Christopher Alexander – Move with Certainty

“As the living process goes forward, repeating the fundamental process again and again … one feature is built up at a time …

How do you determine these steps which must be taken, and their sequence? … The most basic instruction I can give you as a guide for a living process, is that you move with certainty. That means, you take small steps, one at a time, deciding only what you know. You try never to take a step which is a guess or a “why don’t we try this?” …

As far as the scale of the decisions is concerned – that, on the contrary, should be rather large. At the beginning, especially, you need to work mainly with the largest questions. Many of the issues you need to settle, in the early stages of your work, have to do with the whole, the global quality of the design.

… A numerical comparison is useful. Suppose, for example, that at a given stage in a process there are a hundred possible next steps … more of these possible next steps are likely to be bad than good … 90 or 95 next steps which will make the thing worse … 5 or 10 next steps which wil make it better … How, then, do we find the few good ones? There is no special reason that we should be lucky enough to hit one of the small number of good steps …

If we reason this out, we may then draw the following conclusion. It is more likely that the first possibilities that present themselves to our minds will be bad ones … We should therefore be extremely skeptical about the first possibilities …. we should run through the possibilities very fast and reject most of them … If we do accept one … [it should be] only when we finally encounter something for which no good reason presents itself to reject it, which appears genuinely wonderful to us, and which demonstrably makes the feeling of the whole become more profound.

The vital point is that this is an empirical matter. It can be discovered by experiment … But it will not be discovered unless the experiment is done … The one exception occurs when the designer is deeply in touch with the wholeness that is there and can summon up, very rapidly, a genuine structure preserving transformation as an intuitive response which springs directly from the wholeness, in the designer’s mind.”

Christopher Alexander – The Nature of Order – Book 2: The Process of Creating Life