9 We created: they created

I must make it clear that the pattern language, though it came from the mouths and hearts of community members, was created by us. It was hard to create, an artistic and poetic task: but although it was we who wrote it, and put it together, it was their dreams, their hopes, and their aspirations and desires from which it was made. So when they saw it, they recognized it as being theirs. It was theirs. And that is what I mean by a collective vision.

So in the end we reached an overall pattern language —a statement of the community’s collective vision. To make it work, this statement had to be very physical. Even though it was all just words it really described what this campus was going to be like, to the point where after it had been created, discussed, hammered out and then finally voted upon and they said Yes. At that point I used to give this agreed-on pattern language to a particular student or teacher or somebody else in the community, and I’d say, just make me a drawing of what you think this campus is like now.
We still have some of their drawings. Each person could visualize the whole community. Of course no two people visualized it exactly the same. Often they weren’t even nearly the same in detailed arrangement. But the drawings were all the same in the deeper sense that they all had the same broad structure.

It is hard work to get a picture like this. But once you have it, it clarifies everything, it becomes a driving force, and the future layout of buildings and development of the site becomes rather easy.

You have a picture of the new community, you have a verbal picture of it, but of course it is quite another matter to fit that picture to the reality that is actually on the ground. […] So you are trying to set down this structure that you’ve understood in verbal terms — now you’re trying to set it down physically on the ground.

I have come to believe in recent years that the public hull, the hull of public space, is probably best done by the builders with the help and cooperation of the individual families and businesses. But that is an act in itself, the creation of this public hull of space which is going to take the place of all those burnt-out parking lots and nowhere bits of street and asphalt and so forth that we have come to know as the open space in our modern cities.

What is the equivalent step of “staking the public hull” in software development?

#book/The Nature of Order/3 A Vision of a Living World/8 Forming a collective vision of a neighborhood#