Then someone asked me, How did you come up with the pattern language? How did you get the actual material?
I said, “Well, it was not so very different from any other kind of science. My colleagues and I made observations, looked to see what worked, studied it, tried to distill out the essentials, and wrote them down”
“But”, I went on, “we did do one thing differently. We assumed from the beginning that everything was based on the real nature of human feeling and — this is the unusual part — that human feeling is mostly the same, mostly the same from person to person, mostly the same in every person. Of course, there is that part of human feeling where we are all different. Each of us has our idiosyncrasies, our unique individual human character. That is the part people most often concentrate on when they are talking about feelings, and comparing feelings. But that idiosyncratic part is really only about ten percent of the feelings which we feel. Ninety percent of our feelings is stuff in which we are all the same and we feel the same thing. So from the very beginning, when we made the pattern language, we concentrated on that part of human experience and feeling where our feeling is all the same. That is what the pattern language is — a record of that stuff in us, which belongs to the ninety percent of our feeling where our feelings are all the same”.
Christopher Alexander, in the prologue to Nature of Order, an Essay on the Art of Building and the Nature of the Universe: Book 1: The Phenomenon of Life
