One of the things that I’ve found as I’ve worked on technology and business systems over the years is that I believe we look at the concept of “architecture” backwards.
What I mean by this is that when we think of structures or systems that emerge over time, whether in physical or digital form, we think in terms of discrete initiatives that produce outcomes, with those outcomes being an “architecture.”
We believe that we’re going to think something up, and then build it based on some preconceived notion of what “architecture” is and what we expect it to look like when we’re “done” with a project.
I see things differently. In fact, I see the “architecture” as being something else entirely…something that isn’t determined at all, but can only be described in a particular state at a specific point in time.
In short, architecture “emerges.” Architecture represents the observation of the structures, flows, entities, components, and other concepts that all come together to serve a purpose.
And when we observe and describe an architecture, what we find is the architecture tells us a lot about what we were thinking, how we were feeling, and how how we saw the world at a particular point in time.
In a way, architecture can be thought of as the capturing and encapsulating of the knowledge and beliefs of humans over time.
A ledger of our collective wisdom and capabilities. An open book to be read by future observers.
An analogy came to mind as I was thinking through this concept that may explain where my thoughts are on this.
People used to live in mud houses, right?
Today, in wealthier societies, people live in what we would call “modern” houses.
What’s the difference between a modern house and a mud house?
Well, obviously they are not made of mud in most cases. They are made of more durable materials like steel, lumber, and brick.
But beyond that, what separates a mud house from a modern house?
You’re probably thinking in terms of things such as the plumbing, electrical, and structural components of the house. And you would not be incorrect.
But I would invite you to think of this a little differently - it’s not necessarily the specific things like wires and pipes and beams and such that create the “architecture.”
It’s the knowledge and thinking that went into the designing and building of the house that resulted in the final output: The observable structures and flows that we describe as the architecture.
What do I mean by this?
Well, we’ve learned a thing or two about designing and building houses between the days of mud houses and today’s houses, right?
And all of those things that we’ve learned, that we eventually adopted and began applying to designing and building new houses, are what show up in the finished structures.
What worked in the past? What didn’t work? Why?
What should we do moving forward? What shouldn’t we do? Why?
The answers to these questions lead to knowledge, that knowledge gets distributed and applied, and it gets encoded in methods and practices for future generations to apply.
When a new house gets built, it represents the collective knowledge of the humans that designd and built it at a specific intersection of space and time.
The humans that held that particular knowledge at that particular point in time learned it somewhere.
And because those humans, like all humans, cannot know what isn’t yet knowable at a point in time, the architecture also represents what we didn’t know and other constraints we faced at the time.
It represents how we thought about and approached the future without the benefit of knowing what we now know today.
And in 50 years from now, an entirely new generation will be looking back on what I’m now referring to as “modern” houses as being primitive or out of style.
Why? Because there will be 50 years of knowledge collected and applied to the process of designing and building houses between now and then.
People in the future will learn things that we do not know today and couldn’t possibly know. But they will benefit from our understanding of the world as we experience and learn from it, because it will be written to the immutable ledger of architecture.
And we can come back to a conceptual level and apply this to all types of architecture beyond just designing and building houses.
We can apply this thinking to conceptual or digital architectures, particularly software applications and enterprise systems. And even more specifically, what we tend to offhandedly refer to as “legacy” systems or applications.
The architectures that we observe are not necessarily tangible or physical in nature, but they still reflect the state of our knowledge and approaches to the future at the time we designed and built digital structures such as classes, models, or schemas.
And like our evolution from mud houses to modern houses, if we approach architecture as the observation of the structures that we design and build as humans, we can learn to learn from them.
We can learn how to create more lasting digital structures when we need to build durability into our systems, just as much as we can learn how to create temporary and fluid structures that adopt rapidly to changing conditions, attitudes, and beliefs.
The key though, is learning. Learning from the collective wisdom of the past to create the new structures of the future.
And if we view architecture as the encapsulation of that evolved knowledge and wisdom rather than the thing that emerges, we can start to approach designing and building in new ways that create new knowledge to be encapsulated in future observable architectures.