A Pattern Language of Work

 I just learned that Christopher Alexander, the principal writer and force behind A Pattern Language, died on March 17.  This is to remember him, someone who made me see with a new focus.

A Pattern Language of Work
earlier version written in October 1997

There are 253 patterns Christopher Alexander et alia's _A Pattern Language_. There are over 30 that I identify as the patterns that make for human and humane work:

9 Scattered Work 19 Web of Shopping 32 Shopping Streets 41 Work Community 42 Industrial Ribbon 43 University as a Marketplace 46 Market of Many Shops 47 Health Center 61 Small Public Squares 80 Self-Governing Workshops and Offices 81 Small Services Without Red Tape 82 Office Connections 83 Master and Apprentices 85 Shopfront Schools 86 Children's Home 87 Individually Owned Shops 88 Street Cafe 89 Corner Groceries 90 Beer Hall 91 Traveler's Inn 92 Bus Stop 93 Food Stands 101 Building Thoroughfare 146 Flexible Office Space 148 Small Work Groups 149 Reception Welcomes You 150 A Place to Wait 151 Small Meeting Rooms 152 Half-Private Office 156 Settled Work 157 Home Workshop

These patterns can be roughly assembled into four groups - work, shopping, learning, and structure:

9 Scattered Work 41 Work Community 42 Industrial Ribbon 80 Self-Governing Workshops and Offices 81 Small Services Without Red Tape 148 Small Work Groups 156 Settled Work 157 Home Workshop

19 Web of Shopping 32 Shopping Streets 46 Market of Many Shops 47 Health Center 87 Individually Owned Shops 88 Street Cafe 89 Corner Groceries 90 Beer Hall 91 Traveler's Inn 92 Bus Stop 93 Food Stands

43 University as a Marketplace 83 Master and Apprentices 85 Shopfront Schools 86 Children's Home

61 Small Public Squares 82 Office Connections 101 Building Thoroughfare 146 Flexible Office Space 149 Reception Welcomes You 150 A Place to Wait 151 Small Meeting Rooms 152 Half-Private Office

Finally, these patterns and their underlying rules can be developed into sentences and paragraphs to tell something like a story:

A community should be built on walking distance so that all the basic needs can be met within a comfortable walk. Scatter work throughout the community so that there is less of a separation between living and working. No bedroom communities, no 5 pm deserted office blocks, no commutes. Build work communities, groups of a dozen or so businesses with common areas, throughout the whole community. Those activities that are noisy, dangerous, dirty should be concentrated in industrial ribbons at the edge of communities and serve as their boundaries. Work should be organized in small work groups, self-governing workshops and offices, providing small services without red tape and opportunities for home workshops and settled work.

Build a web of shopping which decentralizes services throughout the community into short, pedestrian shopping streets that are perpendicular to vehicular traffic. The shops should be individually owned rather than franchises or chains and concentrated in a market of many shops, like farmers' markets and flea markets, with push carts and kiosks, peddlers and street performers. There are opportunities for many businesses: cafes, restaurants, food stands, and bars with entertainment, health centers, corner groceries, inns and bed and breakfasts...

Education should also be decentralized with the university organized as a marketplace where anybody can give or take a course (the January Independent Activities Period [IAP] at MIT, the Cambridge Center for Adult Education, any "open university" are models already in existence). Another model is that of master and apprentice, practical mentoring, where the community becomes part of the curriculum with shopfront schools and intergenerational learning from birth to death so that teaching and learning is perpetual and integral within the life of the community. 

Now, how do we make that work economically, here and now in the cities and towns we already have?

Pattern Language for Urban Agriculture

https://solarray.blogspot.com/2013/10/pattern-language-for-urban-agriculture.html

Climate Deadlines

 According to this carbon countdown clock (https://www.mcc-berlin.net/fileadmin/data/clock/carbon_clock.htm), at the current rate (1,337 tonnes per second or 42.2 gigatonnes [Gt] per year), the most CO2 we can emit to stay below 1.5ºC rise (global average surface temperature is 1.2ºC above what it was in 1880 and the annual rate of change has doubled in the last 40 years) is 400 Gt, starting from 2020, and that carbon budget will be used up by about July/August  2029.  

We are at 311 Gts left as I write (3/8/22).

To stay below the 2°C threshold, the carbon budget deadline is April/May 2047.  No more than 1061 Gt of CO2 emitted between now and then if we want to stay below that temperature limit. 

I'd like to think there are a whole bunch of wise, dedicated people backcasting from those dates and figuring out what we can do daily, weekly, monthly in the next 7 years and a few months, 25 years and a month or two so that we don't exceed those limits.  If there is, I wish there'd be a more public conversation about it.

Maybe even an even an online all the time, open source simulation/conversation, a World Game (https://worldgameworkshop.org) where those of us all who are for the benefit of all, as my friend the ethicist Milt Raymond would say, could play out the next 7-25 years repairing the climate damage our species has done and is doing, envisioning how "To make the world work for 100% of humanity in the shortest possible time through spontaneous cooperation without ecological offense or the disadvantage of anyone," as R. Buckminster Fuller, the originator of the game, said.

Fuller also wrote, "Quite clearly, our task is predominantly metaphysical, for it is how to get all of humanity to educate itself swiftly enough to generate spontaneous behaviors that will avoid extinction."

How about a global online design workshop on a climate successful 2029 or 2047?  Just as a thought experiment.

We remain alert so as not to get run down, but it turns out you only have to hop a few feet to one side and the whole huge machinery rolls by, not seeing you at all.
Lew Welch

the war that matters is the war against the imagination
all other wars are subsumed in it.

Diane di Prima

Interface: From Living Zero to Climate Take Back

I met Ray Anderson in 1996 at a conference about The Natural Step (https://thenaturalstep.org), an environmental action framework from Sweden.  He had founded Interface (http://www.interface.com/US/en-US/homepage), a carpet tile manufacturer, in 1973 and built it into one "of the world's largest manufacturers of modular carpet for commercial and residential applications and a leading producer of commercial broadloom and commercial fabrics."

In 1994 he started the company on Mission Zero (https://www.interface.com/US/en-US/about/mission/Our-Mission), zero environmental impact by 2020 because, he said, his grandchildren started getting on him about environment, pollution, ecology.  He listened, took a good, long look at what he was doing, and realized he was a pirate, robbing resources and giving nothing back but waste and indigestible detritus.  

So he started the company on Mission Zero, the promise to eliminate any negative impact the company has on the environment by the year 2020.  They did by 2019.

At that meeting in 1996, Anderson said that Interface was working on seven aspects: eliminating waste; eliminating emissions; renewable energy; closed loop recycling; resource efficient transportation (which may he thought might be the most difficult); and sensitivity - teaching sustainability (using the example of hiring a family therapist at the Interface factory to help keep workers from bringing problems at home to work [and vice versa?] and citing the resulting growth in production and morale); and finally, redesigning commerce. For Ray Anderson, the "prototypical company of the 21st century will take nothing from the Earth, do no harm, be just, and do well by doing good." It is interesting to note that the Hippocratic Oath is "First do no harm" and that the first precept of Buddhism, according to Gary Snyder, is "Do no unnecessary harm.”

Now that Interface is living with zero negative impact it has launched its next mission, Climate Take Back, a net positive mission:
https://www.interface.com/US/en-US/sustainability/climate-take-back-en_US

They intend to do it by
Live zero
Love carbon
Lead the industrial re-revolution
Let nature cool

Ray Anderson told us back in 1996, "I think the Earth needs a miracle. We can be that miracle.”

He certainly was.

Ray Anderson wrote Mid-Course Correction: Toward a Sustainable Enterprise: The Interface Model (1998) and Confessions of a Radical Industrialist: Profits, People, Purpose: Doing Business by Respecting the Earth (2009) which was released as Business Lessons from a Radical Industrialist (2011).