“The activity we call building creates the physical order of the world, constantly, unendingly, day after day.”

So begins Christopher Alexander’s The Nature of Order. While coming from a very different perspective, I have identified in the work a connection to Douglas Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach as well as Stephan Wolfram’s A New Kind of Science. All three are concerned to some degree with the recursive nature of the universe and the nature of existence.

I am partial to Alexander’s approach to the material as he identifies himself as an architect, despite his being trained as a scientist in mathematics at Trinity College in Cambridge. He has applied his scientific skills to a discipline perhaps considered more artful by those in the mathematics trade. Surely sound architecture requires a good degree of mathematical rigor, yet do we not think of architects more as designers than scientists?

Like my late friend and colleague Rich Gold, there are those of us who cannot help but express our gifts across a variety of disciplines. I speak for myself when I say that there is little difference in writing a musical composition or architecting an application. The imagination is very much invoked to create order out of nothing in both cases. Coming up with the melody is similar, in pattern, to coming up with an architectural diagram, while producing the song is, to me, like writing the corresponding code. The two production activities are both immensely detailed.

All of these activities are modes of building. What we build creates a particular order, which affects the world around us in more ways than we can possibly perceive or imagine. I strive therefore, in my work, to create an order which connects people to their greatest talents; one of the tools I use to create that connection is the computer. This requires not only technical capability, but also a deeper understanding of people and processes. That’s one of the reason I am reading Alexander’s work, as I feel his voice speaks strongly of the importance to recognize and act on our humanity, thereby bringing out people’s best nature – not solely on the production of sound structures (no pun intended). Alexander does this in his architectural work and writing, while I do the same in my musical work and technology consulting.

I am starting to see that some people’s attitudes are changing and that many of the methods I have adopted in my technology practice are being adopted by an ever widening circle of professionals in the technology space. It is good to be among them.