Pattern Text

We need to move from the meaning of a thing being in the signs on its surface to our experience of it...

From literary theory to experience.

From print to interactive.

From ideas flowing across the face of a building to the experience within it.

From semiotics to the meaning in an experience.

So now I get to the title of this post. When I was 24 I wrote my undergraduate thesis on the meaning we get out of the experience of architecture. I had spent 4 years studying semiotics as part of the telecommunications and film major (technically a BA in Speech with an emphasis in TcF) that I was completing. To write the thesis I took many of the tools that I learned from the semioticians and pointed them at architecture - as if it were mass media. It resulted in this thought:

That experience - architecture or anything else - could be broken into a collection of patterns. Each pattern has a meaning within it. That meaning is the "pattern text".