There is a new genre out there. It's digital and it's focusing on the relationship between information orders and spatial orders, and more often than not it is trying to meld the two into a synthetic space.

The root to understanding the synthetic comes with the realisation that information has a construct that is based upon a system of relative relationships between sometimes disparate pieces or bits of information. We witness the imposition of relative information orders onto space constantly. For example, think of how you arrange your office desk, think of how you order your diary, your hard disk, your note pad, your office. All of these things are divided into parts with different places for different types of information

Information simply can't do that. This very simple example opens the door to understanding the current information environment and some of the cultural, spatial and architectural implications of information systems.

Most of the literature that best illustrates the consequences and changes that society faces, has been underpinned by urban design theory; city theory. Christopher Alexander in a 1965 essay called "The City is not a Tree" used the term artificial cities, to describe a modern sterility and explained that such cities "lacked a level of complexity necessary to sustain a legitimate urbanity." His effective comment through the paper ridiculed the contemporary city while at the same time unwittingly and unintentionally pushing the desire for a new unified aesthetic, the very one that modern cities were drifting toward. This paper clutches at the word 'artificial' and morphoses it into a more positive, relevant and meaningful word, synthetic.

Alexander brings a unique insight to the synthetic dialect. His realisation that spaces can be described within hierarchical, tree-like and or semi-lattice information structures introduces us to the idea that spatial systems are compatible with information systems. Both form similar structures and display common orders when (and only when) analysed and conceived of as hierarchical systems.