Word Pictures

In a section of his book The Nature of Order: The Process of Creating Life, Christopher Alexander wrote about the early stages of the design process. He was mainly concerned with design processes that are governed by a "living process" in the designer's mind. In talking about this process, Alexander suggests an interesting first step: creating a "word picture."

The idea of starting with a word picture is a reaction to how architects (and designers) typically start the design process. Alexander says that it's the first steps in a design process that count for the most, because the first few steps create the initial form and carry within them the destiny for the rest of whatever is being designed. In the early stages of the process, designers should concentrate on the broad structure of the whole. Designers often capture these first steps in a simple sketch or computer representation. The problem with this, Alexander says, is that the sketch always includes too much information, too early in the process, to the extent that it is inevitably over-specific. It contains too much arbitrary information, and lots of decisions that have come too early.

"...if only 20% of the information in a sketch is based on real decisions that have been taken by a living process in the designer's mind, and the remaining 80% is arbitrary stuff entered into the drawing only because the notation (sketching) requires is, trouble inevitably follows."

The word picture comes into this because Alexander suggests that what we need is a way to represent emerging form that stays closer to what we actually know at each moment. This method should focus only on the most global features of the emerging design, without encoding too many early decisions into the output.

Simply put, a word picture spells out, in words, what the design is like. If you're designing a product, what is it like to discover it and to use it? Use words to illustrate a vision of the finished product, as beautiful as you can make it. Alexander's examples are from architecture. Words are a medium that can describe all the essential features of a building without being ultra-specific about the design of it too early in the process:

"If I say that a building towers above me, when I approach it, this says something qualitative about its height, but does not yet describe the exact height (in feet), nor does it describe its shape. But if I make even the most rudimentary drawing (on computer screen or paper), the drawing has an actual height (implied by proportion), and it has many features of shape, width, volume, articulation..."

That example perfectly summarizes the value of starting with words. I find that in the earliest stages of the product design process, being too concrete too soon causes forces me into stakeholders conversations that are too in the weeds, and also puts me on a specific path before some more appealing possibilities have had a chance to emerge. Early on, it's best to focus on alignment about what the product or feature should be like and, as Alexander suggests, let things unfold through a living process so exploration isn't cut off prematurely.