Distributed Application Architecture Patterns

2.5 Design process

Creating ideograms for the patterns, such as those employed in 2.1 was considered, but the issue is that by nature, they can only convey a limited amount of information to those unfamiliar with the underlying idea. However, having a simple, understandable representation of the pattern could be a very useful learning tool.

Therefore, this work instead uses a process to create pictograms called eidetic reduction [33, pp. 39–42]. Eidetic reduction is a process defined by Husserl in 1913 [34], which involves iteratively simplifying a concept, keeping only the elements essential to its representation, i.e. which constitute its essence. This is a time-consuming process that requires a lot of experimentation but results in much simpler diagrams than those used in the literature reviewed in § 1.2 with only a limited sacrifice to informativeness.