Pursuit of Pattern Languages for Societal Change
A living language for changing the world.
PURPLSOC connects researchers, practitioners, and communities who use patterns to make places, services, and neighbourhoods more coherent, humane, and alive.
The idea
Patterns are how a community remembers what works.
A pattern names a problem that keeps returning and a response that has proven itself in practice. Gather those patterns into a language and people can share knowledge that usually stays local, unspoken, or locked inside a single profession.
The approach began with architecture and building, then travelled into education, software, health care, management, art, and social change. What holds it together is a simple test: does the result help life flourish?
Three ways in
Start where your question is.
Meet the conference, the idea, or the books. Each path leads to the same body of work.
PURPLSOC 2017
Seventy participants from thirteen countries met at Danube University Krems in October 2017. Explore the programme and the ideas it produced.
Visit the conferenceWhy patterns?
A short introduction to the pattern approach and the reasons it suits complex social questions.
Read the introductionThe proceedings
Three open access volumes record the workshops, conferences, and research that built the series.
Browse the booksFrom the blog
Notes from the pattern community.
Short reports on new papers, recordings, and moments from the conference series.
PURPLSOC 2017 Proceedings Online
The third volume is online and free to read, with work from more than twenty domains gathered in one place.
Are there Patterns of Humanity?
David West asks whether any patterns hold across cultures, even when each culture gives them a different shape.
Video: Christopher Alexander's Search for Beauty in Architecture
Max Jacobson's keynote traced a lifelong pursuit of beauty in buildings and in the wider built environment.
Reading The Nature of Order together
Follow a guided tour through Christopher Alexander's four volume work, with notes for discussion at each stage.