of Tim Ingold.
David Ing will give an introductory talk on the history and prospective directions for these ideas.
For streaming, the video is accessible on Youtube.
To listen on a disconnected device, downloadable audio is available, with volume digitally boosted as options.
| Audio | |||
| May 9 (59m06s) |
[20180509_Almaden_Ing EvolvingPatternLanguage.mp3] (53MB) [20180509_Almaden_Ing EvolvingPatternLanguage_3db.mp3] (volume boosted 3db, 53MB) [20180509_Almaden_Ing EvolvingPatternLanguage_4.5db.mp3] (volume boosted 4.5db, 53MB) |
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Where online viewing isn’t available, downloadable video files are also provided.
| Video | H.264 MP4 | WebM |
| May 9 (59m06s) |
[20180509_Almaden_Ing HD m4v] (HD 2480Kbps 1.1GB) [on the Internet Archive] [20180509_Almaden_Ing nHD m4v] (nHD 63Kkps 82MB) |
[20180509_Almaden_Ing HD webm] (HD 375Kbps 241MB) [20180509_Almaden_Ing nHD webm] |
My (long) time as an IBM employee positions me as a knowledge bridge between the the past and the present. I joined towards the end of the John Akers regime, and was active during the Lou Gerstner and Sam Palmisano years. I was fortunate for the collaboration amongst some great practitioners in business technology, who laid many of the foundations that we take for granted, today.
