2 Three houses by telephone
I now asked each family to consider what they wanted in their house. Each family had already made a decision about the size of their house (governed essentially by cost). I gave them a copy of the pattern language, asked them to choose the patterns they were interested in, asked them to read through these patterns and to discuss among themselves what was going to be in the house, what would be its character.
This discussion took place by telephone, and lasted about an hour for each family. We ran through the kinds of things they wanted, we talked about the overall vision of the house that each of them had. When we were done, each family had, in outline, a picture of the patterns (the generic centers) which their house was to contain. It was different, of course, for each family.
This sounds like a useful approach for building software too. The patterns though wouldn’t be the software design patterns we know; they’d have to be something more along the lines of user interface “mechanics” that are common across many different apps.
Now, to get things moving, I simply began asking them questions, one at a time. These questions were put to them in a certain order, and were a way of creating a sequence of unfolding. Each question, when answered, would create a further unfolding of the house that had been generated up until then by the answers to the previous questions. As we went forward, we all three together built up, in our minds, a picture of the house they had in mind. Each of my questions was designed to bring forth a new feature of the emerging whole. I chose the order of the questions carefully, so as to cause the house to unfold as cleanly and smoothly as possible.
How can we know the right (a good) sequence of questions, in particular for software design? In architecture, levels of scale seem to help a lot — you generally go from large to small. What is the equivalent in software?
Although my questions, and the order in which I asked them, were largely the same for each family, each family gave entirely different answers to these questions.
#book/The Nature of Order/3 A Vision of a Living World/12 The uniqueness of people’s individual worlds#