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• Many patterns are hard-wired into our mind: we inherit actions and reactions that guarantee our survival. Other patterns have to be learned, and form an artificial extension of the human mind. The ability too observe patterns gives us the human advantage of both adapting to, and changing our environment.

• What is meant by patterns connecting each other?

• The patterns do not determine the design. By imposing constraints, they eliminate a large number of possibilities while still allowing an infinite number of possible designs.

• In a living city, boundaries define and connect different regions, and encourage many human processes that make the city successful. Whether these functions take place is largely a consequence of the geometry of the urban boundaries: it has to be both crinkly and permeable (in mathematical terms, it is accurate to call such a line a "fractal", since it is neither continuous, nor perfectly smooth).

• A pattern is discovered solution that has been tested for some time and under varying conditions. For architectural and urban patterns, the time-frame can be several millennia. A pattern is not usually invented, so creativity is subordinated here to scientific inquiry and observation.

• Many patterns do not yet have a scientific explanation; for others that do, the explanations may be bulky and convoluted compared to the simplicity of the pattern itself. Medicine, pharmacology, and psychology are based at least partially on pattern languages.

• In practice, patterns languages arise from two different needs: (a) as a way of understanding, and possibly controlling, a complex system; (b) as necessary design tools with which to build something that is functionally and structurally coherent.

• A pattern is an encapsulation of forces; a general solution to a problem.

• The rules by which the patterns (nodes) connect are just as important as the patterns themselves. Words without connection rules cannot make up a language.

• A pattern language does not have a strictly modular rule structure - as would be the case if the language were defined by only few units - but adds new rules as the scales grow. Higher levels in a system are dependent on all lower levels but not vice-versa.

• The combination of patterns acting on a smaller level of scale acquires new and unexpected properties not present in the constituent patterns, and these are expressed in a higher-level pattern.

• You may obtain insight into a new field lacking a pattern language by studying patterns from established disciplines. A universal high-level structure is inherent in all pattern languages. The solution space, which is rarely one-dimensional, which means that knowing what doesn't work cannot give what works simply by doind the opposite. There may be an infinity of different opposites.

• We need to warn against the destructive tendency in our times of judging patterns prematurely using strict criteria such as efficiency, cost reduction, and streamlining. It is no that these are inappropiate criteria, but rather that they tend to ignore the linkage between patterns.[...] You may attempt to streamline a process after its complexity is well understood, but not before.

• The most elegant complex systems are nearly (but not perfectly) ordered. having to accommodate patterns on the smaller and intermediate scales, [...] the larger-scale patterns cannot be perfect in the sense of being pure or too simple. GOOD DESIGN AVOIDS UNNECESSARY COMPLICATION. It is balanced between arising out of loosely organized small-scale patterns, which could lead to somewhat random form or processes, and patterns which might pay too much attention to the large scale. Going too far in either extreme damages the coherence (and therefore the efficiency) of the system.

• A pattern is not dictated or forced but arises out of use, and is accepted on its benefits. It facilitates human life and interactions, ans has to continually stand up to test of its efficacy in this respect.

• No architectural pattern can be represented as a single visual image.

• Patterns work via cooperation to build up complex wholes that coexist and compete in some dynamic balance.[...] A destructive stylistic rule, like a virus, is an informational code that dissolves the complexity of living systems. [...] A single visual template can eventually destroy a culture just as effectively as a deadly virus.