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Then Our Buildings Shape Us
Form and Content in Software Development
Tim Berglund
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Testing.
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Winston Churchill once said, First we shape our buildings, and afterwards our buildings shape us. What does that mean? Well, he was talking about the reconstruction of the House of Commons, which had been damaged during a bombing raid. The old building didn't allow all members of parliament
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to see the speaker at once, and some were advocating a large replacement with semi-circular seating in the fashion of the American Congress. It turns out that a change like that makes a difference! A building that let everybody see the speaker would favor broadcast speeches
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instead of smaller, ad-hoc meetings with point-to-point communication. The shape of the building would shape the people using it. Architecture provides some interesting lessons here. Its history is one of a jumble of many building styles, each unique, and each with its own historical and geographical center
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In the 20th century, a group of architects calling themselves the Modernists decided they had had enough of this mess. They sought to build buildings in which form was secondary to function. They would only design buildings according to how they would be used, not according to how they should look
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Then a curious thing happened: all of their buildings began to look like.The Modernists had rejected architectural form. But in trying to avoid participating in a form, they simply invented a new one. This is just how it is. No matter what you’re creating, it fits into a form.
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In poetry we have limericks and sonnets. In painting we have impressionism and romantic realism. In dance we have ballet and tango. In music we have jazz and techno. In film we have documentary and noir. In oratory, we have stump speeches and lightning talks.
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Any creative artifact can be labeled by its form. Why is this so important? Well, first of all, forms enhance the creative process. Paradoxically, it’s easier to create when you have constraints.
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A blank sheet of paper with unlimited boundaries is just daunting. With few exceptions, artists choose the constraints of an identifiable form that imposes requirements and limitations on the content they create.
Forms matter.
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If you were getting married, would you choose a dirge for your recessional? I hope not. Dirges are sad songs, and you want happy music when you’ve just made your vows to your new spouse. And when a form is used to express some kind of verbal content, like in a poem, it ties our hands
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about the kinds of things we can say. Can you imagine delivering a loving eulogy in limerick? You’re talking about the dearly departed, and friends and family are thinking about a man from Madrass. Not good. And you know what? There’s nothing you can do about it. Form is there in the room with you, doing its job.
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I’ve given this talk before, and sometimes when I’ve said “form,” people say, “Oh, you mean like Plato or Aristotle or something?” Well, both men had a theory of forms, but not, turns out that’s not what I mean at all.
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Instead, to understand the intellectual heritage of this idea, you should look at this guy: Marshall McLuhan. McLuhan was a Canadian and a professor of English and media theory at the University of Toronto. He thought a lot about how communication technologies affect ideas and societies. He is famous for his dictum “the medium is the message.”
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One of his intellectual children was this guy: Neil Postman. Neil was a media theorist at the New York University, most famous for his book
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Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the age of show business. Postman built on McLuhan’s ideas, thinking about the transition from oral culture in the ancient world, through print culture ushered in by the invention or writing and the printing press, to an image culture with the invention of photography and television.
When a man hears himself some-what misrepresented, it provokes him, — at least, I find it so with myself; but when misrepresentation becomes very gross and palpable, it is more apt to amuse him.
The first thing I see lit to notice is the fact that Judge Douglas alleges, after running through the history of the old Democratic and the old Whig parties, that Judge Trumbull and myself made an arrangement in 1854, by which I was to have the place of General Shields in the United States Senate, and Judge Trumbull was to have the place of Judge Douglas.
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The point was that when you send messages through a medium like television, it changes the message. In the United States in 1858, we had the famous Lincoln/Douglas debates (Illinois Senate campaign), which were hours-long speeches listened to by farmers. (I use Twitter. I can’t do that.)
My fellow Americans...
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In 1960, a Presidential debate (Kennedy/Nixon) was televised for the first time. Widely cited as a turning point against Nixon, because he looked bad. Campaigns learned fast! Now we get sound bites. Presidents have to be thin, have hair, and be good at making short, memorable statements. Ideas which succeed in text fail on TV.
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Now fast forward to this guy. Know who this is? It’s Nick Carr, author of “Does IT Matter?” “The Big Switch,” and a former editor of the Harvard Business Review.
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He’s also the author of this book. Not worried about images. Worried about the transition from text to hypertext. His book is an exploration of what the forms of the web do to what he calls “deep reading,” or sustained concentration on a text over a long period of time. He argues that the forms of the web change the structure of our brains, the way we think, and the kinds of information we can—or will— convey. He might be wrong or right, but his argument is important, and you should read it.
I have rows and columns.
Can I just estimate sales?
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Let’s take this back to software for a moment, and particularly UX design. Programs expose a certain model of the information they process, and users bring their own concepts to the table. The two will always be in tension. Good UX design anticipates the user model, but it never quite gets it right. People adapt by changing their thinking to match the software.
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Can anybody think of any other examples of this? How about PowerPoint? It was Edward Tufte’s argument in his famous “PowerPoint is Evil” essay that the default settings of the program—its user model—shape our communications in significant and often harmful ways. It actually makes us less effective communicators because it encourages us to express everything in bullets.
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PowerPoint’s default setting is a template containing nested bullets. Does all communication fit this model? Probably not. Why am I even projecting sequential slides? Am I clinging to a habit I have not examined? Probably. Does the linear, step-by-step pacing affect my message? It does. Is that good or bad? It’s hard to say.
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So let’s apply this to our work as software developers and architects. Let’s think...
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What forms do we have in software? We have platforms like Java, LAMP, and .NET. We have languages like PHP, Java, C#, and Groovy, Clojure, Ruby.
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Software forms are a little more flexible than artistic ones: you can’t deliver a eulogy in limerick, but you can write the same program in Java and Ruby. You can write the same program, but will you? Even here, forms are not absent.
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Often we compare languages and platforms through benchmarks. Which one makes developers more productive, which one scales better, which one lets me get the job done in fewer lines of code? Even though those are objective characteristics,
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the shooting match often ends without a solid conclusion. If we think of software in terms of form, we’ll take a broader view of language and platform. We won’t wonder whether something is possible on one language or another; instead, we’ll wonder what kinds of practices go with the grain
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of a given toolset. I mean, you can write tests in PHP, but why is it that no one does? And why is it that Ruby constantly pushes the envelope in automated testing frameworks? Because Ruby developers are smarter? No.
Text
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It has something to do with form. You can get an idea of a tool’s form by looking at its community. What kinds of things do they care about? If they care about graphic design and scalability, the tool will be naturally good at those things. If they emphasize
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testing and code craft, then the tool will make it easy to succeed in those areas. What ends up getting done in that language or platform? What kinds of products are built? Hip tech start-ups? Big enterprise projects? Shell scripts? Could you build a big enterprise
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project in BASH? Sure! It’s Turing complete. It has access to Unix-y integration capabilities. It’s been done before. But nobody does it now.
So forms are rigid, but that’s not to say that they can’t be bent. The most brilliant art consists in stretching the boundaries of a form without breaking them.
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But the content you are creating—the code, the UI, the architecture—all participates in a form, and that form directs the way you’ll solve problems, limits the kinds of solutions you can think of and shapes the practices your team adopts
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and the very code you write. It pays to look past the minute details to perceive the broader structure of the tools we use. We spend our days shaping buildings, and it would be a shame if we never saw how our buildings are shaping us.
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Photo CreditsSkyscraperAuthor’s original
Winston Churchillhttp://www.flickr.com/photos/monkeyc/95191971/
Parliamenthttp://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:British_House_of_Commons_1834.jpg
Men at Barhttp://www.flickr.com/photos/freeparking/2128545230/
Tudor Houseshttp://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Tudor_Buildings_Friar_Street_Worcester.JPG
Diverse Dancehttp://www.vintageadbrowser.com/tobacco-ads-1880s/33#adamyp7l6eaceywb
Blank Paperhttp://www.flickr.com/photos/kristiand/3223920178/
Sonnethttp://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Shakespeare%27s_sonnets%27_facsimile.JPG
Goth Weddinghttp://www.flickr.com/photos/wader/20340936/
Mismatched Plug and Outlethttp://www.flickr.com/photos/sfllaw/222795669/
Web Design Galleryhttp://www.cssblaze.com/http://www.flickr.com/photos/sshb/3661292442/
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Photo CreditsFrankenmimehttp://halloween-costume-ideas.org/costume/ALL+Humorous+and+Couples-138619.htm
English Mansionhttp://www.flickr.com/photos/sshb/3661292442/
Plato and Aristotle in the School of Athenshttp://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sanzio_01_Plato_Aristotle.jpg
Marshall McLuhanhttp://digigen.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/mcluhan.jpg
Neil Postmanhttp://www.psychologytoday.com/files/u45/Postman.jpg
Televisionhttp://www.flickr.com/photos/videocrab/116136642
Slide Projectorhttp://evergreen-rentals.com/images/35mmProjector.jpg
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