Designing Processes 47 FIGURE 3.5 Diagoon housing. Photo: David Kasparek. Source: Flickr. This is an approach that runs contrary to the break-it-down, isolate-the-issues pattern view that scholars such as Christopher Alexander have been pushing. It is also an approach we think suits best the design of complex, user-concerned systems: in designing pervasive architectures it is preferable to sacrifice local details and local precision for a better global experience than it is to do vice versa, as local imprecision might become global precision. If they are all part of a single process, a somewhat lacking but totally integrated Web site serves its user better than a super-hot, super-trendy Web site that has nothing in common--language, layout, categories, or architecture--with either the paper catalogs or the stores. Breaking things down definitely may help understand, but this understanding does not necessarily imply that we should (re)build complex systems that way. These points, notes, and concerns are dealt with in detail in Part Three: for now, let's just see how these loose thoughts apply to the design of pervasive information architectures. Just remember that in the design of ubiquitous ecologies, imprecise may not be a bad thing. Not at all. designing ProCesses Think for a moment of when you go shopping: it is not exactly just buying, is it? It is not the simple act of picking up something from the store (or Web site) and paying for it at the cashier (or on the check-out page). It is much more than that: it starts earlier on, maybe when reading about a certain product in a