Seeing Patterns
What patterns in clouds, polka music, and design have in common.
The word ‘pattern’ has always resonated with me. The word evokes the design of repeating graphic patterns in nature and design as well as patterns in human behavior. It makes me think of pattern languages in design but also patterns of thinking and how we make connections in our mind.
Seeing Patterns Others Miss
There is a desert dwelling community in India with forty different names for clouds. They are experts at gathering water and their interest in cloud patterns, no doubt, stems from their need to know which ones will deliver rain. The Gaelic language has 32 words for field and, according to the author Manchán Magan, 99 words for rain. Like the linguistic fable that Inuits have, “50 words for snow”, many cultures seem to have rich vocabularies to match the dynamics of their environment or dominant interests. But seeing it from the outside usually produces the opposite effect. To someone who’s never seen snow, all snow looks the same. This happens in design, most professions, and our daily lives too.
I took an ethnography class when I was in college. It did not seem so at the time but it became highly relevant to my product design career. The professor, Charles Keil, was an ethno-musicologist and had studied music-making communities in Africa, New York City, and the Mississippi Delta. Since he taught at the University of Buffalo, his research continued there. Historically, Buffalo had a huge Polish population. He told the class a story about the polka music community in Buffalo and two seemingly contradictory patterns. ‘The Laurence Welk Show’ was a popular national TV show at the time. Welk was both the show’s host and leader of the show’s polka band.
Polka music is not for everybody. When people who were not polka lovers were asked about Welk’s music, many said they didn’t like the music. A frequent comment was, “every song sounds the same”. However, when lovers of polka music were asked the same question, the exact opposite sentiment was expressed. Where some heard a grating monotony, fans heard variety. They knew there were common patterns to the music (the part outsiders disliked). But once you got into the music, they felt each song was unique. Hard core fans appreciated the subtle differences in each polka song.
What the polka community experienced applies to almost any sub-culture. One person’s variety is another person’s monotony. I experienced the same phenomenon in trying to find common ground with one of my college roommates. He was into the Rolling Stones. I was into Steely Dan. He despised Steely Dan. When I asked why he said, “It all sounds the same”. What I saw as just blunt criticism, I now see as the Laurence Welk phenomenon. Steely Dan has a distinctive sound. From an outsider’s perspective it might all sound the same. But for an insider, I hear a wide range of songs framed by the common elements of Walter Becker’s distinctive guitar and Donald Fagan’s keyboard and smart vocals.
When I took running classes with the NY Road Runners Club, I was amazed at how much runners can talk about the details of running. To an outsider it would just be a run. But to a runner there are numerous details to discuss. There were different techniques used on slight inclines versus steep uphills. There’s the start of the sprint versus the push to the finish, passing another runner versus drafting. The detailed patterns you see as an insider.
Get Andy Proehl’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
These two levels of detail also show up in my freehand drawings. When I work on freehand maps, I worry about the quality of my line. It wavers. Sometimes it looks natural but sometimes it looks sloppy. Occasionally, I can even detect the echo of my heartbeat in the line. Over time I realized that most people don’t see that level of detail… only that the line is hand drawn. What I was seeing as big wiggles disappeared when you looked at it from a normal viewing distance. We design things at a finer level of detail than most viewers notice.
Seeing the detail that outsiders miss helps cement a community of interest. Focus sets the craftsman apart from the hobbyist and the fan from the casual observer.
Seeing patterns where they don’t exist.
In the movie ‘A Beautiful Mind’, Russel Crowe plays mathematician John Nash. While studying at Princeton, Nash begins suffering from schizophrenia. He starts seeing things, including people, that aren’t there. There is a scene (depicted in the scene above) where he sees mathematical patterns wherever he looks. He sees cryptic patterns in the courtyard outside his dorm window and documents them by drawing on the glass. His path back to sanity later in the movie is a journey of learning which patterns to pursue and which ones to ignore.
I had a young designer working for me when I was a design director at Sony. He was energetic and interested in learning so I enjoyed working with him. He helped design reports for some of our design projects. Eager to contribute, he would suggest additional ideas. Some made sense, others didn’t. I noticed that, in his mind, almost any topic was connected to any other. He was clearly creative but almost too connective. In design, you have to present to broad, non-design audiences and you have to make connections that your audience can see too. This was particularly the case at Sony. We were working on digital, user experience-focused products. But the executives we would present to were anchored in Sony’s long and successful run as a physical consumer products company. UX issues needed to be framed in ways that hardware folks would understand.
Seeing Meaningful Connections
In a post commenting about real vs. imagined connections between AI and mysticism, QuantumTumbler captured the nature of this cautionary tale perfectly.
“I’d encourage people to be careful about keeping a strong distinction between what feels meaningful and what we can actually verify. Synchronicity, astrology, psychedelics, AI, spirituality… they can all produce profound experiences, but they’re also domains where it’s easy to start connecting dots that aren’t really there.” – @QuantumTumbler on X
Patterns are a common theme across disciplines. I first came across it when I stumbled upon Christopher Alexander’s, ‘A Pattern Language’ book when I was studying architecture. The concept of pattern languages ultimately had much more success in UX and product design. It was a better fit. When Yahoo was still in its prime, they had a pattern library and a team that captured and documented patterns from the many properties across the company. Christian Crumlish ran the group and famously had the title, “Pattern Detective” on his business card. Pattern languages evolved into the design systems that are still in use today. The primary value of pattern languages is to make interfaces more intuitive for users by identifying tried and true solutions. But for me, the larger value has been as a time saver. A typical app or website requires hundreds of small design decisions. Design patterns free a team up to focus on innovation and differentiation instead of redesigning the wheel.
Humans, like many animals, are pattern seekers. Expertise and creativity come from seeing patterns and distinctions that others miss. Wisdom lies in knowing which connections are meaningful, which are merely noise.
