PLoP Writers’ Workshop Names
Richard P. Gabriel & Joseph Yoder & Kyle Brown

October 7, 2023

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These are the names of the Writer’s Workshop Groups for PLoP 2023. Where did they come from and why are we using them?
• Seljuk Being• Turtles in the Border• Saph Mihrab with Plum Blossoms,• Endless Repeating Design• Waving Border• Flaming Animal Spirit with Vultures
PLoP came about because in the 1990s a bunch of computer people got interested in the work of the built-world architect
Christopher Alexander. Many, if they know anything about Alexander, associate him with the concepts of patterns and patternlanguages—however, he did a lot more. His four-volume masterpiece is called “The Nature of Order,” and in it he explains what
he’s concluded are the concepts and principles that underlie patterns and pattern languages. But those concepts and principles
came as a result of a hobby of his: collecting and studying very early Turkish carpets1 . He reported that work in “A Foreshadowingof 21st Century Art.”
In the early 1970s Alexander began buying Turkish carpets, religious Turkish carpets. He said:
I was extremely innocent when I started out. I simply liked them. My main concern was actually in their color. I wascompletely absorbed by the question of color but never thought it would have any serious connection to my work. Also,
I never thought of my interest in these rugs as having to do with geometry.
He spent a lot of money—even getting into financial trouble; he became a rug dealer for a while—and he became known
to Bay Area rug collectors. In fact, his carpets were once shown in a special exhibition at the DeYoung Museum in San Francisco.
Most people who collect rugs have a special interest, such as the village where the rugs were woven or the treatment of aparticular theme, but Alexander’s rugs weren’t in such neat categories—they were chosen because they had something special
about them. Because he had so little money compared with the cost of each carpet, he spent a lot of time looking at them before
he bought them. He wasn’t especially aware of the special quality that set some carpets apart—even though his interest in carpets
began in the midst of his quest for the quality without a name. His friends mentioned to him that his carpets had some special
something and he said:
When people started telling me this I began to look more carefully to discover that there was indeed something I was
attracted to in a half-conscious way. It seemed to me that the rugs I tended to buy exuded or captured an incredible
amount of power which I did not understand but which I obviously recognized.
In the course of buying so many rugs I made a number of discoveries. First, I discovered that you could not tell if arug had this special property—a spiritual quality—until you had been with it for about a week. . . . So, as a short cut, I
began to be aware that there were certain geometrical properties that were predictors of this spiritual property. In otherwords, I made the shocking discovery that you could actually look at the rug in a sort of superficial way and just see if it
had certain geometrical properties, and if it did, you could be almost certain that it had this spiritual property as well.
Alexander says some pretty darn unbelievable things about what he learned from these carpets. First is that the beauty ofa structure—a building, for instance—comes from the fine detail at an almost microscopic level. He takes the grain size for
noticeable structure from that used in the carpets: one eighth inch. He wrote:
In short, the small structure, the detailed organization of matter—controls the macroscopic level at a way thatarchitects have hardly dreamed of.
But twentieth century art has been very bad at handling this level. We have become used to a “conceptual” approachto building, in which like cardboard, large superficial slabs of concrete, or glass, or painted sheetrock or plywood create
very abstract forms at the big level. But they have no soul, because they have no fine structure at all. . . .
It means, directly, that if we hope to make buildings in which the rooms and building feel harmonious—we too, must
make sure that the structure is correct down to ⅛th of an inch. Any structure which is more gross, and which leaves thislast eighth of an inch, rough, or uncalculated, or inharmonious—will inevitably be crude.
Alexander feels that artists of the past—often of the distant past but as recently as Matisse, Bonnard, and Derain—had a betterhold on beauty and that it is the task of late twentieth century artists to try to recapture the knowledge that seemed, perhaps, so
obvious to these earlier artists as to be intuitive. Carpets provide a way to study this mastery because they are pure design, pureornament, and their construction is so completely unconstrained by the materials of their construction as to allow the artist’strue mastery to come forward. Alexander said:
1 Mostly 12th –16th century carpets.

2In a carpet, we have something which deals almost entirely with pattern, ornament. There is really nothing else: justthe geometry and the color of the plane. As I began to enjoy carpets, I realized that the earliest carpets, especially, deal
with this problem with enormous sophistication. The design of the carpet is essentially made of tiny knots—each knot
usually about an ⅛ of an inch by an ⅛ of an inch.
Each knot is a separate bit of wool, and may be any color, without any reference to the underlying warps and wefts.
So it is a pure design, made of tiny elements, and which the structure (the design structure, the pure organization of thegeometrical arrangement) is the main thing which is going on.

We chose these carpets as inspiration for the Writers’ Workshop names hoping you’d take them as a challenge to drive beyond
problem-solution pairs.
Let’s look at the groups and their carpets.

Seljuk Being
Leader: Richard P. GabrielSeljuk Prayer Rug
This carpet, possibly the only surviving single-niche prayer carpet of the Seljuk era, is a close counterpart of the famous 15th
century white field saph in the Turk ve Islam Museum. What is important about this carpet, and certainly most striking, is what wemight call its “being nature.” When we look at this carpet. we are unaccountably, but quite definitely confronted with a being.
17: Leading a Software Architecture Revolution “Part 2b: Tactical Prioritization“ by Marden Neubert and Joseph W. Yoder.
30: Aha! Strategies for Gaining Insights into Software Design by Mary Shaw.
31: Using Japanese Yokai as a Pattern Language in a Corporate Culture Case Study by Kurihara Wataru and Hasegawa Atsushi.
43: Patterns for Returning Multiple Results by Andrew P. Black.
44: A Prompt Pattern Catalog to Enhance Prompt Engineering with ChatGPT by Jules White, Quchen Fu, Sam Hays, MichaelSandborn, Carlos Olea, Henry Gilbert, Ashraf Elnashar, Jesse Spencer-Smith, and Douglas C. Schmidt

3Turtles in the Border
Leader: Neil Harrison

Archaic Lobed Medallions Carpet with Turtles in the Border
Most important of these [important features] is the fascinating shape of the main medallion. This medallion, which occupies
almost the whole carpet, has an extraordinary “being” qualty and shape. Of all the shapes I know in the world of design—carpet
motifs, buildings, and other forms—it is one of those, which contains the being quality to the greatest degree.
4: Circle of Responsibility by Neil Harrison.
5: Organizational Patterns: Looking Back Nearly 30 Years by Neil Harrison.
8: Unveiling Connections: Integrating Climate Studies and Cybersecurity Education by Mary Tedeschi.
18: Patterns of Patterns II by Joseph Corneli, Noorah Alhasan, Alex Murphy, Leo Vivier, Raymond S. Puzio, Abby Tabor, MaryTedeschi, Mandiver Singh, Kajol Khetan, and Charles J. Danoff.
24: Pattern Manga: Attractively Expressing Patterns of a Pattern Language in Manga Style by Takashi Iba, Hiroaki Tanaka,
Sae Adachi, Mizuki Ota, and Urara Tajima.

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Saph Mihrab with Plum Blossoms
Leader: Rebecca Wirfs-Brock

Saph Mihrab with Plum Blossoms
This single mihrab from a large saph comes from the same saph as the other single mihrab now in the Turk ve Islam Museum
and the three niche fragment in the Textile Museum. Tile works of similar sprays of plum blossoms were almost exclusively made in
the 16th century. The beauty of geometrical tracery and line, which produced wholeness so strongly in the earlier 15th century carpets,
is still visible in the drawing of the lamp.
7: Oral History of Applying Pattern Language to New Domains: Places, Programs, and Practices by Takashi Iba.
15: Development of Co-Creative Processes Found in Environmentally or Developmentally Advanced Cities Using Pattern
Language by Takuya Togawa, Satoshi Ohnishi, Hideya Fukushima, Ryoko Gotoh, and Yasuko Gomi.
21: Unlocking the Secrets of Generative Patterns by Lise Hvatum and Rebecca Wirfs-Brock.
25: CheriSharing Patterns: A Pattern Language for Sharing Cherished Qualities of a Community by Sawami Shibata, Kento
Takamura, Yuki Maeda, and Takashi Iba.
26: Patterns for Deepening Understanding with Peers in a Pattern Language for Value-Creation Marketing by Takashi Iba,
Miho Masai, Yuuri Abe, and Yuji Kosaka.

5Endless Repeating Design
Leader: Steve Berczuk

Endless Repeating Design with Blue Leaves on a Yellow Border
Here we have dazzling color and brilliant egoless form. This deceptively simple carpet, its very fine weave, subtle coloration ofbrown yellow and blue which is almost Seljuk in quality, the finesse of the design—all suggest a 15th century date. The design isparticularly interesting since an endless repeat—in any form—is the most fundamental structure of centers that there is, and themost fundamental way of making wholeness in the plane.
6: SCM Pattern Looking Back and Forward by Steve Berczuk.
9: Pattern Language for the Modeling Practices of MATLAB and Simulink by Hiroki Itoh and Yasuo Hosotan.
14: Patterns for Software Systems in Low-Resource Environments by Abayomi Agbeyangi and Hussein Suleman.
16: Well-Being Patterns: A Pattern Language for Well-Being at Work by Erika Inoue, Kazuki Hioki, An Hikino, Yutaka Otsuka,Tatsuo Hidaka, Masatada Kobayashi, and Takashi Iba.
20: Patterns for Low-Code Developer Experience by Daniel Pinho, Ademar Aguiar, and Vasco Amaral.

6Waving Border
Leader: Valentino Vranić

Waving Border Carpet
This almost completely preserved carpet of the 15th century is one of the most powerful in the collection. . . . [A]rtistically, thecarpet achieves something very unusual in the field of centers. The centers are more animated than in most early carpets, as though anendless waving motion creates the stillness at the center. The wave of the border, the astonishing symmetrically placed wave elements,vibrates to create the main feeling of the carpet.
10: Patterns of Organizing Remote Users with Agile Teams by Mohammad Daud Haiderzai and Valentino Vranić.
11: Exploring the Intersection of Society, Culture and Technology: Bridging the Knowledge Gap Between Digital Transformation and Traditional Operations by Mohammad Yusuf Momand and Valentino Vranić.
19: Corporate Values to a Pattern Language, Part 2: The Case of Rakuten Group’s Five Principles for Success by Haruto Aoki,Erika Inoue, Sawami Shibata, Yukiko Ochiai, Tatsuo Hidaka, Masatada Kobayashi, and Takashi Iba.
22: A Pattern Language for Filipino Youth to Live a Self-Reliant Life by Takako Kanai, Mizuki Ota, and Takashi Iba.
23: Generator Patterns: A Way of Being That Fascinates Others with the Attractive World and Generates Discoveries andExcitement by Kaito Shiota, Kiyoka Hayashi, Aoi Imai, Ema Okubo, Hiroaki Tanaka, and Takashi Iba.

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Flaming Animal Spirit with Vultures
Leader: Kyle Brown

Flaming Animal Spirit Carpet with Vultures
Perhaps one of the most interesting carpets discovered in recent times. It appears to represent a series of giant winged figures, onwhich animal spirits are dancing or hovering. One of the most striking things is the movement if the figures which I call the flaming
animal spirits.2
3: Patterns for Quantum Circuit Cutting by Marvin Bechtold, Johanna Barzen, Martin Beisel, Frank Leymann, and Benjamin
Weder.
12: Towards a Software Architecture Training Pattern Language by Wilson Libardo Pantoja Yepez, Julio Ariel Hurtado Alegria,Luis Mariano Bibbo, Alejandro Fernandez, and Ajay Bandi.
28: Security Argument patterns for Deep Neural Network Development by Marwa Zeroual, Brahim Hamid, Morayo Adedjouma, and Jason Jaskolka.
32: Software Engineering Patterns for Machine Learning Applications (SEP4MLA) by Hironori Washizaki, Foutse Khomh,
Yann-gaël Guéhéneuc, Hironori Takeuchi, Satoshi Okuda, and Naotake Natori.
33: Classification of Human-Human and Human-AI Pair Programming Effects and Expansion for AI Pair Programming
Patterns by Yuma Takai, Hironori Washizaki, Nobukazu Yoshioka, and Yoshiaki Fukazawa.

2 Alexander v Hackers: FLAME v. To speak incessantly and/or rabidly on some relatively uninteresting subject or with a patently ridiculous attitude.