“I sometimes think that the only real purpose of an initial design is to evolve some sort of of plan to get one started in an otherwise confusing and complex situation.”
Bill Mollison

Permaculture: A Designer's Manual

Tag Archives: quality

Ancient Greek Metaphysical Damage

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Introduction I recently completed yet another reading of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig. There is a section near the end of the book where Pirsig, in his attempt to point the root of our current metaphysical crises, reaches the philosopher of ancient Greece. I’ve always experienced both a draw to […]

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Realms Beyond Reason

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” … the crisis is being caused by the inadequacy of existing forms of thought to cope with the situation. It can’t be solved by rational means because the rationality itself is the source of the problem … the solution to the problem isn’t that you abandon rationality but that you expand the nature of […]

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Shodo – Getting Started

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A couple(?) of years ago Iulia went to a calligraphy workshop in Cluj and the papers she came back with shimmered for me. It stayed with me for a while. Eventually, I did some research into it and that led me to Shodo: THIS spoke to me. I seem to be drawn to Japanese culture. […]

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Sequence: The Difference Between a Novice and a Master

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The experienced carpenter keeps going … every action he performs, is calculated in such a way that some later action can put it right to the extent that it is imperfect now. What is critical here, is the sequence of events. The carpenter neves takes a step which he cannot correct later; so he can […]

Posted in A Pattern Language, AltEco, Design, outside, Quality | Also tagged | You are welcome to add your comment

The Order of the Language

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Design is often thought of as a process of synthesis, a process of putting together things, a process of combination. According to this view, a whole is created by putting together parts. The parts come first: the the form of the whole comes second. But it is impossible to form anything which has the character […]

Posted in A Timeless Way Of Building, AltEco, Design, outside, Quality | Also tagged | You are welcome to add your comment

Attention to Reality

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And it is in the end only when our feelings are perfectly in touch with the reality of forces, that we begin to see the patterns which are capable of generating life. That is what is hard – because so often people choose to put their own opinions forward, in place of reality. … Yet […]

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EXTRA Ordinary (Deepest Insights)

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We have a habit of thinking that the deepest insights, the most mystical, and spiritual insights, are somehow less ordinary than most things – that they are extraordinary. This is only the shallow refuge of the person who does not yet know what he is doing. In fact, the opposite is true: the most mystical, […]

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Wholehearted

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A man is alive when he is wholehearted, true to himself, true to his own inner forces, and able to act freely according to the nature of the situations he is in … … it is a state of being in which all forces which arise in a man can find expression; he lives in […]

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Spaces for the Soul (a Ruth Landy documentary about Christopher Alexander)

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Dear Ruth, thank you for this precious work, it is vital that this story be told, and  for it to be told it is vital that it be available. While I understand your motivation for having it taken down, please don’t. Please let it live and ripple.

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Christoper Alexander – What is Wholeness?

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“How can we tackle the task of making good sense of this intuition of unity and wholeness? First, wholeness is a structure, and can be understood as such … Second, the thing we call wholeness –  the feeling, or the intuition, of what the wholeness is – always extends beyond the thing in question … […]

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Jeff Bezos: They know it when they see it

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In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig describes teaching students to write and how much clarity and agreement there was between students about what constituted good writing (and how impossible is to define what “good writing” is) … and … wholeness anyone? Jeff Bezos confirms: “In a letter to shareholders, founder and […]

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Christopher Alexander – Experience Beyond Descartes

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where Descartes only allowed observation to focus on the outer reality of mechanisms in the world, my method requires that we focus on the inner reality of feeling as well

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Christopher Alexander – The Mirror of the Self Test

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it is not so easy to find out what we really like. It is a skill and an art to become sensitive enough to living structure so that we see it accurately

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Christopher Alexander – Liking from the Heart

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What people like can often not be trusted, because it does not come from the heart.

Posted in Expanding, inside, Nature of Order, Nature Of Order Book 1 | Also tagged | You are welcome to read 1 comment and to add yours

Christopher Alexander – A Universal Personal

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… from the point of view of the world picture in this book, ‘personal’ is a profound objective quality which inheres in something, It is not idiosyncratic but universal. It refers to something true and fundamental in a thing itself.

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Christopher Alexander – Value as a Matter of Fact

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one of the most fundamental tenets of contemporary science – that value is not part of science and tht all matter is, from a scientific point of view, equally value free – can no longer be sustained

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Christopher Alexander – Fundamental Property 6: Good Shape

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good shape … comes about when the whole is made of parts that are themselves whole in this rather simple geometric sense … is not only making things more beautiful; it also makes them work more profoundly, more effectively.

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Christopher Alexander – Centers & Life … and Robert Pirsig

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This excerpt has, for me, a unique flavor. It is brief. I originally intended to skip it, but decided to come back to it. It will probably come across as abstract. I did not find a way to capture the essence of the next few sections which contain examples that illustrate the point Alexander is […]

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Christopher Alexander – Degrees of Life

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“In the 20th-century scientific conception, what we meant by life was defined chiefly by the life of an individual organism. We consider as an organism any carbon-oxygen-hydrogen-nitrogen system which is capable of reproducing itself, healing itself, and remaining stable for some particular lifetime … There are plenty of uncomfortable boundary problems: For example, is a […]

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Inside Grand Seiko

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“This is the minimum requirement in making a beautiful watch: First, each individual part must be beautiful.”  

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