up to the higher rules and it’s about how to design a neighborhood block and where you
should put the schools and play-centers. And then it moves in closer, and it’s about how
you should place your house in the yard, and how you do private and public areas in the
house. And as you move up to the highest level, it’s about where you should put your
flower planters on the windowsill and how to place a park bench. So the rules go
through all these different scales, but they’re all based on aspects of human behavior.
And they try to extrapolate. The fact that we like to have private spaces, and a lot of our
activities at home we consider private activities, and other ones are public activities.
And so the design of the house should reflect that. There should be some pretty clearly
private areas in the house and more clearly public areas. So, that’s the way he looks at
an aspect of human behavior and then extrapolates a design rule from it. And then he
gives examples of how you might implement that design rule. So basically he’s coming
up with one proposal for a grammar of design. And a lot of people have odds with the
particular grammar he came up with, but I always thought his attempt was very noble.
So you thought you could come up with a simulation that would simulate his
rules.
It wasn’t even his rules I was after. What I was after was trying to get this linkage
between human behavior and design. If you look at most architecture magazines nowa-
days they’re about what textures are in this year, what colors, what fabrics, or what
decorating styles. They have very little to do with human behavior. Architecture used
to be about how you design spaces to facilitate human actions, tasks, and activities. He
wrote an earlier book calledNotes on the Synthesis of Formwhich drove home the point a
little more clearly. He actually did a lot of third-world design, where he would go in and
study these tribes or cultures, fairly primitive people, and look at their activities. Which
activities did they do together and what groups of people collaborated on these activi-
ties. And from this he was actually able to extrapolate some design rules for their
culture. How their houses should be laid out and how their towns and villages should be
arranged. And I just thought that was a very refreshing approach to architecture, get-
ting back to the functional reasons for and requirements of architecture as opposed to
the aesthetic and “architecture as modern art” sort of approach. If you look at a lot of
these modern architecture books you see these houses in there that I would not want to
live in. They’re really cool looking, and they look really pretty, especially when they’re
empty and they’re so stark. But I couldn’t imagine living in them. There’s this big
disconnect.
So originally it had to do more with building your house?
It had more to do with enabling behavior and interaction through design. And in some
sense it still retains that. Just with not quite the same amount of focus.
When I played the game, I got much more wrapped up in the interpersonal
interactions.
Yeah, I think that’s where the focus really changed. We didn’t realize how engaging the
social part of the game would be. The original concept was that you were trying to keep
this family happy at home. The idea that you would have these visitors that you would
426 Chapter 22: Interview: Will Wright