Interesting mirror

Tobias Wong's Rorschach mirrror somehow reminds me of peering through an opening in the branches of a tree.

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to22

Three designers in different countries calling themselves to22. The unite a couple of times a year, but most of their collaboration is virtual.

Some really interesting ideas.

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Further thoughts on organicity


The evolution of the human brain
Our brains have been developing ever since the first basic nervous systems evolved perhaps a billion years ago. The specifically human features of our brains evolved between 3 million and 500 thousand years ago. Those features gave us the competitive advantages which have lead to our dominant position (in terms of influencing our destiny and that of the other organisms on the planet) in the Earth's ecosystem today.

We in the modern world use essentially the same brains as our ancestors on the plains of Africa, especially where the processing of visual information is concerned. It's as though we were all driving around in Flintstones cars on superhighways; there's a discrepancy between our tools (our brains) and the environment (the modern world). Our brains obviously evolved in 100% organic environments. This meant no straight lines (except the horizon and some crystals, though the former is curved, even to the naked eye, and the latter rare), no cubes or rectangles and few solid colours (even the sky is never uniformly the same colour). What the brain would have been continually exposed to through the eyes were variegated colour-fields, irregularly-repeating patterns, branching forms and sinuous curves. These are the forms which soothe the brain. It's ironic, but the cubes and other geometric forms invented by humans are literally inhuman in terms of what the brain was designed to exist among. No wonder people are unhappy living in tower blocks. No wonder people prefer warm, organic colours. No wonder people prefer wood to metal. No wonder people like to look at landscapes or watch the waves crash on the shore. Of course fashion and trends may make cold colours, cubic design and metallic materials popular at any particular time, but I believe that they don't ultimately make people happy.

This is the crux of the principal of organicity in design. It is fundamentally more human than…


Geometry and mathematics
Euclidean geometry is a wonderful mathematical tool which enabled human beings to improve their lives by constructing stable buildings, making navigation safer and engineering machines, among other things. Mapping objects and trajectories on two-dimensional surfaces is incredibly useful, though it does have its limitations (such as three-dimensional mapping, which is why maps of the world are never very satisfactory representations). However the introduction of perfect geometric forms and straight lines to the process of design contributed to it becoming increasingly inhuman. Once engineers start doing design, mathematics takes over. Numbers are useful tools too, but mathematics uses them in a limited way.

What is 1+1? Of course, the answer is 2. Or if you're a computer, the answer in binary is 10. But in nature the answer varies. Hold a drop of water in your hand. Add another drop. How many drops are in your hand? One. Take two rabbits and leave them in a cage with some food and water. How many rabbits will there be after six months? Twelve? (I actually don’t know – could a rabbit expert tell me, please?) So in nature sometimes 1+1=1, sometimes 1+1=12. Let's take colours as another example: if blue is B, green G and yellow Y, B+G=Y, Y+B=G and Y+G=B, which according to the rules of algebra makes no sense at all (unless B,G and Y are all 0 or infinity).

The Renaissance was the triumph of reason over superstition. Leon Battista Alberti wrote a hugely influential treatise which set out with mathematical precision the geometric elements which should be followed by architects, such as the square, cube, sphere and circle, all based on the human body's proportions, in the same way as Da Vinci's famous Vitruvian Man. The idea was that man was made in the image of God, therefore buildings made according to the geometric proportions of man would be harmoniously divine.

Organicity is the rejection of Euclidean geometry and mathematics for the purposes of design. Alberti and Da Vinci may have been geniuses, but their design concepts were based far more on rationality than the natural environment in which the human brain developed. Let the engineers figure out how to make the electricity flow or the building stand up in high winds, but don't let them design a bumble bee. And don't let them design our homes…


Architecture
The application of arithmetic and geometry to design, art and architecture lead to discoveries which changed the world. One of these was perspective drawing. Art before the Renaissance was, in a word, flat. Nobody had found a convincing way of reproducing three-dimensional depth. Around 1425 an architect named Filippo Brunelleschi changed all that by introducing straight lines which converged at a vanishing point. Art was forever changed and so was architecture. Already geometry and engineering allowed architects to build taller spires and spacious naves. Now visualizations of proposed buildings could be drawn to convincingly represent them in context. One of the first and most famous examples is the view of an ideal city by one of Brunelleschi's contemporaries (probably Piero della Francesca), shown here. According to anyone brought up to appreciate classical style, it is beautiful. There's only one problem. People, in fact the whole of nature, are completely excluded from the drawing. Just as medieval cathedrals were designed to reach up to heaven, leaving mere mortals in awe, this piece of architecture was meant to represent the perfect proportions of geometry and the triumph of mathematical rationality. The fact that actual people had to live there was completely irrelevant. Soon whole cities were planned according to geometrical forms such as stars, radials and gridirons.

Medieval towns, with their hodge-podge, emergent development are perfect examples of organicity. That's why there is something so attractive about the remaining examples, such as Toledo in Spain, Carcassonne in France or Siena in Italy. They have winding streets, small buildings and organic colours, rather than planned road schemes, awe-inspiring columns and municipal squares (though churches do provide towers). The Renaissance saw the advent of he urban planner and the municipal architect, and between them they have fought a constant battle on behalf of the inhuman against emergence and organicity. They have used concrete, steel and glass to build monuments to their engineering skills and egos. Architecture is the field where organicity has the most to achieve. No other area of design has as much negative impact on our well-being as modern architecture. Nothing else makes people feel so unimportant as individuals, so out-of-place, so small…


Scale
When you look at an architect's model – the building as it is envisaged sitting on a table top in a well-lit office, you might admire all kinds of things about it. The lines may be sleek, the windows might act as mirrors, there may be a clever reference to another period in architecture. What you can never appreciate (even if little plastic people and trees are strategically positioned) is the scale of the final building. You just can't. We must all have had the experience of seeing a photo of a famous building in a guide book, then going there and being blown away by the sheer size of the building in reality. It's a very impressive effect. However it's completely inhuman. The original skyscrapers, the pyramids of Egypt and the cathedrals of medieval Europe, were meant to leave people in awe, to make them feel small. Modern skyscrapers are meant to make the companies and people that occupy them look as awe-inspiring as the pharaohs or, dare I say it, God. The result of this explosion of ego on the part of the commissioners and designers of such buildings is that the people at street level feel like ants. Feeling like an ant is fine if you're an ant, but people exist on a different scale.

Scale is important because it represents what you're comfortable with. Something that fits nicely in your hand feels good. A house can be grand, but not dominating. An architect who understood the importance of scale and organicity in general was Antonio Gaudi, the Catalan genius who worked principally in Barcelona in the first half of the twentieth century. Even Gaudi's still-unfinished Sagrada Familia cathedral, though huge, has such an organic form, and such an attention to detail, that it still works on a human scale. The majority of his other buildings are equally organic.

Scale also intersects with emergence, in that emergent forms, such as ant colonies, tend to be on a larger scale altogether than the elements which produced them. The internet is another example. It has emerged, more or less person-by-person, website-by-website into something which is wholly incomprehensible to human beings. It is literally on another scale. Organic design may produce results which are beyond the human scale. Those results may be inevitable and possibly invisible (as we are to ants) but at least we won't have buildings which turn people into insects.

When the human brain evolved, it was used to seeing things on a human scale. The first people lived on wooded plains, where the biggest objects were trees and clouds. Even distant mountains remained in the distance. A landscape dotted with trees, grasslands and animals was the visual field that the first human eyes and brain had to deal with. There was a great deal of random pattern, rather than the enormous, monolithic facades of office towers.


Randomness
There may by a good deal of beauty in symmetry. Many species of animal, including humans have bodies which are symmetrical when viewed front on. This is believed to be an evolutionary mechanism for the unconscious evaluation of the fitness of a potential partner's genes. However beyond the attractiveness of symmetry, randomness is a very important element in what people consider beautiful.

There is something distinctly machinelike and inhuman about perfect lines, curves and surfaces in design. That's why computer animation works best for representing toys or bugs than people. Nature provides few examples of absolute purity of form. In fact variation is the secret of life. If it wasn't for random changes in the form of our genes, evolution would not happen. Prior to that, if the universe was perfectly uniform there would be no clumping of matter; no atoms and no galaxies.

In art and design, the human element comes in where the imperfections begin. Rembrandt's shadings, Renoir's strokes and Van Gogh's undulations are all examples of control of the random for the purpose of beauty. Designers who are slaves to their CAD programs run the risk of never producing work which is as aesthetically-pleasing as great art. Maybe they should leave things a little more open, allow their designs to evolve, to grow…


Planting seeds
The concept of planting seeds is the opposite of drilling for oil. With the latter, exploration or just plain hope suggest a place to start drilling. Once drilling has begun, it is human nature to want to drill deeper and deeper, even if no oil is struck, rather than abandon the hole and start drilling somewhere else (this metaphor is used by Edward de Bono in his seminal book on creativity, Lateral Thinking). It may turn out that there is oil right nearby, but once the drilling has begun, the investment of time, effort and money in the hole result in a kind of momentum which is very difficult to stop. This concept can be applied to many human activities (such as marriage), including design and other creative processes. The planting seeds metaphor instead suggests that it is more productive to select a good patch of ground, plant many seeds, tend for them and see which ones develop the fullest. This process might seem wasteful, as it is guaranteed that a number of seeds will not grow at all, but in the long run it produces effective results.

What this means in terms of creation is that it is better to begin with playful, unrestricted experimentation, such as sketches. The next step is to be very tolerant of unpromising sketches. In other words, don't be too demanding; don't try to see where each sketch will lead right away. Organicity implies evolution and emergence, which can follow unpredictable paths. Only after several rounds of development should some paths be taken up and others discarded. Even then, they should not be discarded completely, as they may be useful for other, as yet unthought-of purposes.

This method of creation is anathema to business, which requires controlled budgets, linear development and continuous accountability. Planting seeds produces none of these required factors. What it does produce is results. As long as the terrain chosen initially is fertile (ie. you're not trying to design a flying whale) some sturdy, fruitful 'plants' are sure to grow. Something will emerge…


Emergence
I thoroughly recommend reading the book by this title that was written by Steven Johnson and subtitled The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software. In a nutshell, emergence is the phenomenon whereby patterns emerge unpredictably in nature by the process of individual elements (eg. cells, animals, weather systems) following simple rules. The best example is that of ant colonies, which have no central planning, and (despite the misuse of the word 'queen') no leadership or even any kind of hierarchy. Ants communicate through the transmission of eight different pheromones and by touching each other. A simple set of nine basic 'words' and simple rules on how to react to the frequency of 'hearing he words' leads to the emergence of the incredibly complex, scarily human-like social structures which are ant colonies, complete with their armies, cemeteries, food storage facilities, farming, escape routes, nurseries and garbage dumps.

One of the reasons that ant colonies so closely resemble human cities is that cities also tend to develop according to the principles of emergence. Except for notable examples, often government towns such as Brasilia, people choose where to live, work and play according to their own personal desires. This leads to the development of larger structures and patterns such as ghettos, suburbs and business districts without any centralized planning (and sometimes despite the best efforts of urban planners).

How does this theory apply to design? Because emergence involves the application of a few simple rules in an evolving situation to produce unexpected efficiencies and natural patterns (the pattern of a flock of birds in flight is due to emergence). Sometimes, instead of imposing top-down rules when developing a design, a few simple rules can be used as a starting point which are then rigorously applied as a design develops. For example, one might design a mosaic by choosing yellow, blue, white and red pieces or tiles, starting with three tiles at random in one corner, and applying rules for the layout of the rest of the tiles such as, "If a yellow tile is touching a blue tile, another yellow tile must touch it; no red tile can be placed next to a blue tile; a blue tile must always be touched by two yellow tiles, which cannot touch each other and two white tiles which must touch each other." Maybe these rules will produce an interesting result, maybe they won't. The beauty and usefulness of emergence, is that the results are organic and unpredictable. Sometimes a slight tweaking of one of the rules will produce astonishingly different results.

On a metaphysical note, the best example of emergence in the universe is probably the universe itself. It is quite likely that from a few simply rules (whether they be the subatomic theories that scientists have thought up or some other equations) the primordial plasma, or whatever you want to call it, developed form and pattern, from atoms to molecules, to stars and galaxies, which are the largest forms known to man. That's unless you believe in a Grand Architect of some description. If you don't, you probably believe in evolution…

Organic Design - some thoughts on how to proceed and things to avoid


Do's

Ingredients rather than concepts
Flow, rather than discrete units
Emergence, rather than planning


Do Not's

No perfectly straight lines
No cubes
Never completely symmetrical
Not always logical
Not always efficient
Not always solid colours
Pattern rather than purity