Software as a backdrop:

August 3rd, 2008 by Hang

We must first recognize that what a town or building is, is governed, above all, by what is happening there. [...] Those of us who are concerned with buildings tend to forget too easily that all the life and soul of a place, all of our experiences there, depend not simply on the physical environment, but on the patterns of events which we experience there.

- Christopher Alexander, The Timeless Way of Building, p62

Software is not about code, it’s about experiences. It’s about people doing things. Your software should serve as a backdrop to this, an enabler and a force multiplier. But keep in mind that software is never the center of the show.

Stop thinking about your product in terms of code, in terms of technology and features. Instead, your software is stories, it’s actions and people doing stuff. If you haven’t got people doing stuff, then you don’t actually have software, just a bunch of bytes sitting on a server. When people change the stuff they’re doing, your software has changed.

As a designer, you need to be always mindful that you’re designing spaces, it’s up to the users to inhabit them.

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| Comments (6)

  • http://startcleaning.info/ Start a Cleaning Business

    That goes along with the whole nerd mentality. I think it’s much more important to get your people skills down before trying to be an engineer. After all, you can laways hire someone to build a system, but you can’t hire someone to relate your vision. Only you can do that. And it requires people skills.

  • http://startcleaning.info Start a Cleaning Business

    That goes along with the whole nerd mentality. I think it’s much more important to get your people skills down before trying to be an engineer. After all, you can laways hire someone to build a system, but you can’t hire someone to relate your vision. Only you can do that. And it requires people skills.

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