Beauty. Christopher Alexander’s prolific journey in building, writing, and teaching was fueled by a relentless search for Beauty and its meaning. While all around him the world was intent on figuring out how to simplify, Alexander came to embrace complexity as the only path to his goal. The Beauty and life of that which he encountered and appreciated—an Indian village, a city, a subway network, an old Turkish carpet, or a campus—lay in its well-ordered complexity. As a designer and maker he found that simplicity came from choosing—at every step—the simplest way to add the necessary complexity. The failure of so much of our modern world, in Alexander’s eyes, was oversimplification, wantonly bulldozing context, misunderstanding the relationships of part and whole, ignoring the required role of time in the shaping of shapes, and ultimately dismissing, like Esau, our birthright of Value in favor of a lentil pottage of mere Fact. Ever elusive, Beauty demands of her suitors a constant return of attention to see what might be newly revealed, and Alexander duly returned again and again in pursuit of the mystery. In this essay—essentially biographical and descriptive of one man’s endeavors—we examine the full arc of his work from dissertation to most recent memoir. We don’t shy away from his failures, and we don’t simplify his journey. We leave work done by other scholars for another day. We reach no conclusion, rather, we invite readers to reflect on what Alexander’s lifelong effort suggests to them about their own path, their own sense of aesthetics and order, innate cognitive shortfalls, and professional blind alleys.

Today, global competition and rapid market developments preoccupy top management. They have less time for internal issues. If not checked, this preoccupation with the external world will leave top management in the same position as the military commander who may have a brilliant battle plan but does not know or understand the nature of his own troops. To be successful, top management requires in‐depth and quality knowledge of the company′s people and the corporate culture which binds them together. Typically, top management does not get quality information. They work on unchecked hunches and shallow, filtered information. By retooling the frequently underutilized human resource manager with the analytical skills for cultural analysis, general management can be strengthened with skilled and knowledgeable co‐pilots and internal change agents. Discusses these issues and some of the basic concepts of cultural anthropology useful for analysis in both domestic and multinational corporations.

To understand relationships between the urban environment and cycling practices we need new ways to face complexity and multidimensionality. Neither measurable environmental variables, nor thickly descriptive, particularistic, or overtly theoretical contributions provide satisfying recommendations for cycling policy and practice. We propose the development of a pattern language for urban cycling environments, together with a supporting methodologynamed Embodied Makingfor the development of novel patterns. We define an individual pattern as "a honed solution that successfully resolves conflicting forces in a recurring context"; a pattern language as a grouping of related patterns that work together within a given domain. Rather than attempting to identify existing solutions, Embodied Making seeks to develop new patterns from the bottom-up, i.e. from the analysis of forces themselves. The use of a pattern language naturally addresses the integrated quality of the physical, perceived, and lived dimensions of urban environments, and holds promise for a more holistic understanding of cycling environments, which could help bridge existing ontological and epistemological divisions within cycling research. We discuss how such a pattern language (1) Addresses integrated quality of physical, perceived, and lived environments;(2) Makes human experience part and parcel of the investigation;(3) Offers an approach to accommodating complexity; (4) Is adaptable, because it formulates patterns as mid-level abstractions instead of either absolutes or unique context-specifics; (5) Uses pragmatism as its philosophical underpinning; (6) Works with languages in which patterns take on significance and meaning according to connections with other patterns, and; (7) Facilitates community building. ARTICLE HISTORY

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Fine-grain case studies of scientific inquiry, lessons from linguistics on metaphoric thinking, the epistemology of Charles Sanders Peirce, recent work on architectural image-schemata, along with the computer world's own theorist, Peter Naur, all suggest that software developers (frequently dulled and desiccated from overdosing on 'Cartesian' methodologies) could benefit from imbibing a little 'mysticism'-not the wave-your-hands woo-woo kind but the more ineffable hunch and gut side of human cognition. Scholarly publications in their final polished forms rarely admit that stories, jokes, eroticism, and dreams were the fertile seeds that germinated into 'serious' results. This essay looks to these 'closet' sources, non-reductionist, non-self conscious, metaphorical, aformal modes of thought as the salvation of a profession gone awry. It is notably proto-scientific image-schemata that retain our attention as a pragmatic tool for improving the fecundity of Agile methodology, at its roots, so to speak. The necessary context is provided by Peter Naur's fundamental insights about software development as 'theory building' coupled with an elaboration of the Agile concept of storytelling.