As Monty Python famously once said, “And now for something completely different”.
This series is my opportunity to explore my curiosity with the principles articulated in Christopher Alexander’s A Pattern Language and his latest work The Nature of Order: An Essay on the Art of Building and The Nature of the Universe. I intend to use the Disney theme parks as my lab to better understand those principles. So please indulge me as I think out loud. You bought the ticket; let’s go for the ride.
Go here to read Part One.
This series of blogs is based on the hypothesis of Alexander’s latest work The Nature of Order: The Phenomenon of Life (2005):
“What we call “life” is a general condition, which exists, to some degree or other, in every part of space: brick, stone, grass, river, painting, building, daffodil, human being, forest, city. And further: The key to this idea is that every part of space – every connected region of space, small or large – has some degree of life, and that this degree of life is well defined, objectively existing, and measurable.”
As you know, you can only manage what you can measure. What am I to measure and how? Alexander even provides a standard that is “so dead” on it is worth stating in its entirety:
“We are going to pay attention to what we can see and what we can identify and what we can know. And the criterion for knowing it is, that whatever we hold to be true can be put in some kind of experimental form, that another person can then be convinced of. And that unless something meets the standard of being sharable in that kind of sense, it isn’t going to pass muster”. (http://www.katarxis3.com/Alexander.htm)
There are billions of people in the world. The notion that you can create spaces that appeal to such a broad range of opinions and cultures would seem insurmountable. However, as fans of the parks, you know that shared community experience of joy happens all the time. Why is that?
People from around the world come to the parks to experience that Disney “magic”. Best described by James B. Stewart in Disneywar, the Disney “magic” is when “people’s apprehension turns into awe and delight”. Carefully designed immersive environments can make a significant impression on the individual and can quickly change one’s mood and behavior.
Christopher Alexander made a fundamental discovery while researching A Pattern Language. He realized that “human feeling is mostly the same, mostly the same from person to person, mostly the same in every person”. Walt Disney also understood the power of this idea.
What about us as individuals? Aren’t we all different, with different experiences, backgrounds, and education? Alexander recognizes that “there is a part of human feeling where we are all different”. He goes on to say that “each of us has our idiosyncrasies, our unique individual human character”.
Alexander notes that we “often concentrate on…talking about feelings, and comparing feelings”. But his research over 40 years has shown that those individual qualities account for only about ten percent of the feelings that we feel. What about the other 90 percent? The answer is the other 90 percent of our feelings are the “stuff in which we are all the same and we feel the same things”.
Okay back to how this relates to Disney. One of Walt’s greatest gifts was his ability to understand those universal feelings. He was able to articulate those emotions and mirror them back to us in a way that resonates even today. As one of the most influential artists of the 20th Century, his works have crossed boundaries and cultures, they are still relevant, and have stood the test of time.
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