Christopher Alexander (1936-2022) was an architect who studied the way nature and traditionally built buildings (such as peasant huts, or cathedrals) are a particular kind of beautiful, and have (he argued) the ability to bring a person back into a sense of perspective (e.g., a person may be quite stressed out about some detail, and then go for a long walk in nature, and find themselves “coming back to themselves.”) Alexander attempted to work out a theory of design (for buildings, but also for design work broadly) that would create houses and other built objects with this same sort of beauty and sense of perspective embedded in them. His work inspired the “design patterns” movement in computer science, and, indirectly, wikis.