Then our buildings shape us 10 minutes

Then Our Buildings
Shape Us
Form and Content in Software
Development

Tim Berglund

Sunday, September 12, 2010 1

Testing.


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


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


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


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


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.


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.


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.


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.


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


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.


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.


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.”


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


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.


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...


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.


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.


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.

Can I just
estimate sales?

I have rows
and columns.


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.


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.


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.


So let’s apply this to our work as software developers and architects. Let’s think...


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.


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.


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,


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


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


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


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


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.


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


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.

Photo Credits
Skyscraper
Author’s original

Winston Churchill
http://www.flickr.com/photos/monkeyc/95191971/

Parliament
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:British_House_of_Commons_1834.jpg

Men at Bar
http://www.flickr.com/photos/freeparking/2128545230/

Tudor Houses
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Tudor_Buildings_Friar_Street_Worcester.JPG

Diverse Dance
http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/tobacco-ads-1880s/33#adamyp7l6eaceywb

Blank Paper
http://www.flickr.com/photos/kristiand/3223920178/

Sonnet
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Shakespeare%27s_sonnets%27_facsimile.JPG

Goth Wedding
http://www.flickr.com/photos/wader/20340936/

Mismatched Plug and Outlet
http://www.flickr.com/photos/sfllaw/222795669/

Web Design Gallery
http://www.cssblaze.com/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/sshb/3661292442/


Frankenmime
Photo Credits
http://halloween-costume-ideas.org/costume/ALL+Humorous+and+Couples-138619.htm

English Mansion
http://www.flickr.com/photos/sshb/3661292442/

Plato and Aristotle in the School of Athens
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sanzio_01_Plato_Aristotle.jpg

Marshall McLuhan
http://digigen.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/mcluhan.jpg

Neil Postman
http://www.psychologytoday.com/files/u45/Postman.jpg

Television
http://www.flickr.com/photos/videocrab/116136642

Slide Projector
http://evergreen-rentals.com/images/35mmProjector.jpg


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