The Hillside Group was founded on the observation that innovation and design is one of the most difficult human endeavors, requiring the creation of novelty under pressure, sometimes without the benefits of a long tradition to fall back on. The Hillside Group endeavors to help others recognize that for disciplines in early stages of development, artistry and invention are as much a part of creation as good engineering.

The world is a mixture of concerns ranging from correctness and efficiency to the beauty and elegance of the architecture, design, and internal structure of systems to the overall aesthetics, usability, and humanity of systems and all the way to the organization and the manner of design. This spectrum can be broken down into those parts that are necessary for the correct and efficient functioning and creation of systems on one hand and what makes those systems and organizations for making them "good," aesthetically pleasing, and humane on the other. That is, at one extreme are concerns about the minimal requirements to get the job done and at the other are concerns about qualities and the humanity of the process that produced it.

The Hillside Mission

The mission of the Hillside Group is to improve the quality of life and society as a whole. This includes architects, developers, managers, owners, workers, educators, students, and more. Understanding and helping the human element is critical for achieving success. The Hillside Group believes in making processes and design more humane by paying attention to real people and existing practices.

The Hillside Group promotes the use of patterns and pattern languages to record, analyze, and share knowledge to help achieve its mission. The Hillside Group sponsors a variety of activities to achieve this mission—organizing workshops, hosting PLoP (pattern) conferences, and producing publications for discussing, recording, and documenting successful practices.

In August of 1993, Kent Beck and Grady Booch sponsored a mountain retreat in Colorado where a group converged on foundations for software patterns. Ward Cunningham, Ralph Johnson, Ken Auer, Hal Hildebrand, Grady Booch, Kent Beck and Jim Coplien struggled with Alexander's ideas and our own experiences to forge a marriage of objects and patterns. The Group agreed that we were ready to build on Erich Gamma's foundation work studying object-oriented patterns, to use patterns in a generative way in the sense that Christopher Alexander uses patterns for urban planning and building architecture. We then used the term ''generative'' to mean ''creational'' to distinguish them from ''Gamma patterns'' that captured observations. The Group was meeting on the side of a hill when all this occurred, hence the name.

Since then, the Hillside Group has been incorporated as an educational non-profit. It has sponsored and helped run various conferences (PlopConference, EuroPlop, ChiliPlop, KoalaPlop, Mensore PLoP, SugarloafPLoP, and UP97) and has been responsible for getting the PatternLanguagesOfProgramDesign series of books put together and published.

More history can be found on the Portland's Pattern Repository