Christopher Alexander’s forward for Patterns of Software written by Richard P. Gabriel in 1996 poses a question which is still just as relevant in design today.

Over 22 years later, with standardized components in front-end code, UI and pattern libraries, Information Architecture and UX best practices / toolkits, design systems, and ways to translate / prototype ideas across fidelities we can still ask the same things about our design systems:

“In architecture, the question I have been asking is very simple: Can we do better? Does all this talk help to make better buildings…Do the people who write these programs, using alexandrian patterns, or any other methods, do they do better work? Are the programs better? Do they get better results, more efficiently, more speedily, more profoundly? Do people actually feel more alive when using them? Is what is accomplished by these programs, and by the people who run these programs and by the people who are affected by them, better, more elevated, more insightful, better by ordinary spiritual standards?”

Forward from Patterns of Software, noted in Architectural Intelligence by Molly Wright Steenson