Design Patters in Digital Spaces

Nowadays, smart spaces represent a powerful tool that helps people connect, whether for professional purposes or non-professional purposes. In A Pattern Language, Christopher Alexander discussed the design patterns of spaces. Although this book seems to focus on describing a practical and functional architectural system, the concepts that Alexander has described in this book could be applied to design in general. According to him, this book was created to serve as a tool to “… allow anyone, and any group of people, to create beautiful, functional, meaningful places.” It is beneficial for us as experience designers to know the elements that are proven to aid in creating a “living” space that allows and serves the people who interact with it, what is required of a particular space in order to make its users feel comfortable and fulfill their needs in such a space. 

“No social group – whether a family, a work group, or a school group – can survive without constant informal contact among its members.”

Christopher Alexander, 1977

According to Alexander, any space designed to have social interactions should have an accessible common area. Ideally, it should be located at the center of gravity of the space, where people don’t need to make deliberate efforts to get there. For example, on every floor in our dorm, there is a common area that is located right in front of the elevator, surrounded by individual rooms, and people are constantly passing the space. In a digital setting, such common space would take the form of a “feed” or “stream”.

Taking Facebook for example, the “common area” would be the homepage where you can see the activities of your friends and families. The things they post or repost will show up here. People interact with one another by commenting, liking, or reposting, and no one has to make any special, extra effort to get there.

“When more than half a dozen people work in the same place, it is essential that they not be forced to work in one huge undifferentiated space, but that instead, they can divide their workspace up, and so form smaller groups.”

Christopher Alexander, 1977

In A Pattern Language, Alexander also discussed how people would feel oppressed when forced to work in isolation or in a large undifferentiated group. According to Alexander, people would function the best when divided into smaller sub-groups with some form of clear separation, and arrange the smaller sub-groups into one group of people who may share common amenities. I can see this being applied in a school setting where we are divided into smaller sub-groups as individual classes, and the classes would come together to make up the entire major.

Such separation and grouping carries on into a digital setting, in the form of workspaces and channels on Slack. We have a workspace where people of the same major would reside, and individual channels for people taking the same class to come together and discuss. 

References:

Alexander, Christopher, et al. A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction. Oxford Univ. Pr., 1977.