health-beauty-life/sustainable-patterns.html
This paper is based on my observations.
1. There are patterns in the natural environment that result from processes that have been taking place for, essentially, ever. The processes leave a trace that we can see or sense. These patterns seem to be full of life which is not surprising because many of them have been made by living systems. However, the patterns that we see are often not living themselves but the residual or remnants of life processes. For example a tree is a living thing that has a pattern that we associate with life, but we see that same pattern in erosion in the sand.
2. Alexander's recent work (2002) shows that we feel that some patterns have a life-like quality. These observations are reproducible but not quantifiable. When shown a range of photographs of different architectural or natural systems, student/subjects consistently chose pictures. For example they chose a pretty rundown riverside southeast asian home over a modern southwest American home. This must have been particularly irksome to these architecture students who would get nothing for designing a stream-side hovel but could get a ripe commission on a $300 per square foot modern home.
3. Alexander (2002) A key feature of the living quality is that there are strong centers that nearly symmetric but there are small variations that indicate an incompleteness or unfinished nature of the process. These little "flaws" emote (sp?) that there are still forces in action. There are many examples in both living systems and architecture.
some examples:
spider webs
multiple windows in a house (with small ones that disrupt symmetry)
driftwood - stress patterns around a knot
trees, stream drainage
4. The life quality patterns result from complex behaviors, the interaction between multiple agents. The rules for the interactions between these agents are simple. Simulations of the types of patterns of these can be generated with cellular automata or multi-autonomous agent environments.
pictures of patterns as generated by simple rules
fractal
stress and flow
5. The general patterns of symmetry are easily recognizable, but what makes these patterns interesting is the little variations. These points draw attention to the symmetry.
see also Leonard Koren, 1994. Wabi-Sabi
6. Humans like beautiful patterns and are innately interested in strong simple rules that can lead to these patterns.
elegant solutions are simple solutions
beautiful
simple is not beautiful, but beauty comes from simple processes. This is a matter of multiple scales. Beautiful items have to go across scales.
From Levin 1999.
page 98. " pg. 98. The power of simple models is that they isolate the essential truths, stripping away details that obscure the relevant dynamic features. there is beauty in the diversity of nature; indeed that is the subject of this book. But there is elegance and and basic understanding to be found in the general patterns that emerge from consideration of that diversity, and it is the illumination of those patterns that turns anecdotal reporting into science."
7. When something is beautiful, we (humans) want to replicate it, to make more patterns that are similar (but not exactly similar).
Scarry 1999.
this also protects the things that can't be quantified