I'm currently reading Stewart Brand's "How Buildings Learn". Now that Alexander's "pattern language" meme has become broadly and deeply embedded in the software development community, it's a good time to look at Brand's arguments from the perspective of software platforms and applications. How does your software adapt to real world uses, once it's delivered? What are good and bad examples of "high road" and "low road" livable software, and the tensions between software and its environment? Looking at a full user experience, with all the software layers from kernel up, how should this influence the way we design?