Christopher Alexander’s Patterns till Today

Christopher Alexander had created many different patterns. Those claim an idea of how to structure a community, and different patterns can work in different types of situations. And those are still a really important resource for designing software or apps. For example structure of the pattern #41 “Work Community” can still find in today’s app. The idea that having the same workspace and the same personal space is kind of a reason why there are so many working app releases. Due to our personal life, we have apps like Facebook or Twitter that we can share our daily life on it, and those apps have so many features, that people can post something on it, chat, communicate, do a lot of things on it. However if people start using Facebook to also do their work, the space to work might too small and tied to work, because it still has some other feature that might distract users. So the app like slack which design for working had released, it creates all the features that you need for working and gave enough space that makes people work through the app.

Also to work or post on Facebook might create some privacy problems. So “Degrees of Publicness” is also important. It creates a decision for use to separate their private life and information they want to open to the public. Which also gave space on two different part of life equally, because you can make the decision.

There is some pattern that we can also find on other app today. First is #8 “Mosaic of Subcultures.” I think this is pretty similar to the Google ecosystem. Because Google creates so many different apps to work for a different job, but they still can connect by your google account. Apps are like “hundreds of different subcultures” and your account or google itself is like boundaries separate but still can seen as a connection of different apps.

And the idea of #129 “Common Areas” is similar to the email app on mobile devices. It all has a common area that shows all the emails you get from different accounts, but you still can go to each account separately to check your email. It also similar to google calendar apps, the timetable shows all the activity you have on different emails, but you can edit them separately too.