I’ve been seeing people recommend A Pattern Language (amazon, very large pdf) here and there for a few years now and finally picked it up. I’ve only begun to read it, but it is a truly remarkable work. In particular it draws a thick and complex connection between design and ethics.

(Skimming the wikipedia page of the first listed author makes me want to read much more of his work.)

This book simultaneously defines what a pattern language is, makes a case for how they should be used in design, and provides __an example.

Designers of any sort (industrial designers, graphic designers software, urban planners, etc) work explicitly or implicitly based on patterns that they have learned about, developed, or identified. If I own land and want to sleep indoors, I might think about the pattern “Single Family Home” and create a design based on that pattern. And we need patterns for the whole spectrum of human existence that emerges through design, from the way our highest political entities are arranged (“Independent Regions”) through cities (“Subculture Boundaries”, “Night Life”), and so on (“Looped Local Roads”, “Compost”)

How do different patterns, though, connect to each other? There’s the concept of a Pattern Library which I’ve often seen in the tech space (example). The Library metaphor asserts that patterns should be listed and categorized. But metaphor of a Pattern Language goes much farther in exploring the rich connections between patterns, the syntax by which they can be juxtaposed, and the layers of meaning that they bring to bear when they are used together in different ways. A library can only be constructed and maintained, usually by a single entity_._ A library, unlike a language, does not usually develop and evolve organically.

Every society which is alive and whole, will have its own unique and distinct pattern language; and further, that every individual in such a society will have a unique language, shared in part, but which as a totality is unique to the mind of the person who has it. In this sense, in a healthy society there will be as many pattern languages as there are people — even though these languages are shared and similar…

The language described in this book, though, is more like Esperanto than like English. It is not the dictionary of any observed pattern language, it is a call for a new language that will lead to a new and better lived existence for humanity. Languages differ in the fluency with which they can express certain concepts, and so each language comes with a value system and creating a language is an ethical acts. What kind of patterns should feel natural to express? What is clunky?

The language that has emerged in our society is a stunted, depraved language without humanity. We have a pattern for billboards, for surveillance cameras, for strip malls, for old age homes.

[W]e have written this book as a first step in the society-wide process by which people will gradually become conscious of their own pattern languages and work to improve them. We believe…that the languages which people have today are so brutal, and so fragmented, that most people no longer have any language to speak of at all — and what they do have is not based on human, or natural considerations. [emphasis added]

The language in this book contains, on the contrary, patterns like the following:

  • Magic of the City
  • Old People Everywhere
  • Children in the City
  • Holy Ground
  • Connected Play
  • A Room of One’s Own
  • Garden Growing Wild
  • Communal Sleeping
  • Window Overlooking Life
  • Secret Place

These are only a few with particularly obvious ethical ramifications, but every pattern and every connection expresses an ethics, and creating such a language is a lasting way to codify your ethics.

Any such set of design principles contains within it an ethics and ethics are sometimes best expressed as design principles. In particular, I’m familiar with the conversation around dat a ethics. Usually when we talk about data ethics we are saying “here are the set of tools we’ve designed and built, and over there is our thinking about ethical ways to use them.” But those tools were also designed within a value system that is embedded not just in the design of the specific tool but the whole web of existence.

In the book’s domain (the built environment), we might think about the design of a single house. What ethics are embedded in the way a house is designed? How many people is built for, and what kinds of living arrangements? But the design of the house broadly speaking must also connect to the design of the broader society and its ethics: what materials are used, and what sorts of labor arrangements are assumed to be available? What is nearby, and what can we assume about the ways that neighborhood will change over time? What is the anticipated lifespan of this building and how might its uses change in the future?

Similarly, maybe talking sensibly about data ethics requires connecting it more deeply to the patterns we use as designers, and thinking more broadly about what those patterns are that we use and the timescales and means by which they change.

We have spent years trying to formulate this language, in the hope then when a person uses it, he will be so impressed by its power, and so joyful in its use, that he will understand again, what it means to have a living language of this kind. If we only succeed in that, it is possible that each person may once again embark on the construction and development of his own language — perhaps taking the language printed in this book, as a point of departure.