Indeed it turns out, in the end, that what this method does is sizply free us from all method.

But though ihis method is precise, it cannot be used mechanically,

The fact that the kettle is for use by human hands makes this no more than common sense. At the opposite extreme, if somebody suggests that the ensemble is stressed if the kettle wiil not reflect ultraviolet radiation, common sense tells us to reject this­unless some special reason can be given, which shows what damage the absorption of ultraviolet does to the ensemble.

This concept of stress or misfit is a primitive one. We shall proceed without defining it.

compound diagrams

problem

The way to improve this is to make a further abstract picture of our first picture of the problem, which eradicates 7 7

The moment the student is free to question what he is told, and value is put on explanation, it becomes important to decide why "this" is the right way rather than "that," and to look for general reasons. Attempts are made to aggregate the specific failures and successes which occur, into principles.

"No, not that way, this way." No attempt is made to formulate abstractry just what the right way involves.

strangely enough these steps themselves exert a very positive bad influence on the way he develops

Clearly it is at this stage too that the activity first becomes ripe for serious thought and theory.

Since these carpenters need to find clients, they are in business as artists; and they begin to make personal innovations and changes for no reason except that prospective clients will judge their work for its inventiveness.

All that matters, actually, is that sooner or later the phenomenon of the master craftsman takes control of the form-making activities.

the process of adaptation and selection which we have seen at work in unselfconscious cultures has plainly disappeared. But that is not in itself enough to account for the fact that the selfconscious culture does not manage to produce clearly organized, well-fitting forms in its own way.

active equilibrium

In the case of requirements, no sensible way of picking this finite set presents itself. From a purely descriptive standpoint we have no way of knowing which of the infinitely many relations between form and context to include, and which ones to leave out.

physically clear

adequacy

architectural Darwinism

homeostatic (self-organizing), and that it therefore consist­ently produces well-fitting forms, even in the face of change.

Sooner or later the system of lights will reach it.

No complex adaptive system will succeed in adapting in a reasonable amount of time unless the adaptation can proceed subsystem by subsystem, each subsystem relatively inde­pendent of the others.31

It is a purely fictitious system. Its variables are the conditions which must be met by good fit between form and context. Its interactions are the causal linkages which connect the variables to one another.

On the other hand, since not all the variables are equally strongly connected (in other words there are not only dependences among the variables, but also independences)

We shall not be able to see, directly, whether or not the unselfconscious and selfconscious form-making processes op­erate by subsystems. Instead we shall infer their modes of operation indirectly.

But from the point of view of its effect on a form, change only becomes significant at that moment when a failure or misfit reaches critical importance-at that moment when it is recognized, and people feel the form has something wrong with it. It is therefore legitimate, for our purpose, to consider a culture as changing in discrete steps.

cannot

inner nature

he reaction of the system to the disturbance is the reaction of the form-making process to the misfit. If we detect the active presence of subsystems in a process, we may then argue (by induction, as it were) that this is fully responsible for the good fit of the forms being produced by the process. For if good forms can always be adjusted cor­rectly the moment any slight misfit occurs, then no sequence of changes will destroy the good fit ever (at least while the process maintains this character);

These diagrams, which, in my more recent work, I. have been calling patterns, are the key to the process of creating form. In this book I pre­sented the diagrams as the end results of a long process; I put the accent on the process, and gave the diagrams themselves only a few pages of discussion.