Community and Privacy | Book Review

EPISODE 24: COMMUNITY AND PRIVACY

By Sergei Chermayeff & Christopher Alexander

Hosted by Watson, B. Sovereign & Jose

00:00:41 - Watson

Hello, and welcome to episode 24 Watson.

00:00:48 - Watson

I'm here with B.

00:00:49 - Watson

Sutton and Jose.

00:00:51 - Watson

And today is a book review of Community and Privacy by Sergei Chermayeff and Christopher Alexander.

00:01:01 - Watson

One way to characterize this book is by saying privacy is the architecture that makes community possible.

00:01:11 - Watson

This isn't a compromise between two opposing values.

00:01:15 - Watson

It's actually naming a design relationship.

00:01:20 - Watson

People need withdrawal, quiet, and protected intimacy in order to participate in shared life without being consumed by it.

00:01:31 - Watson

It.

00:01:32 - Watson

In the context of software, every product decides who can see, reach, interrupt, index, notify, or invite before the user has time to negotiate what they want.

00:01:46 - Watson

This makes the thresholds within the architecture the real design question.

00:01:56 - Watson

So what's this book about?

00:01:58 - Watson

It's an argument for an architecture of humanism.

00:02:04 - Watson

It's a diagnosis of mass urban life, suburbia, traffic, and noise.

00:02:13 - Watson

It's a design theory for dwellings, domains, thresholds, and scales, a precursor to pattern language about human environments, and it's a builder text about exposure control that can be applied to software.

00:02:36 - Watson

Now what's the standard story when people think of privacy and community?

00:02:43 - Watson

Well, what's the problem?

00:02:45 - Watson

It's that modern life isolates people and weakens the community.

00:02:49 - Watson

Okay.

00:02:50 - Watson

Well, the obvious fix would be to open up more shared space.

00:02:56 - Watson

The second fix would be go ahead and retreat to your private house.

00:03:02 - Watson

Well, the reason why this doesn't work is that openness without domains becomes intrusion.

00:03:10 - Watson

We're going to really dig into that.

00:03:13 - Watson

This book asks for designed relation, not pure openness or pure retreat.

00:03:22 - Watson

Now what's the thesis of the book?

00:03:25 - Watson

Privacy is the architecture that makes community possible.

00:03:31 - Watson

And that sounds counterintuitive, but, we're definitely gonna be digging into it.

00:03:36 - Watson

A humane city needs clearly articulated domains.

00:03:41 - Watson

You know?

00:03:42 - Watson

He has they both have, six realms that they came up with, the urban public, urban semi public, group public, group private, so on and so forth.

00:03:51 - Watson

We're gonna be digging into these.

00:03:54 - Watson

Then there's also the concept of locks and buffers, which preserve the integrity between these domains and realms will which will we will define while allowing transfer between the two.

00:04:10 - Watson

Applied to software, the core question is who is exposed to whom, where, and why?

00:04:18 - Watson

What are the major premises of the book?

00:04:21 - Watson

Human ecology, and when we say ecology, we're talking about studying living organisms and how they interact.

00:04:29 - Watson

Human ecology needs withdrawal, quiet, concentration, and intimacy.

00:04:35 - Watson

That may sound a little counterintuitive.

00:04:39 - Watson

Do you really need those things?

00:04:41 - Watson

Well, you could say you need those things in order to flourish to the maximum potential.

00:04:48 - Watson

The dwelling, we'll talk about these dwelling spaces, absorb pressures, we'll talk about pressures as well, from the large world, so you should you need to design your dwelling.

00:05:02 - Watson

Traffic noise, media, strangers, and services act as intruders that disturb.

00:05:10 - Watson

Modern planning overvalues movement.

00:05:14 - B. Sovereign

When he

00:05:14 - Watson

says movement, you can think of really cars, for instance, and neglects tranquility and calm.

00:05:22 - Watson

Human scale of dwellings change by person time, condition, and activity.

00:05:26 - Watson

We'll get into all of these.

00:05:31 - Watson

Now there's four counterintuitive things that we think are true, that are within the book.

00:05:41 - Watson

Truth number one, privacy is not the same thing as isolation.

00:05:47 - Watson

Truth number two, community is not purely open.

00:05:53 - Watson

Truth number three, density needs thresholds.

00:05:58 - Watson

And number four, architecture allocates exposure before consent.

00:06:08 - Watson

Number one, privacy isn't isolation.

00:06:12 - Watson

Privacy is a source condition for social activity.

00:06:19 - Watson

Withdrawal supports firsthand experience, contemplation, intimacy, and recovery.

00:06:27 - Watson

We need some level of privacy for that.

00:06:31 - Watson

The family and the person need protected interior life, and we'll even there's even a threshold between the family and person that we'll get into.

00:06:40 - Watson

The private realm, we'll talk about, what realms and domains are later, but a private realm can enrich public life instead of opposing.

00:06:53 - Watson

So this is a question of protective.

00:07:02 - Jose

Alright.

00:07:03 - Jose

So I I I wanna key in on the intuition break here that, that both of the authors had addressed here is they're treating privacy as a source condition for the social activity.

00:07:16 - Jose

Right?

00:07:17 - Jose

Saying that withdrawal from, the community, it doesn't necessarily mean that you are subtracting from it.

00:07:27 - Jose

It's it's kind of the it's the feedback signal that keeps the system honest.

00:07:32 - Jose

So privacy is the same in this context.

00:07:35 - Jose

It's not withdraw from the community.

00:07:37 - Jose

It's the architecture that makes communities sustainable.

00:07:42 - Jose

So the question here is not are you private or public, but is your agency protected at each layer?

00:07:54 - Watson

Alright.

00:07:56 - Watson

So now we have these six realms on this diagram, the privacy gradient.

00:08:05 - Watson

So we'll dig into these.

00:08:07 - Watson

The urban public.

00:08:09 - Watson

This is the communally owned civic spaces open to all citizens.

00:08:16 - Watson

So something like a public highway.

00:08:19 - Watson

The urban semi public.

00:08:22 - Watson

This would be publicly usable spaces that are subject to institutional control and regulation or commercial or even governmental.

00:08:33 - Watson

So something like a courthouse, you could say.

00:08:36 - Watson

Then you've got group public.

00:08:40 - Watson

This is a transitional zone between public, civic space, and residential clusters.

00:08:48 - Watson

So you can think of something like a mail delivery drop point.

00:08:54 - Watson

And then you've got group private, shared communal space, space that, that's restricted strictly to a government, specific group of residents.

00:09:09 - Watson

It's really another way of saying an apartment building lobby or a shared interior courtyard, these types of things.

00:09:18 - Watson

You have family private, which would be a shared living environment within a single household.

00:09:26 - Watson

So your living room and your kitchen.

00:09:29 - Watson

And then individual private, that's the innermost sanctuary.

00:09:33 - Watson

So this is your your bedroom, your private study, so on and so forth.

00:09:40 - Jose

Yeah.

00:09:41 - Jose

So to take note here, of these the six named realms here, each has its own integrity.

00:09:49 - Jose

So the context that we wanna deliver here for builders is is a simple test.

00:09:54 - Jose

If you can't name the domains, you don't have a boundary system.

00:09:58 - Jose

You have a space where everything kinda just bleeds into everything else.

00:10:03 - Jose

So in the context of these realms, these separate distinct realms, the gradient is the design.

00:10:10 - Jose

So without it, private and public are just ideas, and they're not a architecture in and of themselves.

00:10:22 - Watson

Alright.

00:10:23 - Watson

So what does exposure control miss?

00:10:28 - Watson

What really is exposure control?

00:10:33 - Watson

Well, it's the assumption that life is binary between this, the ex the privacy, and the community.

00:10:42 - Watson

So you you either have one or another, and you want to control the exposure in this binary fashion.

00:10:50 - Watson

But people can be invaded by sound, sight, traffic, interruption, and media.

00:10:56 - Watson

I mean, you can imagine that someone built a highway that went right by your house.

00:11:01 - Watson

You are having this concept of intrusion, of the sound, the sight, and interruption.

00:11:08 - Watson

A user can be physically alone and still exposed.

00:11:12 - Watson

Why?

00:11:13 - Watson

Because, again, the traffic, it's the sound of the traffic, let's say.

00:11:18 - Watson

A family can be together while outside pressures dominate the room, again.

00:11:23 - Watson

And boundary design, right, so you're designing these domains and realms, they're about attention as much as access.

00:11:33 - Watson

Going back to all of this in order to have human flourishing, you need some ways of scoring the gradients and repelling different levels of intrusion.

00:11:46 - Watson

We'll talk about it.

00:11:47 - Watson

Privacy fails when the system controls only just doors, doors representing a binary.

00:11:59 - Watson

So now truth number two, community is not pure openness.

00:12:05 - Watson

What do we mean by this?

00:12:09 - Watson

The book really wants the true advantages of community living.

00:12:16 - Watson

So he goes back and forth talking about the interactions of people within an urban environment and then the privacy of the countryside.

00:12:30 - Watson

And there's kind of they really have a a negative view of suburbia saying that it's really the worst of both sides.

00:12:41 - Watson

So they critique that pretty hard.

00:12:43 - Watson

They want you to have the true advantage of the community living really wherever you're going.

00:12:52 - Watson

So space that belongs to everybody really doesn't belong to anybody in practice.

00:12:59 - Watson

Now that's gonna be space that's not designed in the way that they are talking about.

00:13:09 - Watson

Shared life needs defined purpose, maintenance, and boundary.

00:13:15 - Watson

A commons without a domain becomes a leftover void.

00:13:24 - Watson

So what would that what would an example of that be?

00:13:28 - Watson

If you have an apartment complex, and if you ever seen these green belts that they have, there's areas where there's just grass, strips of grass, maybe dividers on on areas between different sections of the apartment complex.

00:13:45 - Watson

This this is really a no man's land.

00:13:49 - Watson

They're not a place that children can play.

00:13:53 - Watson

They're not a place where people can interact, but people really they will assign that to being something that it's a green area, so it's somewhat of a a common domain area, but it's really just becomes a void.

00:14:13 - Watson

That's what he means there.

00:14:14 - Watson

So community requires membership queues.

00:14:20 - Watson

These domains, you need to know when you go there that it's for you.

00:14:28 - Watson

You're a member of that gradient in that domain, that realm, and what you can do there.

00:14:36 - Watson

So it can't just be, oh, I have access here.

00:14:39 - Watson

Let me behavior or let me occupy this area.

00:14:43 - Watson

You also wanna have direction, and good architecture will allow for that.

00:14:50 - B. Sovereign

Yeah.

00:14:51 - B. Sovereign

And just to build on that, there's also the there are spaces that meet that definition, these voids that are in fact reclaimed by the community.

00:15:03 - B. Sovereign

And you'll see that there's spontaneous activity that emerges, and that it started just by a few people just hanging out, bringing their dogs, for example.

00:15:12 - B. Sovereign

And then all of a sudden, that invites more people to go in.

00:15:15 - B. Sovereign

Right?

00:15:16 - B. Sovereign

And and maybe at some point, some of the more formal or less formal community just people in the community.

00:15:25 - B. Sovereign

Right?

00:15:25 - B. Sovereign

Maybe organizations like, Neighborhood Association.

00:15:28 - B. Sovereign

Right?

00:15:29 - B. Sovereign

They'll try to not reclaim it, but definitely dig.

00:15:33 - B. Sovereign

Okay.

00:15:33 - B. Sovereign

So who does this belong to?

00:15:35 - B. Sovereign

And then use again, there's some communities that will just go in and and take it for them.

00:15:40 - B. Sovereign

But there's also that, hey.

00:15:42 - B. Sovereign

Let us, work with the city, get a grant, or find out who this belongs to.

00:15:46 - B. Sovereign

Maybe Parks and Rec.

00:15:48 - B. Sovereign

Right?

00:15:48 - B. Sovereign

And let's try to, in that angle, more formal, try to revitalize it while at the same time, there's a parallel structure that is completely spontaneous by informal groups that would also do that.

00:16:00 - B. Sovereign

And there's an interesting dynamic between between that liaison organizations, the more formal cities, and these other groups.

00:16:08 - B. Sovereign

And there's always opportunities to create something, like, super cool and, ultimately, reclaim that space, not from a not in a paternalistic dynamic in which that's a sign that's giving, I think, domain.

00:16:23 - B. Sovereign

You know?

00:16:23 - B. Sovereign

Hey.

00:16:23 - B. Sovereign

Hey, folks.

00:16:24 - B. Sovereign

You can come here and do what we decided that this is gonna be for versus bottom up.

00:16:31 - B. Sovereign

We are reclaiming this space, and we're definitely working with the city to kinda say, hey.

00:16:36 - B. Sovereign

Thumbs up.

00:16:36 - B. Sovereign

And maybe, hey.

00:16:37 - B. Sovereign

Can we get a little bit of support here?

00:16:42 - Watson

Yep.

00:16:43 - Watson

Excellent.

00:16:46 - Jose

Yeah.

00:16:46 - Jose

So, I mean yeah.

00:16:48 - Jose

And perfectly said.

00:16:49 - Jose

So a commons without a domain, simply here, it it becomes a void, not necessarily a community.

00:16:55 - Jose

So community requires membership queues.

00:17:00 - Jose

You have to know who is in, who's participating, what the space is for, and, you know, who is responsible.

00:17:11 - Watson

Yeah.

00:17:11 - Watson

We should, we can revisit I think we should some of those concepts are saying, Jose, where the bottom up development of the architecture Christopher Alexander is be occupied with that.

00:17:33 - Watson

He's really his whole strategy is but how?

00:17:40 - Watson

It's through facilitating, creating language for people to use.

00:17:47 - Watson

And so that's where he's where the the solution for having a bottom up, facilitate when he talks about architecture's facilitating events that happen in spaces, He says, if you want to be an architect, you should create or try to create you should try to create language that people can reuse, and what does the language do?

00:18:13 - Watson

The language is trying to, I'll use the term facilitate, but he has these concepts of pressures that you're trying to alleviate.

00:18:23 - Watson

And he has this, Like, the gold standard is when you have the what he calls quality without a name.

00:18:32 - Watson

So you you can't really name it, but he's using it as an example of let's say you have a book and you're on your little easy chair.

00:18:43 - Watson

The light is just far enough.

00:18:46 - Watson

The coffee is just far enough from within your reach, and everything is kind of perfect.

00:18:53 - Watson

All of the little things that you end up needing to do while you read are facilitated, those events.

00:19:02 - Watson

That and he says he calls that the quality without name.

00:19:05 - Watson

And inside of his books, he'll spend a a bunch of pages trying to say, you could name it this, but then you're leaving this out.

00:19:11 - Watson

But he says that's really what architecture is all about, bottom up, having people really live through that.

00:19:23 - Watson

He talks a lot about living architecture and expressing the things that they build through that without having a formal architect.

00:19:36 - Watson

So he's definitely somebody, I think.

00:19:40 - B. Sovereign

Sure.

00:19:40 - B. Sovereign

And that that's the the same thing that you'll hear in in design.

00:19:43 - B. Sovereign

You know?

00:19:44 - B. Sovereign

I studied industrial design, so I spent my life in architecture.

00:19:47 - B. Sovereign

So there's also the idea that Oh, okay.

00:19:49 - B. Sovereign

That you're also, when you're creating something, you're creating not like objects or buildings.

00:19:56 - B. Sovereign

You are creating everything that that happens.

00:19:59 - B. Sovereign

You're creating, like, this life around it, like, this experience.

00:20:03 - B. Sovereign

And as you said

00:20:04 - Watson

Mhmm.

00:20:04 - B. Sovereign

And also the it's almost like nudges.

00:20:08 - B. Sovereign

It's just like just enable it.

00:20:09 - B. Sovereign

You know?

00:20:10 - B. Sovereign

Just but allow people to actually use their space and create themselves.

00:20:16 - B. Sovereign

And in fact, sometimes what would happen is that you will have this form of dialectic between the space and the occupiers.

00:20:23 - B. Sovereign

And that's when a particular it happens all the time with, products.

00:20:27 - B. Sovereign

I mean, it's digital.

00:20:28 - B. Sovereign

So it's like, hey.

00:20:29 - B. Sovereign

I thought that this there was a problem here, and this is what I built for the users.

00:20:33 - B. Sovereign

And then the user is like, wait a sec.

00:20:36 - B. Sovereign

The users are using this differently.

00:20:39 - B. Sovereign

So you'll get this iteration that is like, actually, the users reclaim agency.

00:20:44 - B. Sovereign

And he's like, thanks for the little object software, whatever.

00:20:47 - B. Sovereign

I'm using it for this.

00:20:48 - B. Sovereign

Appreciate you.

00:20:50 - B. Sovereign

Right?

00:20:50 - B. Sovereign

And that is comes to the next level when with, open source software.

00:20:55 - B. Sovereign

It is like, thank you and not, like actually, yeah.

00:20:59 - B. Sovereign

Thank you.

00:21:00 - B. Sovereign

And there's actually this other opportunity that we could, use this for.

00:21:05 - Watson

Yep.

00:21:05 - B. Sovereign

So, yeah, it was always, like, interesting and not the paternalistic, you know, the authoritarian top down design.

00:21:13 - B. Sovereign

This is what you should do.

00:21:14 - B. Sovereign

This is how you should use this.

00:21:16 - B. Sovereign

And actually enable that dialectic, that user creation that happens at this time.

00:21:23 - Watson

100%.

00:21:25 - Watson

Alright.

00:21:26 - Watson

So the public private balance.

00:21:29 - Watson

The private side, you have recovery, interaction, and concentration.

00:21:34 - Watson

And on the public side, you have the humans interacting.

00:21:39 - Watson

So exchange, play, encounter, services, and civic life.

00:21:46 - Watson

Then you have this concept of the shared edge.

00:21:49 - Watson

So this would be neighbor recognition without forced intimacy.

00:21:57 - Watson

It's really interesting to think about this in a concept of divine creating social, networks and so on and so forth.

00:22:07 - Watson

So it's the boundary inviting interaction while preventing overload.

00:22:15 - Watson

This is what a designer of these systems needs to reason about, and the balance is about spatial governance.

00:22:28 - Watson

So here, truth number two, again, this realm boundary is what we're talking about, realms.

00:22:38 - Watson

So, really, what is this difference between realm and domain?

00:22:44 - Watson

The domain within the context of the authors is a physical or spatial ownership.

00:22:54 - Watson

The realm is more of a social experience.

00:23:00 - Watson

So on the domain side, it's physically defined, bounded, and it's a controllable spatial area.

00:23:09 - Watson

And it's really, you know, establishes who has jurisdiction and access rights.

00:23:17 - Watson

So you can think of a locked private house, let's say.

00:23:22 - Watson

What's a realm?

00:23:24 - Watson

That's going to be about social interaction and psychological presence, and it's defined by behavior and culture and human perception.

00:23:35 - Watson

So if you think about something like a a sidewalk, the realm would be the experience of visibility on that sidewalk and encounters with strangers and public discourse on that sidewalk.

00:23:52 - Watson

So here on the realm boundary, you can imagine with those definitions, the public street, and when you're designing it, the shared approach that you need to have when you talk about all of these other, the physical side and the social interaction side.

00:24:14 - Watson

Then you have a semi public court that could be within an apartment complex.

00:24:21 - Watson

Nick, in your reasoning about that neighbor threshold between people.

00:24:27 - Watson

So, of course, you can think within the apartments themselves, but also when they are in that semipublic court.

00:24:36 - Watson

The queues, how people interact, people you can think of dog, dog parks that are out there, these types of things.

00:24:44 - Watson

And, of course, private dwelling, which we'll get into some more, later.

00:24:53 - Jose

Yeah.

00:24:53 - Jose

So every transition between these realms, it has to be well defined because if it's not and this this is a builder implement, implication here.

00:25:05 - Jose

If it's not well defined, that ambiguity will cause, will cause a lot of issues for people in their own realms if they think that it's defined as something else.

00:25:22 - Jose

Right?

00:25:22 - Jose

So it's just making sure that each of the realms when you're defining it throughout your software that it is well defined.

00:25:34 - Watson

Alright.

00:25:35 - Watson

So the density needs thresholds like was saying.

00:25:41 - Watson

Suburbia fails by being neither countryside or city.

00:25:47 - Watson

So So we were mentioning before.

00:25:50 - Watson

Scattered houses don't automatically generate community, and you may have seen this as a critique of the subdivision and sprawling suburbia outside of the city.

00:26:04 - Watson

Dense urban blocks, though, they also fail.

00:26:08 - Watson

When green space has no domain, like what we were talking about before, these strips of grass, and they don't really have the cues that go with them.

00:26:19 - Watson

The problem happens with organization of human interaction at every scale.

00:26:25 - Watson

So it can happen on what Christopher Alexander talks a lot about in the home, outside of the home, in his other books, but also at every scale, designing every all of these other when you're talk when you're preoccupied and talking and within the context of privacy, all of those, but also talking about all the way up to the level of city.

00:26:53 - Watson

You have this this same problem of privacy.

00:26:58 - Watson

Thresholds make high contact livable if they're designed properly.

00:27:11 - Jose

So, I mean, this, I mean, this really goes out goes to the without having any boundaries, the system can't manage contact pressures.

00:27:22 - Jose

So, what the authors here are saying is really about in regards to physical spaces without threshold, density becomes pressure, and pressure without release becomes a conflict in the sense of just not having well defined borders.

00:27:46 - B. Sovereign

And then to add also to what, you know, what what both the authors have you said, Lisa, is that and this happens in Austin as well in the new plans for, there's this project called Imagine Austin.

00:27:59 - B. Sovereign

And, so it's a, you know, a work group that right now is looking to understand what's the vision for the city.

00:28:07 - B. Sovereign

And a part of that is understanding the the where people right now not only are concentrated, but where are the spaces that are looking to grow in the future.

00:28:19 - B. Sovereign

So that's also something to not only what's the status right now, the systems, but where is it set to grow and where are how's that growth happening?

00:28:29 - B. Sovereign

Because sometimes it happens in corridors.

00:28:32 - B. Sovereign

Right?

00:28:32 - B. Sovereign

Sometimes it happens in a particular spot that starts growing.

00:28:36 - B. Sovereign

Right?

00:28:37 - B. Sovereign

And depending on that, there are different strategies to make it sustainable.

00:28:42 - B. Sovereign

Right?

00:28:42 - B. Sovereign

And how you understand the, the ideal domain and also how you understand, Let's say, there's a paradigm in architecture and in urban planning, which is, oh, let let's focus on the particular elements as in, okay, how many parks, how many, houses need to be here.

00:29:02 - B. Sovereign

And people kinda layer that up.

00:29:04 - B. Sovereign

You know?

00:29:04 - B. Sovereign

They have the little, mini blocks, and that's how you build up.

00:29:08 - B. Sovereign

There's a new paradigm more recent in which you're you're talking about spaces, like, places, actually.

00:29:14 - B. Sovereign

And it's a layer of it's more sophisticated.

00:29:18 - B. Sovereign

And it's not only just like a matter of how much concrete and sidewalk.

00:29:21 - B. Sovereign

It's okay.

00:29:22 - B. Sovereign

We're not only how many people, but it's almost like, let's have, like, a a building block that it's a consolidation integration of spaces that open spaces like

00:29:32 - Watson

a park,

00:29:33 - B. Sovereign

how many businesses and which are necessary for a particular density of, let's say, 5,000 people, and then you build on that.

00:29:41 - B. Sovereign

So you're predetermining the paradigm of where is this gonna grow, how is it kinda set to grow, and is it gonna be in a particular, basic block that will you reproduce, and what is that?

00:29:57 - B. Sovereign

Right?

00:29:58 - B. Sovereign

How do we make this modular?

00:30:00 - B. Sovereign

And a lot of that is I mean, this also applies to the software development.

00:30:03 - B. Sovereign

Right?

00:30:04 - B. Sovereign

It's like, how are you set to grow, and how are you gonna make this modular so it's it's easy to do so.

00:30:12 - Watson

Alright.

00:30:14 - Watson

So let's dig into the thresholds.

00:30:19 - Watson

And I think one of the things that, we were talking about before is a key insight is this edge, this dwelling edge.

00:30:33 - Watson

So, what really what is a a dwelling edge?

00:30:40 - Watson

So these joints or thresholds, and he also calls them locks.

00:30:44 - Watson

They're the physical multilayered boundary zone where a private home meets the outside world.

00:30:55 - Watson

So you can think of a well designed dwelling edge like a like an airlock or a canal lock.

00:31:06 - Watson

It's a deliberate buffer.

00:31:08 - Watson

They use this term buffer and lock a bunch in the book.

00:31:12 - Watson

It's a deliberate buffer that filters out environmental and social noise among other things before someone steps inside.

00:31:23 - Watson

So we'll talk some more about the dwelling edge.

00:31:27 - Watson

It needs to have spatial depth.

00:31:31 - Watson

So urban dwelling edge is often just the front door.

00:31:37 - Watson

It opens directly onto a sidewalk or a lawn, and they don't like this.

00:31:42 - Watson

The authors don't.

00:31:44 - Watson

A true dwelling edge requires depth.

00:31:48 - Watson

It needs to incorporate elements like courtyard walls and recessed entries and other things that are will create more depth.

00:32:00 - Watson

To manage the transition between the public domain and the private intimacy, the edge relies on specialized architectural mechanics.

00:32:13 - Watson

So what are we saying there?

00:32:15 - Watson

Offsetting entrance paths, so these doors, or using sound dampening walls so street noise doesn't penetrate the interior.

00:32:24 - Watson

Again, making it to where you're reasoning and dealing with this and creating depth in this edge between the public and the private.

00:32:35 - Watson

So things like a court law a courtyard enclosure or sight line angles.

00:32:41 - Watson

So this is what's gonna prevent people from looking directly into private living spaces, for instance.

00:32:48 - Watson

And then for your service workers, say postal workers, you wanna have some type of drop off point in order, again, to create depth where the deliveries or even guests, will go first.

00:33:05 - Watson

And so that everyday interactions don't force open the private.

00:33:19 - Jose

Yeah.

00:33:20 - Jose

So the rule here is don't skip levels when, contact pressure rises.

00:33:26 - Jose

And for builders, every context transition needs a threshold, and skipping a level creates a pressure differential the system can't absorb.

00:33:38 - Jose

So a direct jump from a private room to a civic street is not efficient.

00:33:44 - Jose

It's collapsed context where the user has no time to adjust their social posture.

00:33:55 - B. Sovereign

So

00:33:55 - Watson

now the mobility pressure.

00:33:59 - Watson

So they talk a lot about this in the book where they really are hostile to traffic, so cars.

00:34:11 - Watson

But why is that the case?

00:34:13 - Watson

And they have these two concepts, mobility pressure and service movement.

00:34:19 - Watson

And they say that these are really the two major forces that destroy the things that are, contribute to the human flourishing that I was talking about earlier.

00:34:32 - Watson

So the quiet and safety and psychological sanctuary of the modern residential life.

00:34:39 - Watson

So what's mobility pressure?

00:34:42 - Watson

It's a constant growing demand created by automotive traffic, and it's it inserts itself on living spaces.

00:34:51 - Watson

And then extreme example would be building a highway right by your house that you have brought up before.

00:34:58 - Watson

What why is this the case?

00:35:00 - Watson

Well, it prior prioritize speed, convenience, and direct vehicular access above all else, and he says that that destroys the pedestrian sphere.

00:35:12 - Watson

And then you have service movement.

00:35:13 - Watson

So this would, refer to essential logistics, delivery, utilities, so on and so forth.

00:35:22 - Watson

Service movement requires outside workers and vehicles to interact daily with the dwelling, the dwelling edge again.

00:35:30 - Watson

So in a poorly designed house, housing, delivery worker is gonna walk right up to the front window, ring a bell, and that echoes through the entire house.

00:35:40 - Watson

And this is part of what I was saying before where it's, not facilitated well, and so he wants to engineer the, the edge better.

00:35:51 - Watson

So he says things like cars should be parked and contained at the perimeter of the residential area, and that deliveries and mails, mail and utilities should be handled at a physical service lock or drop off buffer.

00:36:06 - Watson

Again, this concept of buffer locks.

00:36:11 - B. Sovereign

So this is independent on whether we're talking about, a model in which mass transit is fundamental to the to the urban planning, or is he kinda pointing out or hitting at really the model that we're more used to in The States, which is, like, a huge sprawl.

00:36:31 - B. Sovereign

There's always, like, a suburban or reservation area, and things are, like, so separated, and it promotes individual movement versus, you know, more walkable, like, higher density, and more mass transit where, I guess, mobility is not as intrusive.

00:36:53 - B. Sovereign

Is there any mention or no?

00:36:55 - Watson

Yeah.

00:36:55 - Watson

He he does talk about mass transit or people caring more about mass transit in the book in, the urban area, so people prioritizing that.

00:37:10 - Watson

And then, of course, if you, you know, if you've been to New York and you have the train go by your apartment, he's pro he's gonna be hostile or something like that.

00:37:18 - Watson

So you gotta see that that that's fine.

00:37:20 - Watson

Well, so, you know, this idea of as an intrusion, so all traffic, including mass transit, would be an intrusion if it's not designed well where you have these dwelling edges and then, okay, again, through all of those six realms.

00:37:41 - Watson

So but your the the more density you have, there are some benefits that you have with density where facilitating, of the engagement with neighbors, engagement with strangers.

00:37:55 - Watson

It's a lot of stuff that's been written about that and why where the benefits are there.

00:38:01 - Watson

So you you can say, oh, you prefer or want density.

00:38:07 - Watson

There still needs to be a designing of the, the privacy or you could say, using their language, more of these intrusions.

00:38:20 - Watson

And then, again, this designing, they are also pretty hostile to go back to the bottom up versus top down.

00:38:29 - Watson

Providing a language for people, of course, we know, oh, they're city planners and all the stuff, and this ends up being top down, and you brought up the reclaiming.

00:38:39 - Watson

Their their idea, is that the people should be from the beginning designing.

00:38:49 - Watson

It sounds foreign, but he actually was a part of a designing of parts of some cities in Oregon.

00:39:00 - Watson

He calls it the Oregon.

00:39:01 - Watson

He has a Oregon, project that was in one of the books, where the people there are actually, from the beginning, designing.

00:39:12 - Watson

And, again, there's different levels of all these from the bottom.

00:39:15 - Watson

There's the homes.

00:39:16 - Watson

There's subdivisions, you could say, or whatever, all the way up to the city levels.

00:39:20 - Watson

You also have communities, where people of like mind will grow will decide to we're gonna make this community look more like a place from Asia or something like that.

00:39:36 - Watson

And he's he really promotes that kind of thing, instead of having it to where everything is, homogenous, let's say.

00:39:50 - Watson

And so that would be a hallmark of something that was designed bottom up.

00:39:57 - Watson

You would have heterogeneous development, from if you had bottom up.

00:40:03 - Watson

But then again, by saying, going into what bringing it back to what you were talking about.

00:40:10 - Watson

Yeah.

00:40:11 - Watson

He every single when he talks about scale, every single, domain, and he he also talks about it as a hierarchy of realms and domain.

00:40:24 - Watson

Every single one, you have this problem at every single one.

00:40:28 - Watson

So the most dense, you're gonna have intrusions from the train.

00:40:35 - Watson

One that's less, dense, you could have intrusions from other other things.

00:40:45 - B. Sovereign

Yeah.

00:40:45 - B. Sovereign

It's it's awesome because, you know, I see this a lot.

00:40:49 - B. Sovereign

I see, for example, people in my neighborhood association, protesting the Texas Department of Transportation.

00:40:57 - B. Sovereign

So we're doing announcing this, we're extending the I-thirty 5, like a big highway that goes through the city.

00:41:04 - B. Sovereign

And then so there's gonna be like additional lanes there.

00:41:07 - B. Sovereign

And that the unintended consequence of that people don't sometimes don't see is that there the ax the accesses are also gonna change a little bit.

00:41:14 - B. Sovereign

So there's a group in my in my, neighborhood stations that are really like, hey.

00:41:19 - B. Sovereign

Actually, you're gonna now all these people are gonna have to come through this road, which is really close to where we live, which has been, like, super low key, but now it's gonna have, like, a more dense traffic.

00:41:30 - B. Sovereign

And that's a problem that permeates.

00:41:32 - B. Sovereign

Right?

00:41:33 - B. Sovereign

And, obviously, that was a design decision that, obviously, these people were not in the room.

00:41:38 - B. Sovereign

Right?

00:41:39 - B. Sovereign

So it's also interesting how, people can also contest and how in the realm or in the space of software engineering, that's why you will also say and that's as a designer, you know, industrial design is always like, you need the users with you, like, super early in the design process.

00:41:57 - B. Sovereign

So they also get to chip in, not only as in again, it's okay.

00:42:01 - B. Sovereign

You guys told me yours.

00:42:02 - B. Sovereign

I don't know.

00:42:03 - B. Sovereign

Actually, there's a cocreation happening.

00:42:06 - B. Sovereign

And because ultimately, also, instead of having, like, back in the day I mean, still today, we have waterfall, and in the end, we have, like, UAT user accepted testing.

00:42:15 - B. Sovereign

Right?

00:42:15 - Watson

That's

00:42:16 - B. Sovereign

it.

00:42:16 - B. Sovereign

And all the problems, there always was with all these super large scale implementations of SAP MLDs.

00:42:22 - B. Sovereign

It's okay.

00:42:23 - B. Sovereign

Well, now after two years, we got to, UAT, and people are like, the business users are, this is not right, and how also agile in a way.

00:42:33 - B. Sovereign

You can always implement agile.

00:42:35 - B. Sovereign

But the huge benefit is, like, people are involved really early and you have the cycles.

00:42:40 - B. Sovereign

Right?

00:42:41 - B. Sovereign

And, otherwise, you have then this not acceptance of the final product.

00:42:48 - Watson

Yep.

00:42:48 - Watson

100%.

00:42:52 - Watson

Let's go in here.

00:42:54 - Watson

Like, we we've already dug into the dwelling, but so, you know, what a dwelling cluster needs.

00:43:02 - Watson

Dwellings near the ground for families with children.

00:43:08 - Watson

Protect, protected approaches that don't dump traffic into private life, like we were just saying.

00:43:14 - Watson

Shared spaces small enough to feel owned and maintained by these micro communities.

00:43:21 - Watson

Service routes separated from the intimate pedestrian life and edges, these dwelling edges that let neighbors recognize each other without overexposure.

00:43:37 - Watson

And families, neighbors, and shared territory.

00:43:40 - Watson

The individual needs protection from outside pressure.

00:43:46 - Watson

The family also needs protection from adjacent households.

00:43:51 - Watson

A larger group needs a defensible domain of its own, so talking about more, like, say, subdivision area of these types of things.

00:44:00 - Watson

And then, privacy scales outward as a nested responsibility.

00:44:07 - Watson

Community begins when a shared territory becomes identifiable.

00:44:13 - Watson

So, again, gradients, it can't be too private, can't be too, public.

00:44:20 - Watson

There's always threshold and designing of the thresholds and facilitation there.

00:44:25 - Watson

Now truth number four, architecture allocates the exposure before the consent.

00:44:33 - Watson

Oh, well, what is this about?

00:44:35 - Watson

And this could be controversial, people think.

00:44:38 - Watson

There's so many definitions of architecture, within software.

00:44:45 - Watson

People borrow a lot from one of the authors of this book, Christopher Alexander.

00:44:50 - Watson

Another one, Martin Fowler, his definition of architecture are decisions that you make now that are hard to change later.

00:45:00 - Watson

If it's not hard to change later, then it's not architecture.

00:45:04 - Watson

That's that's his, definition.

00:45:06 - Watson

He's very influential in software.

00:45:09 - Watson

So this whole idea of allocating exposure before consent, Now this seems like the total top down thing.

00:45:17 - Watson

But you can push back on that, and you could say, the people have to make even if it's not top down and it's more bottom up, you're still making decisions that are hard to change later even if you're doing it from the bottom up.

00:45:33 - Watson

So a plan decides who meets, hears, sees, waits, and who passes whom.

00:45:40 - Watson

Those decisions happen before the residents negotiate rules.

00:45:46 - Watson

So if you're doing a subdivision planning, these types of things.

00:45:52 - Watson

Bad defaults go ahead.

00:45:55 - Jose

Oh, no.

00:45:55 - Jose

Sorry.

00:45:55 - Jose

You can go.

00:45:56 - Watson

Yeah.

00:45:57 - Watson

Bad defaults convert, the, neighbor into interruptions.

00:46:05 - Watson

Good defaults give people staged invitations and refusal points, and design is governance before policy.

00:46:13 - Watson

I'll just add it again.

00:46:14 - Watson

This is you're a problem of top down and of bottom up.

00:46:20 - Watson

You can be a group and make a bad, decision on your defaults that's hard to change later.

00:46:29 - Jose

And and this I I think that this, translation in the book is very, very similar to what we went over in guilt socialism, on episode 23.

00:46:44 - Jose

Authority must be scoped invisible before conflict.

00:46:48 - Jose

The authors are saying the exact same thing about exposure.

00:46:52 - Jose

The design allocates exposure before the user ever gets to choose.

00:46:58 - Jose

So, the question that we should have here is is not did the user consent, but did the design leave them a refusal point?

00:47:09 - Jose

Right?

00:47:10 - Jose

Was there a point for them to actually voice what they think?

00:47:18 - Watson

Yeah.

00:47:18 - Watson

This is such a tricky one because, this is like a bootstrapping problem.

00:47:29 - Watson

This is chicken and egg problem.

00:47:31 - Watson

So how is it that you can design a thing?

00:47:36 - Watson

Of course, like what Jose is saying, you bring in the users from the beginning.

00:47:40 - Watson

The users and a certain percentage of all design really is user developed design, because of power users, all these other examples of where the the actual design, which never gets attributed to the users in the end.

00:48:05 - Watson

It's always ends up being some other fancy person on top.

00:48:09 - Jose

That's a good point.

00:48:10 - Jose

Oddshot.

00:48:12 - Watson

Yeah.

00:48:12 - Watson

Right.

00:48:13 - Watson

Yeah.

00:48:14 - Watson

So this is a well studied thing as well.

00:48:18 - Watson

But so that attribution is also a problem.

00:48:22 - Watson

But this if it there's a the chicken and egg problem happens because, again, like what Jose was saying before, within software, we we we scrambled.

00:48:37 - Watson

We put it together.

00:48:38 - Watson

We threw it over the wall into the user acceptance testing, the UAT.

00:48:43 - Watson

And the users, you know, are frowning.

00:48:45 - Watson

Like, I don't know why I'm looking at this.

00:48:49 - Watson

I hate this.

00:48:53 - Watson

But you try to bring them closer into the design, the meetings, all this, so on and so forth.

00:49:00 - Watson

And the the author, at least the Alexander, his thing is that's one phase, but the other phase is trying to get the users to have a language to talk about their problems.

00:49:17 - Watson

And then you're kind of having the top the people who wanna be top down and wanna be experts, they're translated into, within this context, it's privacy and community.

00:49:29 - Watson

So talking about, here's some things that you may care about, and here's some naming of the problem, and then let the users go bottom up.

00:49:39 - Watson

For instance, Alexander uses the example of barns.

00:49:48 - Watson

He says that farmers that for millennia, essentially, created barns, and there was no architect.

00:49:57 - Watson

And there's this discommunication of what is a good barn.

00:50:02 - Watson

What is it supposed to do?

00:50:04 - Watson

And the architecture is about facilitating, and they end up having a language between one another talking about how you build a barn, a a barn to handle the problems that what barn does.

00:50:18 - Watson

And that ends up being bottom up.

00:50:21 - Watson

It doesn't it's not a top down commission, and it works.

00:50:26 - Watson

So that tap back concept applied to other things.

00:50:31 - Watson

It's counterintuitive.

00:50:32 - Watson

Somebody will say, you can't well, you need to have a strong top down, understanding of building a if you're going to build a house, you're not an electrician, you're not this, and you have these regulations and all that.

00:50:48 - Watson

But he pushes back and says, no.

00:50:51 - Watson

Actually, someone can have these higher level abstractions, we'll talk about later, when they're reasoning about decisions that are that you're making, we say, in architecture, decisions that you make now are hard to change later.

00:51:04 - Watson

And what the architect, if you want to call someone as art, they make it to where they roll up these decisions into, these this jargon domain language, and then the you they try to make it to where people can reason, and they themselves are designing what they're gonna dwell in in a safe way.

00:51:31 - B. Sovereign

But yeah.

00:51:31 - B. Sovereign

Because ultimately especially, you know, the scale of this.

00:51:35 - B. Sovereign

Not like the pyramid.

00:51:36 - B. Sovereign

Right?

00:51:36 - B. Sovereign

But I mean, even the pyramid.

00:51:38 - B. Sovereign

Right?

00:51:38 - B. Sovereign

It's like, it was that firewall.

00:51:39 - B. Sovereign

Right?

00:51:39 - B. Sovereign

So it was commissioned.

00:51:41 - B. Sovereign

It's like, come here, architects.

00:51:43 - B. Sovereign

I'm gonna tell you.

00:51:45 - B. Sovereign

Right?

00:51:45 - B. Sovereign

Or or actually, if okay.

00:51:46 - B. Sovereign

These are my needs.

00:51:47 - B. Sovereign

You tell me.

00:51:48 - B. Sovereign

You're the expert.

00:51:49 - B. Sovereign

Okay.

00:51:49 - B. Sovereign

Well, how can you play with this?

00:51:51 - B. Sovereign

How can I make this happen?

00:51:52 - B. Sovereign

Right?

00:51:53 - B. Sovereign

But, also at at different levels, right, in in a community that needs a horn or a bigger plaza or whatever.

00:52:00 - B. Sovereign

In my mind, it's like, when you're saying Watson bottom up, I'm thinking, okay.

00:52:05 - B. Sovereign

Well, you're talking about what's the level of, I guess, power and influence that the the people have.

00:52:15 - B. Sovereign

So that can be either I'm thinking what what when I'm all these slides, what what's missing here, it seems like people are involved a little late in the game as opposed to being, again, as, you know, in in Antiques.

00:52:28 - B. Sovereign

Actually, they were the folks that that commissioned this.

00:52:31 - B. Sovereign

So that was the first sit down.

00:52:32 - B. Sovereign

It's like, what do you guys want?

00:52:34 - B. Sovereign

As opposed to, hey.

00:52:35 - B. Sovereign

We've commissioned this from the city.

00:52:38 - B. Sovereign

We've we've told this architect what to do.

00:52:40 - B. Sovereign

He's gonna come in, and he's gonna get a few you know, make sure that you guys are okay with it, which is, like, would you consider that bottom up?

00:52:50 - Watson

I think his way is what I would think, which is whatever.

00:52:58 - Watson

I'm not a I'm software On software side, I'm not a traditional architect.

00:53:03 - B. Sovereign

I think it applies to software as well.

00:53:04 - Watson

Yeah.

00:53:05 - Watson

It applies to software, but it's easier to solve software to me because I'm more familiar with it.

00:53:10 - Watson

If you were to talk about city planning, I think what Alexander is preoccupied with is getting we all live in homes.

00:53:20 - Watson

We all live in some type of community with all that.

00:53:23 - Watson

And his thing is raising the general awareness of the problems of community.

00:53:30 - Watson

Instead of saying, at the highest level, we know something's wrong with there's too much traffic here or something's not walkable.

00:53:37 - Watson

You said that earlier.

00:53:38 - Watson

His thing is to say there's that's one word is walkability.

00:53:43 - Watson

Here's, like, 30 or 20.

00:53:46 - Watson

The more you're naming, the more you're having this language.

00:53:51 - Watson

And now you're just because people know the the accountability is going to be there for someone that plans a subdivision.

00:54:01 - Watson

It's too late.

00:54:03 - Watson

After they're planning subdivision and there's no accountability that the general awareness of,

00:54:11 - Jose

how

00:54:11 - Watson

about some sidewalks here?

00:54:13 - Watson

How about and that's very simple, but, you know, all of this other thing all these other things we're talking about, dwelling edges, there's some type of accountability.

00:54:23 - Watson

So even if someone were to do a a, an interview of a subset of people that might live in the community before it's built, so this is the developer, let's say.

00:54:40 - Watson

And even by that time, you could say it's too late because the people don't have a shared language in order to critique, and then the developer can't come in and, you know, make a subdivision, and there's no walkability.

00:54:59 - Watson

No one cares.

00:55:00 - Watson

Another way to look at it would be if you took someone from, say, Italy or any of these Europeans, like Belgium or something, and said and had them move here for Spain.

00:55:20 - Watson

They have them move here and then be exposed to a subdivision here when coming from a better architecture.

00:55:29 - Watson

They they wouldn't put up with it just from the beginning.

00:55:34 - Watson

It would be really hard as a developer to say, yeah.

00:55:38 - Watson

I know we can do a user group study, to we could bring some people in.

00:55:46 - Watson

We already know we're not gonna get away with a bunch of other things.

00:55:52 - Watson

You know?

00:55:52 - Watson

Whether that's a subdivision, whether that's buildings in general, it's like, we're gonna have a bunch of ugly fire escape fire escapes on our buildings, and then the people in Europe are like, oh, we don't care.

00:56:04 - Watson

No.

00:56:04 - Watson

We're not living in that, you know, kind of thing.

00:56:07 - Watson

But in New York, you know, fire escapes that make the buildings look ugly.

00:56:10 - Watson

I mean, it's one example.

00:56:13 - Watson

Yeah.

00:56:13 - Watson

Yeah.

00:56:14 - B. Sovereign

Yeah.

00:56:14 - B. Sovereign

And I know we're almost out of time, but I just wanna Yeah.

00:56:17 - B. Sovereign

Real quick because I would just say something kicked in my head, which is, not only I mean, you can involve the users in anything, And I think that the more also they know, the more you might inform and train perhaps, the basic knowledge for them to be able to propose in more informed ways, like using certain language.

00:56:37 - B. Sovereign

I think that's I think that's great.

00:56:40 - B. Sovereign

And I think it's software development as well.

00:56:41 - B. Sovereign

Even though, I mean, you you I mean, depending on what you're doing, but the business user users, they usually are using a system.

00:56:48 - B. Sovereign

But then I'm thinking about the more, you know, strategic aspect.

00:56:55 - B. Sovereign

And I see that, for example, in Austin, in this plan that I was telling you guys about, right, and how the city has put in money to hire some consultancy and have the people in the city bring people, right, across the city.

00:57:09 - B. Sovereign

People are involved, you know, in in the running of the city, right, informal in neighborhoods.

00:57:14 - B. Sovereign

Mhmm.

00:57:14 - B. Sovereign

And then, we're getting trained also in the language.

00:57:17 - B. Sovereign

Okay.

00:57:17 - B. Sovereign

This places this is the ways that other cities are doing models.

00:57:22 - B. Sovereign

And then people with that informed idea, then we can respond so much better to what is it that we want.

00:57:29 - B. Sovereign

So I I like that idea.

00:57:31 - B. Sovereign

Yeah.

00:57:31 - B. Sovereign

Me

00:57:31 - Watson

there.

00:57:32 - Watson

Yep.

00:57:36 - Watson

Alright.

00:57:39 - Watson

You can go into the exposure the exposure ladder here.

00:57:48 - Watson

They, from top to bottom, you have the invisible.

00:57:52 - Watson

So this would be a and then all of these also relate to those those six realms that we talked about earlier.

00:58:03 - Watson

So what do we talk about when we say exposure?

00:58:05 - Watson

Invisible, complete air gapped isolation where a user's presence and data are or, you know, somebody who's dwelling inside of this area.

00:58:17 - Watson

Their presence or data is entirely hidden from the external view.

00:58:23 - Watson

So this would be, like, individual private.

00:58:26 - Watson

This reachable by invitation.

00:58:28 - Watson

So access is strictly restricted to trusted peers who've been explicitly granted permission.

00:58:36 - Watson

This would be family private, family or domicile, visible to neighbors.

00:58:42 - Watson

Visibility is scoped, like what the sovereign was talking about before with the scoping, only to a known bounded local network or immediate community.

00:58:55 - Watson

So that's the group private, then visible to the local public, Accessible to a regulated contextual civic group or local organization.

00:59:07 - Watson

This would be the group private or the urban semi public.

00:59:13 - Watson

And then searchable by everyone.

00:59:15 - Watson

Unrestricted, and this is what normally people think of public, unrestricted globally indexed discovery, open to the entire public network or world.

00:59:30 - Watson

So yeah.

00:59:31 - Watson

Mhmm.

00:59:32 - Watson

Good.

00:59:32 - Jose

Mhmm.

00:59:34 - Jose

So, yeah, the the product question is where the user can stop the ladder.

00:59:40 - Jose

So this specifically for builders is every platform has an exposure ladder, and the default rung is a design decision.

00:59:51 - Jose

If the default is searchable by everyone, the user does not have privacy.

00:59:56 - Jose

They have a race condition between their settings and the platform's defaults.

01:00:01 - Jose

So the lock has to come before the exposure and not after.

01:00:09 - Watson

Alright.

01:00:10 - Watson

So now we this is a portion where we're critiquing the book.

01:00:14 - Watson

We went over a lot of some of these critiques already.

01:00:20 - Watson

So within this portion, this is software craftsmanship, and we're critiquing the architectural language of privacy and community.

01:00:32 - Watson

There's three different books that I'm borrowing from for this, the structured interpretation of computer programming, which has a critique of language itself.

01:00:44 - Watson

Then, there's domain driven design by Erica Evans, which just talks about, ubiquitous language.

01:00:52 - Watson

And then, also, borrowing from A Timeless Way of Building, which is Christopher Alexander's book itself.

01:01:00 - Watson

All of these ways, for critiquing, the domain jargon or language for trying to build and facilitate.

01:01:08 - Watson

So, the the structured interpretation of computer programming, there's three components there.

01:01:14 - Watson

There's primitives, composition, and fundamental methods of abstraction.

01:01:18 - Watson

Primitives, we went through these domain, boundary, threshold, lock buffer, and data scale.

01:01:24 - Watson

These things are these fundamental building blocks, and you compose them.

01:01:28 - Watson

So you have fundamental methods of compose composition.

01:01:32 - Watson

How you compose.

01:01:33 - Watson

There's rules, grammar for composing within a language.

01:01:36 - Watson

Again, the idea is if you're doing bottom up building, you're and you're creating a language for others to use, name, problems.

01:01:46 - Watson

You're trying to create a language, and you solve the problem in the language, a domain specific language.

01:01:51 - Watson

So composition would be if, for instance, combining room dwelling, cluster, like, so subdivision, street, and city, all of these combined together, and you have a solution or way of reasoning about a problem or solution.

01:02:06 - Watson

Then you have fundamental methods of abstraction.

01:02:08 - Watson

What's that?

01:02:09 - Watson

You can look at these as the building block.

01:02:12 - Watson

So these are also like meta compositions.

01:02:17 - Watson

So a six domain hierarchy, what this whole thing about all of those realms we just went into, bringing that forth to reason about the problem.

01:02:27 - Watson

Again, now you're getting to you have a language and you solve the problem in that language.

01:02:33 - Watson

The joint system, the exposure budget, we're talking about, these methods of exposure.

01:02:39 - Watson

And then for, creating a ubiquitous language, going back to this is Eric Evans.

01:02:46 - Watson

This, again, interesting.

01:02:48 - Watson

This is an Eric Evans interpretation of Christopher Alexander's book, A Timeless Way of Building in a Pattern Language.

01:02:56 - Watson

So he took that.

01:02:58 - Watson

A bunch of people did, but his is more of the one of the more influential ones.

01:03:02 - Watson

We're talking about patterns in software.

01:03:05 - Watson

And one of the big takeaways is the ubiquitous language.

01:03:07 - Watson

You're trying to create you have the so called technical people, and you have the so called and you have the business experts and the the power users or so so on and so forth, or regular users even.

01:03:19 - Watson

You want a language that you're both speaking.

01:03:22 - Watson

That language would be represented right in the code.

01:03:25 - Watson

So if in counting, you'd be talk you'd have the word account in the code.

01:03:28 - Watson

You'd have ledger in the code.

01:03:30 - Watson

You'd have these types of things.

01:03:31 - Watson

This one, you're reasoning about a problem.

01:03:33 - Watson

What is the problem?

01:03:34 - Watson

Community and privacy.

01:03:36 - Watson

Those things would be right in the code or the implementation, so so on and so forth.

01:03:42 - Watson

So now you can talk you don't talk past each other.

01:03:44 - Watson

That's what the ubiquitous language is about, is the one of the main takeaways is you're not talking past each other anymore.

01:03:53 - Watson

So in this, example, when someone talking about an open community, you want to drill down into say what is exposed, who who's exposed to what.

01:04:06 - Watson

So now you have a way to avoid talking past each other.

01:04:14 - Jose

Alright.

01:04:15 - Jose

This is, the choke point to exit analysis.

01:04:18 - Jose

This slide pulls together the choke points that we've been circling all episode and shows how the authors route around each one.

01:04:27 - Jose

For our first choke point, it was one street or platform mediates every contact.

01:04:34 - Jose

The exit pattern the authors chose was graduated domains with multiple contact skills.

01:04:40 - Jose

So when one channel mediates every contact, it's not a street, it's a checkpoint.

01:04:45 - Jose

Think of it like a building with one hallway.

01:04:48 - Jose

Every neighbor, every delivery, every visitor, every piece of mail, all through the same corridor.

01:04:54 - Jose

The corridor doesn't just connect people, it decides who encounters whom, and you have no alternative route.

01:05:01 - Jose

That's what a platform does when it's the single contact surface.

01:05:05 - Jose

It doesn't just mediate.

01:05:07 - Jose

It arbitrates.

01:05:08 - Jose

So the exit is not removing the corridor.

01:05:11 - Jose

It's building multiple paths so that, so contact can happen at different scales.

01:05:19 - Jose

A front porch for neighbors, a side door for services, a back gate for quiet exits.

01:05:24 - Jose

The author's graduated domains are the same architecture, not one channel, but a hierarchy of contact surfaces each with its own scale and purpose.

01:05:37 - Jose

For our second check second choke point is shared space with unclear ownership and maintenance.

01:05:43 - Jose

The exit pattern was named shared territory with legible responsibility.

01:05:50 - Jose

So I think that we've we've kind of harped on this through all the episodes.

01:05:54 - Jose

So if no one owns the commons, no one maintains it, you have to name the domain.

01:06:04 - Jose

So for choke point three, notifications, search, and logs that collapse audience.

01:06:12 - Jose

Yeah.

01:06:13 - Jose

The search and logs collapse audiences.

01:06:14 - Jose

So exit pattern was audience aware design, and the system knows which domain it's speaking to.

01:06:22 - Jose

So when a notification, a search result, and a log entry all treat the public as one audience, the boundary between private, shared, and public disappears.

01:06:34 - Jose

Think of it like a single mailbox that receives your bank statements, your neighbors' invitations, and your city's public notices all in one pile.

01:06:44 - Jose

You can't tell what's private, what's public.

01:06:49 - Jose

It's all just mail.

01:06:51 - Jose

So that's what happens when a notification system doesn't know which domain it's speaking to.

01:06:56 - Jose

A push notification about a private message and a push notification about a public event look exactly the same.

01:07:02 - Jose

The audience is collapsed.

01:07:04 - Jose

So the exit is audience aware design.

01:07:08 - Jose

The system must know which domain it's in before it exposes anything.

01:07:14 - Jose

Private messages arrive in the private channel, public events arrive in the public channel, and the mailbox sorts by domain, not by timestamp.

01:07:24 - Jose

So for our choke point four, architecture allocates exposure before consent.

01:07:31 - Jose

The exit the authors chose was graduated domains with local refusal and quiet paths.

01:07:39 - Jose

So, the plan decides who meets, hears, sees, and passes whom.

01:07:45 - Jose

Before residents ever negotiate the rules, think of it like a house where the architect put a window in your bathroom facing the street.

01:07:53 - Jose

You didn't consent to being visible.

01:07:56 - Jose

Right?

01:07:57 - Jose

The architect decided it for you.

01:07:59 - Jose

You can hang curtains, but that's a workaround and it's not necessarily a design.

01:08:04 - Jose

The lot came after the exposure.

01:08:07 - Jose

You're retrofitting privacy into a plan that never had it in the first place.

01:08:12 - Jose

The author's exit is putting the lock before the exposure.

01:08:16 - Jose

The the graduated domain, the local refusal, and the quiet path.

01:08:21 - Jose

The users don't have to discover the exposure and then fight to undo it.

01:08:26 - Jose

The default is the lock and the users decides when to open it.

01:08:31 - Jose

And this, again, it referenced, in episode 23 on guilt socialism that the authority must be visible before the conflict.

01:08:41 - Jose

So here, the authority is the exposure boundary and the lock must come before the latter, not at the top of it.

01:08:50 - Jose

And our final choke point was collapse thresholds between domains.

01:08:56 - Jose

The exit pattern was explicit lock action before exposure changes.

01:09:01 - Jose

So when thresholds collapse, every connection becomes a potential intrusion.

01:09:05 - Jose

Think of it like a house where the front door opens directly into the bedroom.

01:09:09 - Jose

There's no hallway.

01:09:11 - Jose

We we looked into this already.

01:09:13 - Jose

There's no transition.

01:09:14 - Jose

There's no, moment to adjust your social posture.

01:09:17 - Jose

Right?

01:09:18 - Jose

So you the builder imperative here is to expose audience and reversibility before the, invite, publish, mirror, for, or export paths.

01:09:29 - Jose

And onto the, builder usability.

01:09:33 - Watson

Alright.

01:09:33 - Watson

Builder usability.

01:09:35 - Watson

This whole idea of taking the domain, the domain language is a major argument of the book and saying, how would you supercharge adoption if you were trying to get it to where you you gain adoption as best or as most fast as possible way, what would you do?

01:10:04 - Watson

And so when you're thinking about from the software component or perspective, if you were taking if you're building a system that was using the the main jargon and is facilitating and implementing the domain of the book, how would you do that?

01:10:22 - Watson

Trying to make it as it's not necessarily user friendly, but easiest for a user to jump in.

01:10:29 - Watson

So with this domain jargon, so you have safe exposure.

01:10:33 - Watson

You wanna make safe exposure path the happy path.

01:10:38 - Watson

It is the default.

01:10:40 - Watson

Then there's also this concept of con, convention over configuration.

01:10:43 - Watson

You're making a system when someone is using the system.

01:10:49 - Watson

Let's say you're making a framework.

01:10:51 - Watson

The defaults of the framework should be same defaults.

01:10:55 - Watson

The convention, the usage of them should be sane.

01:10:58 - Watson

You shouldn't have to configure it in order to get to where you wanna be.

01:11:05 - Watson

They should have same default.

01:11:06 - Watson

So default within this domain jargon, again, privacy and community, default to local scoped visibility.

01:11:15 - Watson

This concept of amakase, what is that?

01:11:17 - Watson

It's a Japanese word for when you let the chef decide.

01:11:20 - Watson

You go into a restaurant, and there's a menu, and you don't do this a la carte.

01:11:29 - Watson

You actually let you actually let the chef decide just about everything, maybe even, how to even cook the steak.

01:11:40 - Watson

So to grab the steak.

01:11:42 - Watson

So one opinionated you you would want with if you were using this concept, you'd have one opinionated flow for how you invite.

01:11:50 - Watson

Again, inviting remember inviting neighbors or inviting people into a space.

01:11:54 - Watson

You have boundaries, and you have how people consent and review.

01:11:59 - Watson

So again, applying this community and privacy to a framework or a system where you would be implementing something like this social media platform.

01:12:10 - Watson

You have to deal with different levels of groups and all this, how you interact and all of these things, so it would apply.

01:12:18 - Watson

Then you have the, lean view.

01:12:21 - Watson

So what would be the minimum viable product if you were creating as a builder, you're creating a product, you're implementing some of these concepts.

01:12:29 - Watson

It's like what would be a quick win, and you would want it to wear, or you would test whether the users can predict who sees what.

01:12:39 - Watson

Again, this exposure idea.

01:12:42 - Watson

And then the concept of worse is better, this is a concept within the eunuchs, philosophy.

01:12:50 - Watson

It's like a play on less is more.

01:12:53 - Watson

So you don't want the, the great to be the enemy of the good.

01:13:00 - Watson

For you to stop you from creating a decent good system.

01:13:04 - Watson

So visible, imperfect boundaries.

01:13:07 - Watson

Right?

01:13:07 - Watson

So if you have boundaries, they're they're there, but they're imperfect, but they're able to be seen.

01:13:13 - Watson

Thresholds.

01:13:15 - Watson

They beat the invisible policies you would you would have if you're developing a system where you're trying to manage and implement privacy versus, community.

01:13:26 - Watson

And you're having it all be invisible because you're doing top down and you're smart one in the room.

01:13:31 - Watson

No.

01:13:32 - Watson

Worse is better.

01:13:34 - B. Sovereign

Now The worst is better is, like, saying seen is better than seamless.

01:13:37 - B. Sovereign

Right?

01:13:38 - B. Sovereign

On purpose so people can see.

01:13:41 - B. Sovereign

Right?

01:13:42 - Watson

Yeah.

01:13:42 - Watson

So worse is better that we're we're getting that from is they, there's a it's a famous essay within, software that recounts the the history of Unix.

01:13:58 - Watson

So there was Unix and Lisp machines.

01:14:03 - Watson

And this was created by I wanna the last name was Gabriel.

01:14:07 - Watson

I wanna say his first name is Richard.

01:14:09 - Watson

I always get them confused with the singer, but or the musician.

01:14:14 - Watson

But, what he did was he recounted the creation of UNIX, and UNIX was passed around.

01:14:24 - Watson

You had BSD, and you had other components of Unix, and this goes into the history of TCPIP and all network stacks and all this other stuff.

01:14:33 - Watson

But it was passed around as c c c and c plus plus, and the implementation had a very, if you can imagine, loose boundary, API, now you would call it, and a very easy or visible internals.

01:14:57 - Watson

And so people were passing around the code and working on it versus what people through intuition would normally think is have a very strong, well defined boundary, and but the internals may not be perfect.

01:15:17 - Watson

But you're trying to make it to where people are interacting with the outside.

01:15:21 - Watson

Now that's counterintuitive, especially we're talking about thresholds in the book and well-being, well designed, and so on and so forth.

01:15:28 - Watson

But worse is better.

01:15:29 - Watson

What ends up happening is the people it still lends itself to some of what we're talking here.

01:15:38 - Watson

You're making it to where the internals are going to be easier for people to reason about and get involved in.

01:15:46 - Watson

So this is about user adoption.

01:15:49 - Watson

Making it to where everyone can get it in code, let's say, versus saying, you can't get in and code.

01:15:58 - Watson

The code is ugly, let's say.

01:16:01 - Watson

But we have these APIs you can call.

01:16:06 - Watson

This has been through the history of software, through every paradigm shift.

01:16:10 - Watson

This has come back and forth as in a fight over and over and over again.

01:16:19 - Watson

The latest iteration of this is the winners are the the the API is winning.

01:16:26 - Watson

So containers.

01:16:27 - Watson

Put everything in the container and call it, and then you could share containers instead of build the code.

01:16:34 - Watson

So we it's a pendulum that swings back and forth.

01:16:38 - Watson

The, but this is saying as far as adoption and having people contribute, then worse is better.

01:16:46 - Watson

It's, again, play on less is more.

01:16:50 - B. Sovereign

And I love the consent aspect.

01:16:52 - B. Sovereign

And also as you said, it allows people to engage.

01:16:54 - B. Sovereign

I would also argue that even if I'm not gonna engage because I'm not a developer myself, probably I'll be hopefully in different ways.

01:17:01 - B. Sovereign

But it's also the idea of trust.

01:17:04 - B. Sovereign

You know?

01:17:05 - B. Sovereign

It's I trust something that is, open as an open source because it's transparent.

01:17:11 - B. Sovereign

I'm already to me, I trust the person, right, or the entity, whatever, that is backing that because, oh, it's almost like a and it something that is closed.

01:17:22 - B. Sovereign

It's almost like I cannot consent to that because it's closed.

01:17:25 - B. Sovereign

I would never be able to.

01:17:26 - B. Sovereign

I just I'm forced to trust.

01:17:29 - B. Sovereign

And the other aspect is, like, I choose to trust because it's open.

01:17:34 - Watson

Yeah.

01:17:35 - Watson

And the the the part with when you say I can engage, that you going back to the ubiquitous language thing, the ubiquitous language allows everyone to engage.

01:17:50 - Watson

And this could be technical.

01:17:51 - Watson

This could be not technical.

01:17:53 - Watson

Again, this is within software, you have the Eric Evans.

01:17:56 - Watson

With outside of architecture, you're on in, you have Christopher Alexander.

01:18:01 - Watson

The ubiquitous language, you're creating a language that is goes from the people who are using and inside experiencing, and the people or the so called experts.

01:18:15 - Watson

The language that goes between the two, the implementers, the people who are experiencing the events.

01:18:25 - Watson

If you have a shared language, then everybody is developing, and this is the argument for this true bottom up instead of having it be top down.

01:18:35 - Watson

It's his solution for it anyways, and it's one that I, enjoy myself or whatever.

01:18:41 - B. Sovereign

This this language thing is also horizontal

01:18:44 - Watson

in a way.

01:18:45 - B. Sovereign

It's like, hey.

01:18:46 - B. Sovereign

Allow people that are not technical also to understand what's happening.

01:18:50 - Watson

Yeah.

01:18:51 - Watson

The the ubiquitous language is not supposed to be technical.

01:18:55 - Watson

Again, so for instance, if you're building a system for accountants, then every the language that you use should be their domain jargon.

01:19:05 - Watson

It shouldn't be where, you know, depend however technical you wanna get, like the word container.

01:19:11 - Watson

They there's no reason to bring that up with the accounts.

01:19:18 - Watson

But you will see someone saying, with technical, and here's all these reasons why we couldn't do what you're saying.

01:19:23 - Watson

There should only be ubiquitous language, and the in that language, it actually should be in the code.

01:19:29 - Watson

So when somebody comes in later and they're not an accountant and they use and look in the code and then they start communicating with the accountants, and then they the accountants say, you know, here's what, a a balance sheet is and all of these things.

01:19:48 - Watson

It's like, yeah.

01:19:49 - Watson

I'm using that same language, and you can find, of course, tests and errors and all these other things.

01:19:56 - Watson

Of course, the implementation could be different than what real life is, and that's the struggle of the technical.

01:20:04 - Watson

But at least the intent, it's it's about intent.

01:20:10 - Watson

So if you're a really good with a Christopher Alexander, his way would be if you're a really good architect.

01:20:19 - Watson

If in software, like, if you're a really good programmer, if you're really good d so on and so forth, you they you're making them the programmer.

01:20:28 - Watson

You're because they're using the language that's actually in the system when they're communicating what they want, the intent.

01:20:35 - Watson

Yeah.

01:20:39 - Watson

Alright.

01:20:40 - Watson

So the questions to contemplate, where does your product, if you're talking about software collapse, private, shared, and public realms, you know, that would be a problem.

01:20:50 - Watson

Who becomes reachable before they have a refusal point?

01:20:54 - Watson

Again, this back and forth of architecture and decisions you make now are hard to change later.

01:21:00 - Watson

Which shared spaces have unclear responsibility?

01:21:05 - Watson

What fast system is invading a slow human context?

01:21:10 - Watson

We're talking about traffic and invading intrusions and all these things.

01:21:15 - Watson

Where is the lock or buffer before the buffer changes?

01:21:20 - Watson

And now our conclusion, community and privacy is a theory of human scale association.

01:21:28 - Watson

The strongest move is named domains, not some type of generic openness.

01:21:36 - Watson

Privacy and community belong together, And a lesson for the builders, make locks, buffers, and exposure visible before, everything else.

01:21:51 - Watson

So now community and privacy is strongest when it refuses the fake choice between open community and private retreat.

01:22:03 - Watson

It says that humane association depends on gradients.

01:22:07 - Watson

So the room, the dwelling edge, the neighbor group, street service path the city.

01:22:15 - Watson

For builders, the lesson again, they're visible before conflict.

01:22:19 - Watson

And if users cannot tell who sees what, who can reach them, and where the refusal point is, then the boundary has not been designed.

01:22:32 - Watson

And as always, you can visit bitlemmas.com for more information.

01:22:37 - Watson

Also, visit bitlemmas.com to post any feedback in the comment section.

01:22:44 - Watson

Thanks, and we will see you next time.