Christopher Alexander's fifteen properties applied to the design of communication

Abstract

This paper examines Christopher Alexander's Fifteen Fundamental Properties of Living Structures, and their relationship to the design of communication through website development. The Fifteen Properties are found to describe and provide solutions to a number of common quality problems in websites. In the spirit of design patterns, originated by Alexander, each Property is presented as part of a pattern describing a design problem in the website context, and its resolution through appropriate application of the Property.

Edward tufte meets christopher alexander

“…Both Alexander's Properties and Tufte's Principles have been subjects of interest regarding the application of their philosophies to web design. [3,4] Hart-Davidson [5] defines quality documentation in terms of four criteria:…”

“…The wholeness that Christopher Alexander works to define through the Properties has been shown to provide a view of quality on the Web. [3] Alexander takes an approach of reducing structures to fundamental components to produce a quality structure (with structure actually being used as a metaphor for a variety of entities such as buildings, objects of art, and groups of people). While both methodologies promote internal quality on one axis, they differ by attending to different aspects; orthogonality arises from Tufte's emphasis on organization on one axis compared to Alexcander's emphasis on structure on another axis.…”

“…The current object-oriented pattern language community, the Portland Pattern Repository, may be found at http://www.hillside.net/. Stamey and Honeycutt [3] developed a pattern language from Alexander's Fifteen Properties that described a framework of quality for websites. This framework was validated by a survey of website users [4], with all Fifteen Properties found to be statically significant indicators of website quality.…”