The Beautiful Software Seminar
Building Beauty invites computer professionals to work, study, and conduct research with a network of Christopher Alexander’s colleagues and students
Beautiful Software is a seminar and research group carried out in addition to the Building Beauty Core course.
The Building Beauty core course regards the creation of tangible material in the built environment. It consists of lectures, reading discussions, hands-on projects and small group meetings, a commitment of about 20 hours per week for an academic year of two semesters.
Beautiful Software is an additional 4 hours a week. It consists of a once-a-week 2-hour meeting where the material is discussed, and the group self-manages projects and research. In addition, we expect about 2 hours of work on the Beautiful Software joint project or research.
It is our belief that this maximizes the chance that the participants will be exposed to the material in a fashion that lets them fully make use of the core discoveries and motivations behind the work of Christopher Alexander, his students, and colleagues.
Ryan Singer, a highly respected thought leader in software engineering who has closely followed and built on Christopher Alexander’s work for many years, gave an introductory lecture on July 31, 2020: “Christopher Alexander, A Primer for System Designers.”
Ryan talks with Greg Bryant, a collaborator of Christopher Alexander’s and creator of the Gatemaker app. The subject is how to go beyond implementation patterns and apply Alexander’s principles on the front-end to make software that makes people feel more alive.