The following principles have been excerpted from The Oregon Experiment. The Oregon Experiment is the third volume in a series of books written by Christopher Alexander describing methodologies and patterns for designing healthy architechural structures that satisfy human needs and contribute postively overall to the surrounding ecology.
Many people in OO design have drawn from the works of Christopher Alexander and I thought it would be a fun (and hopefully beneficial) experiment to systematically apply Christopher Alexander's ideas to the development of Turbine.
1. The principle of organic order.
Planning and construction will be guided by a
process which allows the whole to emerge
gradually from local acts.
2. The principle of participation.
All decisions about what to build, and how to
build it, will be in the hands of the users.
3. The principle of piecemeal growth.
The construction undertaken in each budgetary
period will be weighed overwhelmingly toward
small projects.
4. The principle of patterns.
All design and construction will be guided by
a collection of communally adopted planning
principles called patterns.
5. The principle of diagnosis.
The well being of the whole will be protected
by an annual diagnosis which explains, in detail,
which spaces are alive and which ones dead, at
any given moment in the history of the community.
6. The principle of coordination.
Finally, the slow emergence of organic order in
the whole will be assured by a funding process
which regulates the stream of individual projects
put forward by users.
Doug Lea has written an excellent article on the writings of Christoper Alexander and how they relate to the practice of OO software development: Christopher Alexander: An Introduction for Object-Oriented Designers