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Design creativity: harnessing your inner genius

cloud patterns

I am typing this as I listen to Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos. I love all kinds of music but can only work whilst listening to jazz and baroque. Researchers have show that baroque music creates a mentally stimulating environment in which the brain can work. Apparently, it has a calming affect on brainwaves. J S Bach always lifts my mood and I love that fiction writer Douglas Adams in Dirk Golightly’s Holistic Detective Agency attributed Bach’s music to aliens who ‘helped’ the poet Coleridge to write Kubla Khan – a poem partly about inspiration and genius. Amongst the theories explored in Adams’s fiction is Jung’s collective unconsciousness. Jung says that mankind has a reservoir of experiences that anyone can dip into, which is why people come up with the same ideas simultaneously, yet independently. One example of this is the theory of evolution. Charles Darwin developed his idea of natural selection over 20 years but didn’t publish it until Alfred Russel Wallace wrote to Darwin with the same theory he had developed on his own. Continue reading “Design creativity: harnessing your inner genius”

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Design using function, behaviour, structure

English Heritage pic of Rievaulx Abbey
Last month, at the Architectural Association, Bill Hillier described how English Heritage often want to reinstate the paths and roads of the historic sites they are trying to preserve. Hillier argued that these sites need new pathways as the way people interact with them now is not the same as when they were built. One example of this is Rievaulx Abbey. It was once a place where monks lived and worshipped, until Henry VIII dissolved the monastries to get his hands on their money.

Today, Rievaulx is a tourist attraction, which is occasionally used as a place of worship and the change in its functionality is reflected in the pathways around it. They can be described as paths of desire, which have come about because visitors wander across the grass or clamber over a wall to get to a specific part of the abbey instead of walking about retracing the routes the Cistercians may have used, which would give visitors a better insight into the way the abbey and its inhabitants behaved. Continue reading “Design using function, behaviour, structure”

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Using patterns to shape our world

Escher picture

In the 1990s, Erich Gamma changed the way I thought about software engineering forever! Gamma visited the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne where I was a PhD student, in order to give a seminar on design patterns.

The idea of extracting a solution template from a piece of software to turn it into a pattern which can be reused, was to me, an exciting step forward in software engineering. Instead of reusing software from a library that needs to be maintained and ported as necessary, abstracting the solution and creating a pattern repository gives software engineers a toolbox of meta-level solutions.

Continue reading “Using patterns to shape our world”