It will take me a few paragraphs to get to the point. My starting point is Christopher Alexander’s thesis: the only good structure is living structure.

Living structure is not just something that biologists would call “alive” (though all life is living structure). Rather, living structure is structure that *unfolds* (again following Alexander) using a number of structural patterns. Alexander’s work was mostly applied to architecture, but it can be applied to all design.

The degree of life in a structure is equivalent to the degree of how much life it infuses in what it comes in contact with. If one’s purpose is to give life to others, designing living structure is a direct way to do so.

In information systems, most of what we build is quite dead. I think there are luminous exceptions, like Redis. I’m currently busy building an information system and trying to unfold it, as best as I can, as living structure.

I find that planning doesn’t fit quite well in the unfolding process. This is quaint. Why shouldn’t be able to “look ahead” when designing living structure?

Just today I realized a possible answer: the type of planning that considers a part of the whole as an isolated piece that fits into the whole is fundamentally incompatible with unfolding living structure. When designing a part of the system, its unfoldance should affect the entire system. So there’s no “jumping over” a part of the system, saying “while X is in progress (or done), let’s work on Y and Z”. Because Y and Z need to learn from X.

But how can we have a vision of the whole if we can only focus on what’s just below our nose during a design process? I think the answer is to think in levels of scale. Rather than considering X as a nonreactive piece, we acknowledge its process but then look at it in the context of the whole thing. We then see how X is affecting the whole, and how other parts of the whole can affect what we need from X. The picture will still be unfolding.

I almost wrote “the picture will still be incomplete”, but this is the wrong understanding. Living structure is always whole but never done. It’s alive at every step. It’s degree of detail and life intensifies at every point.

Therefore, planning for living structure is perhaps the process of looking at the whole, being able to jump through levels of scale, and go back into what we were doing before. This type of “unfolding planning” feels in stark contrast with the “Frankenstein planning” of assembling separate parts in a linear form. The core difference between them is that “unfolding planning” is chiefly interested in synergies between the assembled parts, rather than ticking off their completion.

If you have similar design struggles, drop me a message, I care about what you have to say.