Layers of Change: How Buildings and Software are Alike
Stewart Brand’s model of how buildings learn applied to product design
As a first-time home buyer in the Bay Area in 2014, discouraged from the million-dollar studio apartments and unwinnable bidding wars, I stumbled upon this fantastic little cottage in Berkeley in my price range. Built on a hillside surrounded by public land, there was a hiking trail just feet from the front door. The house looked entirely handcrafted, with arched doorways, a pinnacle skylight, and a circular floor plan. I couldn’t believe it — did I find an affordable single-family home in the Berkeley hills?!
I was ready to buy it that day and called my realtor to start the process. But after looking at the disclosures, we learned a critical detail: the house was slipping down the hillside! We’ll never know if it was because the home had gotten jealous of the happy hikers it had seen for all those years and finally wanted to join them or because of a poorly engineered foundation, but the house was slowly slipping away.
In effect, you were buying a lot with a building to demolish. So it wasn’t a $500k house. It was a multi-million dollar and multi-year project.
Stewart Brand is a prolific figure in many areas of our culture. He was a Merry Prankster, founded The Hackers Conference, and the organization that became the Encyclopedia of Life. Brand also created a publication called The Whole Earth Catalog. It reviewed products through the lenses of self-sufficiency, ecology, DIY, holism, and alternative education — all concepts to which you may be subscribers. An early instantiation of the open-source and hacker ethos, the magazine’s slogan was “access to tools.” The publication was so significant that Steve Jobs included it in his famous 2005 Stanford Commencement address:
When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation … It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along. It was idealistic and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.
Shearing Layers of Change
Among his other publications, Brand authored How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They’re Built. He explores the concept of Shearing Layers, an idea from architect Frank Duffy where he suggests that we perceive buildings as static objects, but in reality, they are in a constant state of change. When a colleague first shared this concept with our team, the parallels to software development helped me think about our work differently.
Site
Building foundations, like tech stacks, are expensive to change and change very slowly. Sometimes past decisions continue to build debt until you have to tear it down and start over or slip away.
Structure
The structure holds the building up and allows for flexibility while maintaining resilience. Structure in digital products is analogous to layout and platform conventions: page and record types or native patterns like Apple’s new Dynamic Island and Google’s snack bar. There are canonical models for much of this, and they change slowly.
Skin
The surface of the building; its paint, siding, roofing, etc. To designers, this is visual design. It reflects the fashionable current trends, including typography, color, spacing, and motion. It can change seasonally, annually, or when the brand updates.
Services
Services are electricity, water, or HVAC; for software, they are our features and APIs. Does the product do what people need? Can the user accomplish their task?
Space Plan
The space plan is how we group things. It’s the information architecture of your site or product. If someone can’t find their information, it’s time to rethink your organization.
Stuff
The stuff is your furniture, photos, and accessories, which constantly change. It’s the content of our products, the images, UI text, and supporting materials. We’re always experimenting with new ways of showcasing our business and communicating with customers.
Regained Focus
As I’ve continued in my career, I’ve used this framework to help structure how I think about software design. It’s a reminder and warning; while there may be many ways to improve your software significantly, your best efforts may amount to naught without a strong foundation.
I hope this helps you think about product design differently! Have feedback, questions, or different insights? Let’s connect on Mastodon.
🙏 Thanks to Justin Rheinfrank for originally sharing!
Update
I’m honored that shortly after sharing this article on Twitter, Stewart shared it with his audience with kind words.
