My notion of balance comes from thinking about Alexander's misfits. The information here is drawn from [Sal10].
Misfits introduced by Alexander in Notes on the Synthesis of Form [Ale64] (NSF).
He also introduced two “cultures” of designing:
Alexander's work on misfits has not been as popular as his other work.
Set theory is used extensively in NSF. I have found some problems with its use there:
Alexander's work is not invalidated by these 3 problems, but because of these problems, the formal aspects of Alexander's work are unreliable by modern standards and are ignored in developing the idea of balance.
NSF gives no direct definition of misfit, but rather a number of characteristics scattered over several passages.
That misfits are really variables is important but easy to overlook.
The goal of designing, then, becomes the changing of the values of misfit variables so that they are no longer “bad.”
The designers’ goal, however, is to eliminate the misfits.
We can resolve the contradiction thus:
Another problem: misfits represent only the “bad” aspects of ensembles.
Address this by capturing as “fitness” variables any property of an ensemble, not just those with bad values.
Now we can describe the network as representing forces at work in a situation that must be resolved, or balanced, by a design.
Misfits motivate designing, so misfit identification (and existence) must precede design.
However, the author believes that there is always a preceding form.
In high innovation, it may be difficult to identify/separate the predecessor form within the context.
The Palm Pilot was not the first PDA to be designed, but it was the first to be successful.
In NSF, Alexander refers often to an example of a kettle, and gives a rather extensive list of requirements that a kettle should satisfy. One of them reads “…should have a handle that….”
Two examples of how this might have been done for the kettle’s handle include:
Thus, Alexander’s requirements are not good ones.
One can recover and refine the overall process as follows.
Alexander correctly observes in NSF that requirements are in practise often grouped according to abstract concepts like “safety” or “durability,” and that such categorization is not helpful because it is arbitrary and constructed entirely by the needs of the designers rather than the needs of the situation for which the designers work.
Alexander also correctly observes that categorizations should be driven by the available information and not by the designers’ needs or beliefs of what the categorization “should be.
Per Alexander, the purpose for decomposing misfit networks is: “We now have a graph G(M,L) which represents the design problem. …to solve the problem, we shall try to decompose the set M in such a way that it gives us a helpful program for design.”
This approach is problematic.
A possible solution is to develop a hierarchy of systems based on functional interactions.
Alexander in NSF gives 2 criteria for what constitutes a good misfit network decomposition
However, it appears that Alexander is following a waterfall model.
Another problem: Alexander’s method of combining subsets of misfits.
Reconsider Alexander's example of the requirements for a kettle.
The distinction between functional and structural aspects is also evident in Alexander’s own words:
The concept of balance can help address the problems noted in preceding sections. Designing as balancing provides a sketch of a design process based on balance.
Example: NSF's kettle