Building Levels and Websites

Stewart Brand, the author of "How Buildings Learn" is a proponent of the layered theory of time and space. In buildings, for example, he identifies six levels: site, structure, services, skin, space plan, and stuff. The site is the basis for everything else. It's the lot, the foundation, the ground underneath. It sets limits for everything else. The structure is then the load-bearing part of the building, and sets still more limits for further construction. The skin is the outer covering, and services are the functional parts of the building, the electrical, water, heat, elevators, and so forth. Space plan is the movable walls within, and stuff is people, furniture, and other readily-moved items.

In this view, each layer has its own time cycle, and woe betide the building owner who ties them together or makes them move too quickly. The stuff can change daily, while the space plan typically changes in two or three years, or perhaps more. The skin may change only once a decade. Services longer than that, and the site almost never. He counsels strongly against tying the various levels together, such as built-in furniture, because it forces levels with inherently different time-scales to stick together, creating (in the case of built-in sofas, tables, or chairs, for example) either radical surgery on the space plan or tolerance of out-of-date furniture.

I think this structural metaphor can be applied to portals and websites, and it can help us understand why some sites always seem to give us trouble. Of course, the absolute time-scale has to be reduced for the IT world, but the relative splits in levels seems to hold.

Try these equivalents:

Site = Server hardware and underlying base code, such as portal
Structure = Information architecture
Services = App code (portlets, Javascript, etc.)
Space plan = Links, portlets, pages, actual "places" that are delineated from one another
Skin = Appearance (CSS, colors, layout)
Stuff = Content (text, news items, and so on)

From this perspective, it can be seen why CSS is such a good idea -- it isolates the skin from the space plan and the stuff, giving us distinctly different time-scales for them. But there is also a caution here, that changing a space plan too often, for example, because the stuff changes, is a mistake. And in the Web world, the skin is generally replaced more often than the space plan, but they are often replaced together, too. Is this a mistake? Is novelty so important that we have to mess with the user's comfort levels?

I may not have the right Web components identified with the right building metaphors, or the whole comparison may be futile. Look through Brand's book and tell me what you think.