#10 – Ryan Singer

February 24th, 2025

Everything is Somewhere Podcast – Episode #10 transcription

Sponsored by GEODNET

(Music)

Angus W Stocking (00:04.706)

This is Everything is Somewhere, I’m Angus Stocking. Ryan Singer has had a strong and interesting career in software development and is author of 2019’s Shape Up: Stop Running in Circles and Ship Work That Matters, and in 2021, Ryan founded his website feltpresence.com to help product teams stop running in circles and regain the thrill of building.

Along the way, he’s lectured quite a bit on Christopher Alexander and Edward Tufte. Both of these figures are important to land surveyors and infrastructure and of intense interest to me personally. Ryan Singer, welcome to Everything is Somewhere.

 

Ryan:  Okay, thanks for having me. I’m curious how Tufte has been of great relevance to land surveyors. That’s something I didn’t hear before.

 

Angus:  I wrote a column about Edward Tufte back in the Aughts and I read all his books. Very fascinating to me. I went to one of his lectures where, for example, he handed out the Galileo Principia. Yeah. And to see that, it person to be a couple of feet away from it, looking at this original.

 

Ryan:  Yeah. I got to go to one of those workshops too. That was really something.

 

Angus:  For land surveyors, part of the first book, Visual Display of Quantitative Information, was about mapping and about presenting quantitative information. And land surveying, cadastral maps, certified survey maps, subdivision maps, have a lot to learn. The one that’s coming to mind at the moment is his dictum that all uppercase…

is much harder to read in uppercase and lowercase. And this is the norm in subdivision mapping, for example, titles. And I wrote a column and started doing maps in Dodge County, Wisconsin that insisted on uppercase and lowercase in map titles as a means of being more apprehensible, we could say.

 

So that’s why it is for me. let me, to frame this conversation, what I would really hope to talk about more is Christopher Alexander. And just as an opening statement, for 30 years I have been obsessed with Christopher Alexander’s ideas and how they can affect the built world and infrastructure and land surveying and subdivisions, so forth. And my… first question to you is, is Christopher Alexander important? Is there a strong scientific and even spiritual presentation of ideas that should be adopted?

 

Ryan:  Wow, that’s a broad question. I mean, what I can say is that his work is extremely important for me, you know?

And I think there are, of course, there are a lot of people out there who feel the same, right? Who feel that he was really inspirational and gave a new perspective, gave a lot of tools, gave a lot of ways of thinking, gave a new orientation for how to approach problems or how to think about all kinds of things, you know, from the abstract, from sort of abstract design problems all the way through, you know, ideas about beauty and creating a meaningful surrounding for people and things like that, you know? I mean, it’s such a broad area. I think a lot of us who are appreciators maybe sometimes look out at the world and shake our heads at different times and say, why aren’t these things maybe more popular or whatever? But you know, mean, everything’s like that, you know? And I think also it’s interesting.

As the years go by, think, you know, sometimes, what is it, the, the zealotry of the newly converted. Yes. You know what I mean? Sometimes you, you discover his work and then you want to go, you want to go protesting outside of all the glass skyscrapers and, change the world. And for me, it’s been an interesting process over the last, I mean, you said 30 years of being a close student of his work. And for me, it’s been closer to 20 years and.

I mean, for example, if you look at a lot of the material in his latest book, Battle, what you hear about are so many practical considerations that get in the way of doing things the way that he suggests. know, there are a lot of structural things, including Yakuza. yeah. It’s also, there’s a, there’s a bit of drama in there. It’s a bit of a thriller novel in some ways too, right?

But there are just so many practical things that have to get solved and so many conditions that have to come together to make things happen in a good way. You know what I mean? And it’s not just a matter of taste or snapping one’s fingers or having a better idea or you know what I mean? It’s, there really are a lot of, a lot of challenges to solve in order to, to, make things in a good way. mean, I, I’m in the software industry and if you really want to make something fantastic,

You have to overcome, example, this, this hurdle of how do we bring the technical people, the engineers into closer cooperation with the designers and the business people? How do we actually make trade-offs together and make decisions about the work together, you know, and not just have meetings and status updates and handing things down the line and then hoping that it all goes according to what was drawn in the initial plan, right?

But really looking at problems together and making decisions together because we all have knowledge that has to get integrated to actually solve the thing, right? There’s always these hard trade-offs, you know? So, I mean, on the design side, you have a million things that the designer wants to have, but then you have the realities of cost, right? And you have the realities of engineering and how to actually make trade-offs there, right? And I think for me, Christopher Alexander’s work is an inspiration because it’s not only pointing to different kinds of aesthetic beauty. And there’s a piece of me that can open up a Christopher Alexander book and flip through it and just have an aesthetic experience. but the practical piece for me is how he really gave a lot of actual methods for how to put heads together and work on problems or solve design problems or, or, or engineering problems or construction problems by changing the order of the problems that we solve, by changing the questions that we ask and how we actually get hands-on together, you know, as a team to solve things in a way that’s going to move things forward faster and get to a better outcome and, you know, get to a better result that really does the job in the best way.

 

Angus:  I agree with every word of that. You mentioned battle and going back to land surveying for a moment, the small book of his that’s really important to me.

and I think to infrastructure generally, would be his plan for the development of a Brookings, Oregon subdivision. And he gave a very detailed and workable method for working with planning commissions and obtaining approval for his ideas about the way subdivisions should be developed.

And he did that so often in his work. He gave the battles with zoning and planning committees and contractors. And it’s of such importance that in his life and work, he was not just an architect and theorist, he was a contractor and built so many great big buildings, small buildings, actual subdivisions. So there’s a very, there’s a practicality.

I’ve called him a pragmatic mystic. He has difficult, hard to approach and embody ideas alongside the nuts and bolts of tile design and contracting and building in accordance with the ownership. A really wonderful thing, and I think for you it’s been mainly in software development, is that, could you talk about that a bit, how his ideas have affected your work in software development.

 

Ryan:  My entry into software was through user interface design. What is it that people actually see and what are the things that they can do and how do you press a button to move forward to the next screen and things like that, right? And when I got into UI design, I started, I really started working in like the late 90s, early 2000s, and there were very few resources, you know.

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I mean, you just, there were a couple really well-known examples of things, for example, that Apple had done with the Mac that were groundbreaking at that time and some very early experiments of what people were doing on the web, you know, and there were a few famous software tools and that’s kind of all you had for your reference point. And if you wanted to go to school in UI design, there were things like human computer interaction and stuff, but they tended to be kind of “researchy” and not very practical. It wasn’t really about building the things that people use. It was some, some, somehow more academic. And so I was looking for some kind of help in how do I think about these problems? know, how, how do I develop a kind of a rationale where I can really not just say this is something that I like or this is something that looks good.

Because the tricky thing with something like UI is that it has an aesthetic graphic element to it, where you want to put some forms together where there is color and shape and it’s pleasing and all of that. But then there is a very, very big structural and functional component. You’re using the software to actually fulfill some kind of purpose. You need to get through some tasks, get some answers, do something. And so it has to have all of these, the things that I think we have as a common touchstone in Tufte’s first book.

 

Angus:  You mentioned in previous lectures I’ve listened to Donald Norman and his great book, Design of Everyday Things.

 

Ryan:  Well, I’m thankful to that book because it’s what connected me to J.J. Gibson’s work on affordances. I wouldn’t say that the design of everyday things kind of stood up in the way that it’s the thing that I would make sure somebody reads if they were starting now versus I would still give everybody the visual display of quantitative information. Do you know what I mean? Because there is a kind of, there’s a kind of hard, it’s almost like hard physical truth. You know what I mean? That’s, that’s being presented there. Like here is something that’s hard to read. Here is something that’s, that’s, that, what I like to is that like Tufte doesn’t talk about hard and easy. He gives examples like if I need to make comparisons, right…

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Then a design that shows things side by side is going to be easier for me to make a comparison than if I have to flip between the two pages, for example. So like adjacent in space versus adjacent in time. There are all these great principles that are really about like what works and how do things work and how can I kind of get the best result that’s going to work the best way. So for me, that was really inspiring. So there were these very kind of practical things from Tufte there.

And, what, what I first got from Alexander was from the notes on the synthesis of form. And when there’s this chapter early on, think it’s the second chapter, it’s called goodness of fit. And he introduces this way of thinking of a problem in terms of the context, which is the part of the world that we don’t control. And then the form, which is the part of the world that we are trying to make different or better or to create. Right.

And how there is this relationship between the, the, there’s this kind of boundary, you know, and the thing that we’re making, the form we’re making, it has to fit into the context. And it’s the fitness between the two, which is a way of thinking, is this thing doing what it should do? Is it good or not? As opposed to just the more artistic perspective of how do I feel when I look at it? Do I like it or not? Or does it express my emotion or not? Or something like that, you know? So this…

This, to me, this was kind of like, wow. Finally, this, this notion of context and form and fit, and especially, you know, he talks a lot in, in, in, in, in that chapter about misfit, even more importantly, right? Like noticing where things don’t work as they are. And then, then we can kind of talk about a problem that we’re trying to solve. He kind of gave this basic language for dealing with a design problem, in a way that wasn’t just aesthetic, but it was really functional…

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So, for my brain, that’s exactly kind of what I was looking for. And what I tried to do early on in my career was could I build a really strong case, you know, for why this thing that I’m working on is, is why this is a good design or, or, or how this is, what is working and what’s not working. So that what I didn’t want to have is just this endless circular discussion with my colleagues or my boss or whatever about where we’re just kind of throwing stuff at the wall and it’s really hard to understand like how to make it better or what we agree on and what we don’t agree on. Like how to kind of rationalize this whole collaboration so that we could we could understand what’s working, understand what’s not working and then identify like are we getting warmer or colder on the things that we need to solve here. You know, that’s really that was the the first really big thing that I got from Alexander and then the second big thing that I got was what’s best summarized in, I mean, we see it really mainly in chapter, in the second book of Nature of Order, which is this whole notion of making stuff in order to understand what works. Yeah. Not just making kind of an abstract drawing and then building it all according to the drawing and then finding out at the end that what we drew wasn’t really what we wanted.

 

Angus:  Sure. And for listeners, an example of this would be the creation of in cardboard of a proposed trusses or making 20 different tiles and being considered for a border, actually physically instantiating at scale what he was trying to make. It’s a fascinating process and it’s part of its fundamental process for creating and it depends upon actual building of trials and Seeing what works best.

 

Ryan:  Yeah. The thing that really inspired me, I always think about there’s a, there’s a photograph of him in a, in a very roughly framed out living room. I mean, it’s just some, some, some pieces of wood, you know, there’s a wooden floor and then there are some kind of temporary beams and stuff like that. It’s very roughed out and they’re using cardboard to place the fireplace, you know?

and they’re feeling where is the best place. And it’s one of those things where you kind of have to be in the room to really judge. When you look at it, if you look at it just on a drawing and then you’re in the room, I mean, you always know it. If you’ve ever bought a couch, you know that the theory and the reality can be different, you know? so I just, I love that, you know?

 

Angus:  And the other big example is using the flags.

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to walking the building site and placing flags to design the building volumes and then using the flag positions to then create the drawings of the building volumes, which then are submitted for permits, as opposed to kind of doing the drawings and then finding out later that it doesn’t quite feel right, you know?

 

Ryan:  So this whole thing about like the sequence of operations, what are the things that we need to really know if they work by trying them?

very early on in the process, and which things do we do in which order so that we’re solving the right problems in the right order so the whole design isn’t blowing up at the last minute, you know?

 

Angus:  Yeah, and that’s part of what he calls the fundamental process of building to create living structure, I think. But that idea is directly opposed to the idea of the building plans. Plan a thing and then build it is horrible idea, Christopher Alexander. You should instead be on the land, in the software, starting to build it and identifying what works and what doesn’t and building on that. And it’s very difficult to come in with a detailed plan of what you want to make and to have it be good. Instead, what you want to make or how it’s going to be made arises from the building process. Am I correct there?

 

Ryan:  That’s tricky because from a certain level of abstraction it’s exactly what he showed in a lot of his amazing examples and it’s exactly what we’re talking about. But language is so tricky, you know? And when we just say it like that in words, it’s really hard to know what that actually means. In the software industry, we had a big, we’ve had a big challenge over the last 15 years because of this, actually, this pendulum swinging from heavy upfront design to we don’t really know what it should be in advance. So let’s somehow build it and design it as we go. And what we saw is that if we just say, let’s not do the big plan upfront and let’s find out as we go there, it’s, it’s, it, there’s the hell of too much order. And then there’s the hell of too little order, you know,

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And what we saw was that, so many teams, I mean, across the whole industry have rejected upfront design, which means that they are just literally running in circles all the time, because there is so much method to how Alexander goes through this process of working out what it should be, you know, through, through these experiments and through these trials, there’s a, there’s a lot of method there.

So for example, if you look at the case study in battle, what you see is that there is an incredible amount of attention to which problem is he solving at which step. So he doesn’t have a master plan, but he does have what technically he, if we were speaking as Alexander nerds, we would call a generative sequence, right? There is a sequence of operations that he’s following. So he,

There’s, so there’s, there’s this preliminary work of trying to understand what the school needs to be through the interviews with all the stakeholders and then a kind of rough pattern language that came out right before going onto the land. Then there was a going onto the land and doing a mapping of the, let’s say we could say the, the, possibilities that were afforded by the site. I mean, like if you would go to that, that specific site, there are beautiful areas and ugly areas and elevated areas and low areas and there’s all these different things that you need to know about the land in order to inform that say they are the things about the context that we need to know in order for the form to fit well there, right?

 

Angus:  So there’s this mapping of the land, that, please, just to jump in on the Brookings plan, that very idea of identifying centers he talks about, points of interest in the land, on the land. That’s part of his proposed process for subdivision development and approval specifically. actually, just to brag a bit here, I interviewed Christopher twice. And a third time he called and offered me a job on the Brookings plan. I could have been his surveyor, and I should have done that, a big failure in my life.

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But specifically, he learned from me how to use a total station to quickly gather topography and points of interest and viewscapes as part of the process of development for large pieces of land. He was so very aware of how things actually get made.

 

Ryan:  No, that’s great example. of like, so getting really clear in a way it’s like problem definition. mean, he did such thorough problem definition, you know, first through the interviews, then through the, the rough pattern language. I mean, pattern language is actually a little bit half problem, half solution, but at a higher level of abstraction. And then going into, to very carefully map the site and understand kind of what the, possibilities the site gave. And then, you know, they did this, this kind of, these rough attempts to stake out the building volumes, but while they were staking out the building volumes, they were trying to implement the pattern language that they had come up with for that project, you know? So they had kind of some key elements of the solution, you know, that needed to be there, but their exact physical relationships weren’t clear yet, but there were a lot of relationships that had been solved that kind of needed to be true, that were already there in the pattern language, right?

So then they go onto the site and they’re staking out different building volumes. And then there’s a lot of problem solving happening there, but there’s also so many details that they are not wasting their time on. You know, he’s not doing the tile mark, mock-ups, right? In that early phase, when it’s more about what building goes where and what are those volumes going to be and how are you going to move through the site from one building to the other and all those different things, right?

But then, there, this, this, this very intentional sequencing of what am I solving and kind of moving from the macro major structural relationships and then gradually coming into the fine details later. I think this is what, what, what enabled this kind of, let’s call it like no upfront plan. When we just say it in a few words, the reason why it was successful is because he had a method for how to move through all the unknowns in a very productive sequence. Right. And if you just say, I don’t have a plan…

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…and then you start trying to build together the first building that you’re looking at, then you have to tear it down and build it again and tear it down and change this and change that. And you have the never-ending projects that we see in a lot of fields.

 

Angus:  And he himself, I’m thinking of the Mary Rose Museum, I think was the name of the ship. He did come up with a plan and proposal based on the method for you, and he didn’t win that project. But when you look at the drawings and the site and think about what could have been. He was working with the system, his process, and it could have been great. I look at what was built there now and I get hives. And I’ll give you a little insight into his thinking on pattern language versus nature of order. My first interview with him was for a review I was writing about Nature of Order.

And in the first review, I kind of gave the impression that he had moved on or maybe disavowed some of the ideas in A Pattern Language. And we talked after that, and he explained that that was definitely not the case, that a pattern language was very important. But just as you say, there’s its half problem, half solution, it’s kind of a cookie cutter approach. And he realized in nature of order that process for building needed to be established in a theoretical framework. I guess a question for you. I’ve listened to your previous podcasts and lectures and writing and shape up. There’s sort of the idea in software development world, but also in do-it-yourself architecture and building.

 

I feel like a pattern language has caught on more as a way of getting things done, as if the methods can be applied wholesale. Whole Earth Catalog was really big on the idea of people building and designing their own building. And that’s very true and strong and correct. In nature of order,

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is constructed around the idea of centers, loci of interest that can be strengthened, developed into more centers. And I guess my question for you, I have heard you talk quite a bit about identifying the problems and implementing patterns, nature of order in particular and the idea of living structure and centers as a means of developing living structure.

How is centers, Christopher Alexander’s ideas of centers, how does that change what you do now, for example?

 

Ryan:  Centers is, as I understand it, is a very spatial and geometrical idea. Because… Yes and no. It’s also, he applies it in color.

process as well in the subdivision approval. It is structural, but it’s so key to so many of his ideas. Have you more or less rejected that or kind of ignored it? tried to find a short way to answer this. So here’s how I understand it. There is a whole

When, when you look at what’s in, example, the nature of order, mean, here you have a summary of a man’s life, life’s work. And what you have is everything from case studies of, of actual buildings, right? Like actual concrete practical decisions of how we moved this load bearing beam, right? Or how we chose colors for this tile, right? All the way to very, very abstract.

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theoretical considerations, right? With a lot of linking things in between, you know? So he has, on the most abstract, know, you have, for example, his definition of his idea of what is living structure and, you know, the idea of life and so on. Right. And then you, you, you, he starts to kind of use the idea of centers. I see it as a theoretical tool.

as a, as a concept that he needs to get from the more abstract all the way to a more concrete problem. It’s like, he uses the language and the theory and the concept of centers to build up everything like the 15 properties and what makes beautiful geometry. And, and the, mean, he uses the notion of centers in site diagnosis, right? Identifying what he calls latent centers, you know, areas.

that are already beautiful and should be therefore left alone versus areas that are weak and therefore are places where we should rethink everything. I mean, as a software person, I see it almost like a stack. If I want to understand, you know, there’s these computers that are doing the number crunching for AI today, which are called GPUs, and they’re mainly made by this company called Nvidia. And if you try to understand a GPU,

I mean, there is a physical object that you can plug into the wall and then it does stuff. Right. But there are so many, layers of, of technology. So if I need to understand a GPU, do I know there’s one level of just, how do I use it to solve a problem? Like, can I feed it data and get an answer out? But then there’s, I can go deeper and deeper. And do I need to understand how, how silicon chips are designed?

Right. Cause there’s I don’t know how many millions of transistors are built in there, right? And Nvidia, I mean, they’re not actually even manufacturing those transistors. that silicone is being made by another company, but it’s part of the whole stack. So there’s this kind of endlessness. If I want to understand the foundations of how the GPU works, or I can just take it as a box and plug it in and do stuff with it, you know? And I think what we get with Alexander, it’s like we get the whole stack. We get the theory.

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We get like how the chips work. We get the chip manufacturing, then we get the GPU assembly. We get the, the, the, the, the instructions on top. have the whole thing. And, I think for the purpose of architecture, and, and related fields where you are making, physical objects, centers work, they work for his purpose as a kind of cornerstone of the theory that everything else is built upon.

If I go and I try to help a software team to work together on a business problem they’re trying to solve, I’m not going to get anywhere using the language of centers. It’s too far away from the reference points that they have. But if I move up in abstraction and we talk about something closer to a pattern or a step in a generative sequence, that’s something that I can easily draw all kinds of parallels to things that they already know and understand. So I think that depending on the work that we do, we can kind of find the pieces in this giant body of work that Alexander gave us and find like, where is the jumping off point? What are the things that I can use and adapt for the kind of work that, well, in my case, context and form and misfit is something I could just take.

I needed to kind of rename those in order for them to work for people. So today, for example, the teams that I work with, we talk about framing the problem versus shaping the solution. And then we look at the fit between the frame and the shape. It’s just putting new words on it so that people can relate to it a little bit easier in our specific world, you know? Well, yeah. I’m interested in this notion of centers, but for me, it’s too far from the work that I’m doing to if I had another, if I could live 300 years, you know, that I could put more time into it, but I don’t think I have time.

Angus:  Ryan, thank you. That was a very good answer to a nebulous question. man. It’s such a deep subject.

 

Ryan:  mean, there’s so much in there, you know, with the meaning of what he’s expressing with centers and stuff. I mean, I have a great appreciation for it, but in terms of using it, you know, the I could imagine, for example,

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I’m very sympathetic to the popularity of pattern languages. think that it’s very clear why pattern language is so popular because it’s so adoptable. You understand what he’s talking about. You understand how to use it. You can see how it relates to what you’re already doing. You know, the, I think there is some potential for generative sequences to, be the same.

if we could present them more in very specific verticals, in very specific domains where people are doing different kinds of problem solving. When you see that example of how to design a kitchen and what to do first, second, third to get the best result, I mean, it’s such a great process, you know? So I think that there are different things beyond the pattern language that might be more relatable, where people could kind of jump in.

And then you have all of this sort of theory waiting if you want to go deeper and deeper and deeper.

 

Angus:  Yeah, for me, it’s a little easier because I work, I’m more often involved in instantiation of physical objects and geometry and structure. And it’s difficult and maddening to seek to absorb nature of order, which by the way,

Has there been a better magnum opus produced in our time than the four volumes of Nature of Order? It’s a monumental work. It’s really something, yeah. it’s been my privilege in my life to do some sculpting, to do some land development, to paint a bit, make a studio. And…

I have been able to work through the generative design process, the fundamental process. And to my satisfaction, I have achieved more of what Christopher Alexander describes as living structure as a result of trying to apply the ideas in nature of order. But it’s a pill, man.

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It’s a very hard lesson to absorb and apply.

 

Ryan:  In what way? What’s hard about it? I mean, what do you mean?

 

Angus:  Well, you spoke of language. And Christopher Alexander tries very hard, and I think successfully, to apply a formality of definition and language to the process of creating living structure.

But it’s complex and it gets into language that is essentially mystical or spiritual. And it is a lot to ask of land surveyors, architects, planning committee members to take on this worldview. But it’s also vitally important. I guess my summation would be that

Christopher Alexander’s ideas, if applied, could redeem the world by revamping or rebuilding the world according to Christopher Alexander and the nature of order. Humans could be happier and more whole and more successful and better off as a civilization, a species. So for me, it gets pretty important.

You talked about the zealotry of the new convert, and I’ve had that for 30 years now. And it’s frustrating. guess we’re moving into the conclusion of the interview. But as a final question, where do you see, is there a legacy that’s being passed on? Certainly there are some architects building a building.

according to this method. But I don’t see a real strong movement continuing Alexandrian ideas. Do you? Where in the world do you see?

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an upward adoption of ideas of life and centers and patterns making positive change.

 

Ryan:  There’s different aspects to this. I actually see. a bit of a cultural pendulum swing away from the Bauhaus right now. I see more when I just look around on the internet, you know what I mean? Or like things that Instagram shows or things that are appearing in magazines and stuff like that. see more interesting form and less of this, glass boxes everywhere. I think that there is a, I think there are some bigger.

swings back and forth in the wider culture. I don’t know how to explain. When you look with a big macro lens back at the 20th century, there were so many big trends happening in the whole of society that had also to do very much with industrial production. know, I mean, the effects of the industrial revolution, they took time to really come to a peak.

you know, to really become fully manifest. And we also had a lot of major shifts due to, to world wars and population movements and all kinds of things where the speed of life, the, the willingness to spend time on a building, you know, I mean, there were the, the new technology that became available, the economic pressure. mean, so many things all changed at once.

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I have a good friend and mentor, my friend Bob Mesta, and he has this view. says, context makes the irrational rational.

And if we see terrible buildings or unpleasant environments and stuff like that, of course, we don’t just want to accept it and say, it’s perfectly all right and to somehow leave it alone. But at the same time, like, it can be made understandable by looking at all of the different pressures and conditions that came together for that to happen. You know? Yes. And it’s interesting to see with

For example, what’s happening not with the LLM part of AI, but with the sort of generative AI, the ability to fill in detail and to make complicated things faster. We’re already seeing a return, for example, to even like 3D printing different forms for building exteriors that have more ornament.

This, simple fact that ornament could become cool again. Yes. When ornament was sort of, out, according to the Bauhaus, right? simple things like that where it can be cultural trends, you know? So I’m really curious to see how, I think there are openings, right? Where people become interested and they say, I don’t just want a plain empty box, right? I would like to have some ornament. And then when you start.

If you want some more color, some more life, something more interesting, some more ornament, and if the economic conditions or the time or the methods of production allow it, then you can get into a situation where it, you don’t have a good answer for how to get to the thing that you imagine. You know, like there must be a way for it to be more beautiful, for it to feel better, for it to be more comfortable. Right. And then if you start to kind of, if you already have that value that you’re seeking,

(41:28.66)

then I think the work that Christopher Alexander did can be a place to find some really good stuff. You can find some really good techniques, some good answers, some good ideas. So that’s one piece. Well, his writing specifically on ornament.

 

Angus:  Yeah, sure. For example, in book three, there’s a bravura passage, large section of the book, about the importance of ornament, that it’s not simply ornament, it’s actually

part of the building, know, form and function. So good on those. And you talked about Bauhaus and its decline. One of President Trump’s recent blizzard of executive orders, a small one that kind of snuck by, the dictate or the attempt to re-institute traditional building methods for government.

buildings. didn’t see that one. And I’m not suggesting that it came from Christopher Alexander, but the formal introduction of the idea that

architecture has gone wrong in traditional buildings, that there’s a better way to do things, I thought was pretty interesting. And I would like to see the White House instead of a brutalist library being built.

 

Ryan:  think there’s a positive trend there. mean, we also see it quite a bit in Eastern Europe right now. There’s a lot of rebuilding going on, which is more in the traditional direction and less in the…

in the traditions of the communist era and stuff like that. So I think there are some good trends there. From my side, think the value that it, I’m a little bit of a, I kind of think in terms of the free market principle a little bit, where you always say, where is the demand for the product? You know what I mean? And so I think that to the extent that there is demand, then we can see some good things come out. I do think that we have a supply side problem. I think that-

(43:37.44)

Alexander’s work is really hard to get your head around. I think there’s so much there and he had so much to give that he packed it all into, you know, this giant nature of order and so many, many, many books. And there isn’t a simple approachable synthesis. And also a lot of the things are not, they don’t go straight into your hands as something that you can use kind of.

 

it under the heat and pressure of a, of a, of a real project, you know? So I think that for those who were appreciators of his work, I think that there’s, there’s a lot of work to be done in terms of, of offshoots of that work that are more adoptable, you know, for different industries and different purposes. And a lot of what I’m trying to do in my work, I mean, really a big

I’m pulling, he’s maybe one third of, of, of the, of the major inputs that I’m trying to take into my synthesis. And I’m trying to use that stuff, what I understood from it. And then how can I, what’s something that I can give to the people who are in my circle, right? Where they can say, that’s something that makes sense. That’s something that I can use. And, and the, the, the, the meaning is the same and it comes from these really good old.

foundations, but it’s something that people can understand and use. And I think that’s always a moving target.

 

Angus:  I agree, and it’s almost as if Christopher Alexander requires a religious conversion, which is a hard sell. But worthwhile, and I think there are good trends, and I hope that things are moving in an Alexandrian direction. Ryan, this has been great.

(45:27.694)

Maybe we could close with you. What are you up to now? What are you doing in Portugal, I think? What’s felt present all about? What would you like listeners to know about your work at this time?

 

Ryan:  Well, I was actually inside of one software company called 37 Signals. We made a product called Basecamp and I was there for 17 years and I was able to learn a lot by moving through different roles and from three people to 60 plus people, you know, over all that time.

And then in 2021, I struck out on my own and the things that I’m helping people with are the things that I learned when I was there. And through all this stuff that we’ve been talking about, especially how to get engineering teams unstuck and how to connect the design and engineering side so they can actually make hard decisions together, get through tough moments together and everything can move in a much more flowing way where we’re making more progress. know, so that’s really what I’m helping software teams to do how to put this stuff into practice. of course, when I went on my own, needed to have a, I needed to stick some kind of a sign on the door, you know? And I had this personal website feltpresence.com for a long time. But really, that’s just a domain name I had sitting around. Probably the real brand is just Ryan Singer. You know, I’ve been talking about these things.

So if people know my name and then they’re interested in the work that I’m doing, then they can have a look and one of the main things I’ve been doing lately is helping teams do a pilot project in the new way. So they realize that the old way of throwing work over the wall or using these kind of agile methods where you never know where you’re going, they realize those things aren’t working and then they have an idea from the book that I wrote from ShapeUp and stuff like that, that there’s a better way, but it’s still not clear how do we actually do it, right? And how do we make sure that it goes well?

And then I can kind of guide them through a pilot project where they are able to really figure out how to put the right heads together and solve which problems in which order so that things really move forward in a different and powerful way.

 

Angus W Stocking (47:42.124)

Thanks for listening to this episode of Everything is Somewhere, and I hope you enjoyed listening in on the conversation with Ryan Singer as much as I enjoyed being part of it. Christopher Alexander has been a patron saint of my inner life for 30 years now, ever since the book angel led me to a pattern language. And if you’d like to learn more about Christopher, you can look for my archived columns and articles in the American Surveyor website, amerisurv.com.

That’s A-M-E R-I-S U-R-V dot com and all of the episodes of Everything is Somewhere can be found there too at amerisurv.com slash podcast and of course also at iTunes and Spotify. I love to hear from listeners, especially when you have ideas for Everything is Somewhere topics or guests. So please email me directly at angusstocking at gmail dot com or connect with me at LinkedIn where I’m easy to find there’s only one Angus Stocking.

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