Beautiful Software is Christopher Alexander's research initiative on computing and the environment
"...the character of the computer environment of the future needs to become more childish,
and more human, if it is to help human beings to genuinely extract the best of themselves...
this change may well affect activities which are apparently technical, not only those that one
broadly classifies as 'creative'." -- Christopher Alexander
In the future we'll only understand how to build good software,
if we focus, now, on creating software that does good ...
We need to develop our capacity to work together help the world to be more
beautiful, humane, fair, natural, comfortable, and alive. We need to listen
carefully to people and nature, and to ground ourselves in reality.
Ultimately, we want to help human intuition to do what it does best. That
means people's interactions with computers should only help them to do
what is needed, to inform them, to help them connect to the real world,
and to draw their attention towards important things they've forgotten,
and away from unimportant things they're too focused upon.
We bring computer people into the Beautiful Software Initiative through the
Building Beauty core course, so they get a chance to study the physical building
process with Christopher Alexander's colleagues and students. This stimulates
a foundation ability to seeing the living qualities in anything,
and to generate a living process for growing anything in the world.
With this appreciation for the importance of natural structure, we are moving
forward with the experimental engineering that Alexander felt was needed
in the practice and application of computing.
2022 Bryant, Heshmat, Lavrisha: Analogous Unfolding
2022 Greg Bryant: Unfolding Sequences - a video introduction
2021-2022 Shahriar Heshmat's Color theory guide: patterns.blue (in progress)
2021 The Beautiful Software Thesis: feeling as the core of good engineering
2021 Beautiful Software at Building Beauty
2020-2021 Tomaž Žlender - Mirror of the Self survey tool
2021 Gareth Rees: Building Beauty / Beautiful Software -- the first year
2021 Stefan Lesser: Christopher Alexander’s philosophy — useful for tools for thought?
2020 Stefan Lesser: How to adopt Christopher Alexander’s ideas in the software industry
2020 Self-descriptive webapp -- a class exercise
2020 one step of a sequence platform
2020 PUARL+BB conference: The point of the Beautiful Software seminar: distributing the toolbox
2020 Podcast: Ryan Singer and Greg Bryant
2020 The Beautiful Software Initiative announcement
2020 Beautiful Software at computing philosophy
2019 Gabriel and Quillien: A Search for Beauty
2018 Or Ettlinger: The wonder of mockups
2017+ buildingbeauty.org
2017 Gatemaker video demonstration
2015 Living Structure and Cognition
2014+ Urbanology YouTube channel
2013 Gatemaker: Christopher Alexander's dialogue with the computer industry
2008 Greg Bryant: Developing software with sequences: Passing Keys
2007 Christopher Alexander: Interview by Katy Butler
2006 Christopher Alexander: Action List for Building a Living Neighborhood
2006 Christopher Alexander: The Heart of the City
2006 Christopher Alexander: Three Rules for Starting a Neighborhood
2006 Christopher Alexander: Pattern Languages, Sequences, and Generative Codes
2006 Christopher Alexander: The order in which things are done
2006 Christopher Alexander: Main steps of work
2006 Christopher Alexander: What is an unfolding?
2006 Christopher Alexander: Generative codes
2006 Christopher Alexander: Seven Main Steps to a Living Neighborhood
2006 Christopher Alexander: Our Services (CES)
2006 Christopher Alexander: Empirical Findings from The Nature of Order
2005 Christopher Alexander: Pedestrian London
2005 Christopher Alexander: Harmony-Seeking Computations
2005 Christopher Alexander: A house in 33 steps
2005 Christopher Alexander interview: Battle for Ordinary Human Existence
2005 Christopher Alexander: Generative Codes - The Path
2005+ livingneighborhoods.org
2004+ community-projects
2004 Christopher Alexander: Sustainability and Morphogenesis
2004 Christopher Alexander and Maggie Moore: Conversation on Stress
2003 Christopher Alexander and Maggie Moore: Conversation on Sustainability
2003 Christopher Alexander: New Concepts in Complexity Theory
2002 Christopher Alexander: A Universal Sequence
2002 Christopher Alexander: Our New Architecture And The Many World Cultures
2002 Christopher Alexander: The Kitchen Cost Game
1998+ patternlanguage.com
1997+ urbanology.com
1997+ Greg Bryant: Gatemaker or "The Aspen summit"
1997 Christopher Alexander: Gatemaker as a fundamental step in computer science
1997 Christopher Alexander & Greg Bryant: Thoughts on the Aspen Meeting
1997 Greg Bryant: Report on Software Issues
1994 Greg Bryant: Alexander visits The Oregon Experiment
1994 Christopher Alexander interviewed by Greg Bryant: The Application of Feeling
1991 Greg Bryant: The Oregon Experiment after Twenty Years
1991 Christopher Alexandert: Manifesto 1991
1987 Christopher Alexander: Toward a Personal Workspace
1984 Christopher Alexander & Pete Retondo: An Uncommon Bench
1984 Uncommon Bench on Google Maps
1984 Christopher Alexander: The order in which things are done
1982 Christopher Alexander: Moshav Shorashim Handbook for House Design
1973 Christopher Alexander: The Grass Roots Housing Process
1972 Christopher Alexander: The Invention of a Human and Organic Building System
1972 Christopher Alexander: An Attempt to Derive the Nature of a Human Building System from First Principles
1972 AIA Journal: Alexander's research medal
1971 Christopher Alexander: The State of the Art in Design Methods
1971 Christopher Alexander: Summary of Houses Generated by Patterns
1970 Christopher Alexander: Early summary draft of A Timeless Way of Building
1970 Architectural Forum on Pattern Language
1970 Christopher Alexander: Changes in Form
1969 Christopher Alexander: Houses Generated By Patterns
1969 Christopher Alexander: Major Changes in Environmental Form Required by Social and Psychological Demands
1968 Christopher Alexander: The Bead Game Conjecture
1968 Christopher Alexander & Susan Carey: Subsymmetries
1968 Christopher Alexander: An Environmental Pattern Language
1967 Christopher Alexander: Systems Generating Systems
1966 Christopher Alexander: The Pattern of Streets
1966 Christopher Alexander: The City as a Mechanism for Sustaining Human Contact
1966 Christopher Alexander: Relational Complexes in Architecture
1966 Christopher Alexander: The Atoms of Environmental Structure
1966 Christopher Alexander: From a Set of Forces to a Form
1966 Architectural Forum: Christopher Alexander at BART
1965 Christopher Alexander: A City is not a Tree
1965 Christopher Alexander: The Theory and Invention of Form
1964 Christopher Alexander: On Changing the Way People See
1964 Christopher Alexander: A Much Asked Question About Computers and Design
1964 Proceedings of Architecture and the Computer
1964 Architecture and the Computer
1964 Christopher Alexander: Main Structure Concept
1963 Christopher Alexander:
Twenty-six pictures to the top of the tree
1963 Christopher Alexander: The Determination of Components of an Indian Village
1963 Christopher Alexander: HIDECS 3
1962 Christopher Alexander: HIDECS 2
1962 Christopher Alexander: The Use of Diagrams in Highway Route Location : An Experiment
1962 Christopher Alexander: The Origin of Creative Power in Children
1962 Christopher Alexander: The Design of Highway Interchanges
1961 (written in 2002) Christopher Alexander: The Bavra Story
1961 Christopher Alexander: Information and an Organized Process of Design
1960 Christopher Alexander: A Result in Visual Aesthetics
1960 Christopher Alexander: The Revolution Finished Twenty Years Ago
1959 Christopher Alexander: Perception and Modular Co-ordination