Biography Rodd is an architect with international experience in health care facility design, complemented by unique ICT expertise, gleaned as the owner/manager of FMW, a CAD/GIS-based applications software development company which delivered planning and design decision support solutions to the construction, health, aviation, utilities and telecommunications sectors on 3 continents. Rodd graduated from Brookes College, Oxford in 1982, where his work focussed on modelling and architectural problem seeking frameworks – a thematic area that can provide a valuable contribution to the current EA/SOA developments. Operating independently since 2002, Rodd is supporting a range of physical and enterprise architecture projects where his organic, trans-disciplinary approach helps clients to achieve their vision.

Presentation
Towards a Living Architecture for ICT Services
From components and services to patterns and organic order

The continuous miss-match between people’s rapidly evolving information and communication needs, and the current nature of systems growth designed to meet the challenge, represents an ever-growing cost that can no longer be tolerated in economic or human terms.

The development of frameworks for enterprise architecture (EA) and service oriented architectures (SOA) are directed at delivering the agility to respond to this on-going change, and these approaches have been heavily guided by analogy to the construction industry and the physical architecture profession.

But the analogy with current architectural practice must also be challenged as it has often been responsible for delivering ‘one-off’ pieces, or worse, master plan frameworks designed to impose and accommodate a new order at some future point in time, but which shatter any organic integrity and growth possibilities in current local systems in the meantime.

Over the past 30 years, the architect, Christopher Alexander, and his colleagues at the Center for Environmental Structure in Berkeley, have been pursuing an alternative approach to building. It is aimed at making a more ‘living architecture’, based on principles which include organic order, participation, piecemeal growth, diagnosis, and the agreement and use of a ‘pattern language’.

Alexander’s concept of patterns is nothing new to the ICT world, where it has been heavily referenced by Yordin in software engineering, Berczuk in software development, Common Ground in HCI design, CPSR and DIAC in their patterns project, and most recently in Microsoft’s .NET patterns initiative. However, many of these applications have looked at patterns individually, rather than as a rich language providing a network of patterns thats call upon and support one another. Patterns also lose their cohesiveness when looked at outside a framework directed at maintaining an organic order.

This paper will describe Alexander’s ideas of a ‘living architecture’, ‘organic order’ and ‘pattern language’, and explores what it might mean for practitioners of both EA and SOA frameworks. In looking at some of the spatial and process characteristics and attributes of a ‘living architecture’, the paper will explore a revised ICT/architecture analogy using a different vocabulary around wholeness, centres and unfolding. The paper will also outline the early stages of an experimental project to see where and how some of these ideas might be applied. The project, ‘Nestling with technology’ is a new distributed, inter-agency, public/private pilot project aimed at nurturing the well-being of an elderly population in ambient, home ‘living environments’.

If the principles of ‘organic order’ can give shape and direction to the processes of making and evolving our ‘living ICT’ systems, the approach offers everyone a wonderful opportunities to gain much greater ownership of getting the services they need when they need it, while always keeping the whole in balance.