Property 12 — Echoes
Echoes is introduced in
Echoes, or self-similarity, are similar to design motifs. There can be a recognisable element occurring at different scales and under different guises. It could be a colour combination, a set of angles, or how things are connected. When we echo the details this way, it makes the whole a cohesive thing, even if it goes on and on.
Rather than actively introduce echoes, we instead attempt to maintain some self-similarity as we accept new elements into the design. We reject ideas that add unnecessary variation and invite others which mirror aspects of the elements already present.
When a project grows, more people work concurrently on its development. Having more minds invites more ways of solving problems. But if we restrain ourselves and maintain the vision, we produce work with echoes throughout. When a design starts to veer off, we see more themes or fonts than are necessary. A level of variation is typical of something living but those variations will be thematic because natural processes usually pull from a palette of options.
We can see how it hurts in collections with limp central themes which need more definition. Some buildings try to conform simultaneously to multiple styles and exhibit a loss of identity. Art that attempts to represent more than one aspect can lose itself to meaninglessness[NoO1-01]. The same statement can be applied to a presentation or document that doesn’t make a cohesive argument. I hope this last point isn’t relevant to this book.
Sometimes, all you need to do to create echoes is use the same materials. Materials tend to guide their use and often suggest themes by their limits. So do the restrained usage of fonts in your document or a narrow palette of colours on your website. When you have a lot of different styles, they break the echo. You must tame the styles by grouping them or separate them into contrasting collections rather than a soup of randomness.
Any architecture lacking echoes almost implies it has too much complexity to remain stable. Echoes of forms help create repeatable patterns of stresses and strain, which allows the builder to judge the limits of the material better, as there is less to consider. Without echoes, there are too many variables. Notably, echoes are often absent in software architecture, as DRY causes echoes to look suspicious.
Echoes are used to repeat elements over different levels of the hierarchy of life. We have giant malls, superstores, mini-markets, and corner shops. These are like coarser-grained levels of scale of the same resource. They cater for the differing scales of different types of consumers. From national parks to regional parks to local parks to local common green spaces, the scale of space and use is graduated but echoing. Each is a scale up or down to the next and helps address the needs of a different user, as the users echo across different ages and group sizes. But notice that the scale is not too close. The small park feels unnatural next to another, similar-sized park. A small shop can be more competition for another small shop than a mall is, as a mall brings a different type of consumer.