I know, that's turf I've raked over time and again, but I think there is a set of distinctions worth drawing out. Firstly, software folk aren't usually using "design" the way the design community uses it. We mean internal design (of the "guts"), with a focus on the code rather than the software as something that is experienced in many different ways (not just as a developer developing and evolving the code). Then, when we say, borrowing from Grady Booch, "all architecture is design but not all design is architecture" in our mental model we're still thinking in terms of designing the guts -- the architectural elements and relationships, mechanisms, ..., design of classes and factoring at that level. 

The design community, by contrast, very often is using design to mean of the skin, of the surface that the user interacts with. They are dealing with the look and feel of the thing, and designing interactions between the thing and the user, rather than its guts and how the guts works to make the surface behave and react and interact with the user.  In the software world, these are the user experience and UI designers. And they quite often work largely independently of, or in isolation from, with handoffs to, the design and development of the guts.

Separation of concerns, divide and conquer, hierarchical decomposition ... and composition, building more complex (sub)systems out of smaller proven components,... these are critical techniques for building ever more complex systems. It works for human organizations and processes and for other systems humans build. But if we want to speed up "evolution" to bring intentionality and reasoning, experience and transfer of knowledge and techniques from one domain to advance another, we set out to design at a higher level -- to design systems, not just components and subsystems of systems. To design across the boundaries. Not just the interfaces within the guts of the system, but the interfaces with the context -- the system-of-systems context(s) and the use context(s). And not just the interfaces, but the processes, the dynamic interactions not just in terms of activities but intentions too.

Then, is there a distinction we should draw between architectural design and system design?

And should we make a distinction between design as an intentional act versus design that is a matter of emergence (where Serendipity or Happy Accident or Evolutionary Adaptation or Natural Selection is the architect or designer).

And...

This is a rat hole, me thinks!

;-)

12/27/10 Scanning Tomorrow

Tonight we watched Bicentennial Man. So naturally a whole set of um very human lines have entered the family banter as a result. It fits the roadmapping/trip to the future theme that a New Year and new project invite. And I thought the kids should be part of the conversation, because this is all very much about the world they will live in.

We are headed into an ever more tech enabled world. It is immensely exciting! The waves of change just keep rolling in!

We already have autonomous and remotely controlled mining equipment and airplanes, and more and more smarts in cars. We have more and more use of drones in warfare. Interesting times ahead. Isaac Asimov's "Three Laws of Robotics" are a nice idea... except that a major thrust in funding for robots comes precisely from the opposite desire. The desire for power and control, which we may couch in "security" terms, but which rides on our baser human traits... Is humanity ready for all we are enabling? This deluge of change can't be halted (except by mass disaster), so we have to work at every frontier to create the kind of world we want to live and work in.

A gentle caring kind of world.

I hope.

12/28/10 Scanning Yesterday

I was reading over October's entries and, wow, you missed a lot letting me put a lid on my journal... well, you knew it wouldn't last. ;-)

We went hiking yesterday and the sun on the snow lit the crests and crevices revealing the contours of our landscape that in the summer are more hidden by the woods. It was mind-lifting, spirit-expanding lovely!

I'm so glad our electric guitar playing boy is a "roots with the dirt still on" kind of kid whose hero is Woody Guthrie! Otherwise I'd never have known Woody Guthrie's songs of identity and social awareness! I'm perfectly happy to be drawn into bluegrassy roots, but it's not where I come from. I also think it is great that there are kids today who are drawn to folk music and their heritage, even when their friends tell them they'd be more popular if they moved on from bluegrass...

Here's Woody Guthrie:

The kid, like anyone who pursues a passion, does it for the joy of it. Which has an aspect of doing it for people who will see it for its common and unique human qualities and appreciate them. Sportsmen compete. Musicians perform. Much of the work we do on ourselves in the pursuit of excellence is quite solitary, but that we pursue excellence has an importantly social dimension. If we didn't have an audience, didn't earn esteem, we would probably still have that internal drive to achieve excellence. Probably. But the social connection of a warm response is hugely important to the aspiring spirit.   

12/29/10 The Grace of Empathy and Poetry

In Finding Opportunity (the agile architecting paper), I draw on The Wheel on the School because that story makes so many points about innovation and self-organizing teaming delicately yet powerfully. Delicately? Yes! There to be drawn on -- rather than proclaimed and asserted in a style that commandeers our senses superficially for a moment but leaves them more passive and dulled than inspired and invited.

In The Wheel, the little girl is encouraged to "think like a stork" -- to use her imagination and powers of empathy to understand what a stork needs. This morning, I picked up our copy of The Way of Chuang Tzu and read The Joy of Fishes, and it again struck me how important empathy is.

"I know the joy of fishes

In the river

Through my own joy, as I go walking

Along the same river."

-- The Way of Chuang Tzu, translation by Thomas Merton, 1965

Which, of course reminds me again of these lines from J.K. Rowling's Harvard Commencement Address:

"Imagination is not only the uniquely human capacity to envision that which is not, and therefore the fount of all invention and innovation. In its arguably most transformative and revelatory capacity, it is the power that enables us to empathise with humans whose experiences we have never shared."

-- J.K. Rowling, The Fringe Benefits of Failure, and the Importance of Imagination, June 5, 2008

Which is quoted here and in the To See section of To Lead is to See, to Frame, to Draw. ;-)

We were bouncing around ideas for daily organizing themes for an upcoming architect leadership workshop, and I suggested magic for one of the days. Don't you like that? Magic takes perception and attention, and persuasion and influence, and all those topics to a pinnacle that is beyond where we go, but we can learn a lot by opening ourselves to some of the ideas and influences and thinking about the mechanics of illusion. And it is entertaining! Of course, there's the visual arts with visual analogy and symbol, composition, balance, compression and abstraction and all that good stuff that makes for another rich theme. And Dana suggested poetry for the third day. No, not to spend the whole day on poetry! Of course we'd still use our architect competency model as the warp structuring the day, but use poetry as a colorful ribbon in the weft. Well, at first I was reluctant because I thought that while magic could be a dangerous stretch of goodwill, it is fun, but poetry is dangerous and work, so it'd put the thing in danger of being cast as "flying above the ozone" by those made uncomfortable because they don't much like/get poetry... But, when I think about it, it fits quite nicely:

poiesis: the root of our modern "poetry", was first a verb, an action that transforms and continues the world

So, maybe. We could use Phlippe Kruchten's Tao of the Software Architect.

and

Or is that leaning too precipitously toward the mystical, and rather far departed from engineering?

Of course, Chuang Tzu has an answer ready to hand:

An architect is an engineer or computer scientist by training and by experience, but an architect is more than an engineer. The architect creates that crucible for engineers to do their work thinking they did it all, each themselves, and yet it coheres within a system that has integrity.

The architect, perhaps, has to step beyond the circles of past comfort. Unless... 

12/29/10 The Useless -- Journal

How about this as the by-line for my journal: "This shows the absolute necessity of what has 'no use.'"???

This is the time of the year when "top 10" entries are picked. That's not my style. But I think I might be able to pick the "10 most useless" entries... ;-)

Scanning for at least one entry for the "most useless" list, I read this:

... the joy of the thought chase drawing insights glimpsed but barely into view and finding them fall into epiphany -- 6/29/10

Doesn't that just make the useless point magnificently? If I hadn't written that useless retro/introspective piece, I wouldn't have written that line. Seriously, isn't it the most sensual line about awe-struck seeking you ever read? Like Epiphany is a forest nymph. Most sensual? Did you read the entry? Anyway, when I wrote the piece, words just tumbled as they do from my fingertips; I wasn't thinking about the allusion. Reading it now is kind of like this. Well, if that offends you, it serves you right for reading a useless entry! ;-)

Perhaps I should arrange the words thus:

the joy of the thought chase

drawing insights glimpsed

- but barely - into view

and finding them fall

into

epiphany

Tennis with the nets down. Think Frost would have been so stuffy about his rules of play today? Ah, you question how I see poetry, if I blithely rearrange a line of prose? I do well know the value of discipline, structure and convention. And Epiphany found within righteous structures is as rewarding to me as Epiphany found wild and free. We value the one all the more for the contrast with the other.   

Epiphany? You know, "eureka-level convergent insight" (7/20/10) or "like the last few moves in a solving a Rubik's cube" (3/10/09)... that "flood the brain with insight reward response" (11/14/10).

Ok, here's a possibility for the useless list: weaving Ruth.

That should do it, don't you think? Do what? Ensure that I get to keep asking myself what I mean, knowing that no-one else is reading this. ;-)

Why weaving Ruth? Well, there's the pointers to Eric Whitacre, the head crush line ("the lineage of many of my thought children trace to these recognized fathers of the fields I work in") and there's a bonus in that it contains some quintessential links to previous year's posts (that's called a Trojan horse or a Greek gift, or a head fake. Depending on your heroes.). ;-)

Oh come on. I told you it was useless! So, how about the notion of a poetry theme for a workshop day, huh?  No, it wouldn't be anything like this!

"There's a fine line between appropriate and inappropriate, and then there's the whole category of stuff you just don't do!" -- Ryan

I should listen to the wisdom of my son, huh?

I'm serious.

Now, now, I didn't write this whole post just to work in a reference to today's xkcd. What this obviously means is that I'm streaming a bunch of eurekas in the background and the To Draw section is just going to write itself -- words will be tumbling from my fingers in happy eagerness to take the form they have been contriving in my subconscious... Yeah, that must be it.

When we were painting Sara's wall, she confided "I have writer's block. Actually, all the voices in my head say they have writer's block." I told her I'd written "It is very good to have more than one internal voice 'cos you can get so much more thinking done!" in my journal. She replied "That's because you just hear your voices. I hear other voices." Right. My voices all work all the time, just like Sara's mom. ;-) But isn't that so insightful. The child's eleven. Elizabeth Gilbert develops this "genie" notion, and Sara already is totally onto that.

Now, as geniuses go, Martin Fowler has been talking to some in India. Should we conclude he's doing a book on distributed/global development next?

12/30/10 On The Invisible Fabric of Our Lives