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".

Blogs are Essays, Dang It.

I deleted all of my posts so far in 2009. I had not taken the time to articulate my ideas clearly in those posts. This blog (the whole idea of blogs to be honest) keeps saying, "Hey! Go ahead and post your thoughts whatever they may be! It's the web! It's two point oh!!! It's OK that they are only half baked!"

But it's not.

A blog is an essay.

Just as homeowners who find a designer on Craigslist still expect the services of a professional architect even though they aren't willing to pay for one, so do I expect a fully tuned essay from a blog.