Today, as I strolled through my early morning walk in the park, I let my mind wander, jog and some times even sprint through thoughts of design. The park, an assortment of thousands of thick and tall trees, bushy shrubs, stumps and even half dead trees spreading it’s naked branches like cobwebs across the skies. Amidst these trees and plants that adorn a range of shapes and shades of leaves and fruits, snakes around, a grey paved walkway, used by people of all ages, dogs and cats too that laze around. Enveloping the pathway to most part is a yellow fencing wall. Blue circular drums double up as trash cans sticking out at different points like a sore thumb. This park is an ideal example of design by nature and by humans. While all that nature creates is so organic, free flowing and composed, all our handy work is geometric and indifferent to the context to say the least.
Not a thing in nature (that I know of) is made of straight edges nor it is perfectly circular or spherical. Think of the flowers that bloom, the fruits they bear, the leafs that spring or the nests of the birds, or the path they take in flight. But it is interesting to note that humans are the only species to predominantly interact and thrive between this organic and the geometric world’s at the same time. The gardens and the nature are inorganic, but the spaces we create and objects we make are all geometric.
It is every designers vision to emulate nature in their work. Very often we try to replicate it without any understanding of how nature works that it comes out shallow and half baked. My understanding of design by nature is that, what we see in nature has evolved over time, and the principles of design has been perfected by every single species over millions of years of existence that it has been encoded in it’s DNA. The dog we see now wouldn’t have been the same few million years ago, but then, through time, by trial and error an ideal design would have been achieved at some point in time, after all, nature specializes in making mistake. The point is what we see in nature is design that evolved, evolved as per it’s needs for survival and to fulfil its role in the larger scheme of things.
I find that there are two main reasons for our designs to be not organic in most cases. One is the time. All our endeavours are so short lived that we do not dedicate sufficient time to let it shape up, secondly the systems we have developed and the machines we have made have confined us to a 2D world in a 3D space. This is akin to fitting a square peg In a circular hole.
That is not to say that we cannot adapt the principles of nature into our work. Of course designers use some of the same tools as nature does such as patterns, repetitions, variations, light and shadow etcetera to name a few, but what we miss is the progressive nature of these tools that nature uses so effectively in it’s glorious creations that we fail. If you notice, a branch of a tree having a bunch of leaves, the size of the leaves vary becoming smaller as it goes towards the tip of the branch, the color of the leaves to grades from a dark green to a light shade in that direction. The pattern may be visible from a distance but as you inspect from close quarters, you see that every leaf has some small variation, some small flaw or a kink making it unique but still retaining similarity at large. You can see progression in the angles the branches grow out of the trunk, the proportion between the sizes and distances between them. Untill we bring these dimensions to our work, it would remain a craft.
Design in the real world has become so cold and mechanized, thanks to our technology and systems. It is high time we take a relook at nature to breath a fresh lease of life into it.