I’ve become one of the fifteen students in this year’s Building Beauty and https://www.buildingbeauty.org/beautiful-software — the postgraduate course on Christopher Alexander’s Nature of Order with an additional seminar for “computer people” to find out how to transfer his ideas into the software industry.
It’s been a busy first three weeks and I’ve already learned a lot, which I hope to share eventually. I’m even more convinced now that Alexander has figured out a deep truth about designing and building beautiful things that absolutely needs to be adapted to the software world.
I’d love to invite those here who are interested in Alexander’s work to connect so we can attempt to bridge the two communities — in which way exactly I’m still contemplating and open to suggestions. At least I wanted to start a thread here which could become anything from an AMA about the course to a beacon for those who’d be interested in activities that might happen around this topic spanning both communities (I could picture an online event bringing us all together). If you want to be part of that, leave a comment in the thread and feel free to suggest ideas or ask me anything…
If you are looking for a little more background on what this is all about, I’ve collected a few good resources in this short Twitter thread: https://twitter.com/stefanlesser/status/1312739694950612993?s=21
🐦 Stefan Lesser: Excited to join Building Beauty and the Beautiful Software Initiative as a student starting tomorrow. We will dive deep into Christopher Alexander’s Nature of Order series and find ways to approach building technology differently. https://www.buildingbeauty.org/news/2020/10/2/the-nature-of-order-lecture-series-2020-21
Stefan Lesser do you know how many of the 15 students have background in architecture vs software?
Yes, there’s 5 with software background and 10 others, although that doesn’t necessarily say anything about the architecture students’ software proficiency. As far as I can tell we have the whole spectrum from struggling with Zoom to having some programming experience among the architecture students as well.
However, there’s a variety of people among the professors, instructors, and faculty as well that are also part of that community, so I'm not just thinking about the students here.