Elephants, Patterns, and Heuristics

Capturing the wholeness of design solutions in order to effectively communicate them to others can be challenging. We posit that patterns are observable phenomena of design solutions. To represent these phenomena, a pattern author needs to generalize and omit information. Experienced designers are able to unfold the essence of the pattern and generate design solutions based on the information that they do find in a pattern description. Not surprisingly, their personal design heuristics play a central role in this. As they create a design solution, they also liberally apply their pre-existing design know-how and heuristics. But novice designers may have more difficulty. As this folding and unfolding of information and knowledge seems to be quite an abstract concept, we have chosen to make our point by discussing elephants. Like patterns, elephants are an observable phenomenon, a pattern in nature. Many different descriptions, representations, and accounts of elephants exist. Many people claim to know what elephants are. Yet they actually have little or limited knowledge of them. This analogy helps to understand how at the same time we both know and do not know what a thing is.