The Complexity Lounge is devoted to exploring all complexity and complex adaptive systems approaches. So, this month we welcome Michael Feathers of R7K Research & Conveyance to discuss what he refers to as Forms.

The Patterns Movement sought to describe recurring design solutions and the forces leading to them. Christopher Alexander pioneered this approach in the 1970s in building design, urban planning, and residential architecture. In the 1990s, software practitioners independently adopted this approach to help people understand patterns in software design that have been rediscovered numerous times and proven in practice.

Alexander's approach paid off in two vastly different domains: architecture and software. However, it is worth considering whether some patterns can be found in more than one domain. We often use the words metaphor and analogy when we talk about these things. We speak of using a social phenomenon as a metaphor for a technical phenomenon or vice versa. This session will hypothesize structures behind various metaphors that appear to be the same in several domains. We'll examine whether the forces that underlie them might be similar enough to see them as domain-independent abstractions -- forms that are usefully descriptive across phenomena in social, technical, physical, and conceptual domains.

Bio:
Michael Feathers is the Founder and Director of R7K Research & Conveyance and the Chief Architect of Globant. He is also the author of the book Working Effectively with Legacy Code.