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Dundalk
Institute of Technology, Ireland
![Rodd Bond](/events/q205/bond.jpg) 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.
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