Beauty of function.

Looking under the cover of electronic devices was a trip into a new world for me. I was astonished by the beauty of forms, patterns. The miniature world animated by electric flow, beyond my limits of comprehension. I suddenly saw a very clear parallel with nature, describable and provable. With a printed plate in my hand I can prove why a stickerd lamppost in a city is just as natural as a tree.

The way natural world is build can be abstracted into a very basic rules. Rules of physic, chemistry and mathematics. Biology is a complex integration of all three in a form of life. Geography, geology, mineralogy, meteorology, it all goes by the same basic laws. As a designer I am interested in the visual representation a all these elements. The forms and patterns that occur as a consequence of function. What amazes me most about living nature is that is not build to be beautiful, but is built to work. To perform. To live and grow. To reproduce. And still, what we see we almost always perceive as beauty. I don't want to go too deep into why is that so, at the moment I am taking it a s fact. We are a product of nature and we like what comes out of it's workshop. What is of grater interest for me at this point is how do function and beauty link in our designed environment. How do we create beauty.

The yearning for aesthetic qualities and trying to create them is an attribute of human kind since the beginning. Exploring the forms, colors, composition. Not only in art, but also in the creation of tools and our surrounding. The appearance was an important issue through the whole history and especially in pressent time. Design is recieving a lot of attention because of it’s great economical value. On the other hand a lot of resources and knowledge is put into a development of technology, where there is no space for form. The shape is exactly what it needs to be.

At this point I am extremely close to the infamous "form follows function" but it must be understood. I am not talking about a glass of water. I am not talking about a handle or a house. I'm talking about systems which are infinitely more complex. I am talking about a tree which is build up by hundreds of different organic substances, which each of them have a very complex way of behaving. I'm talking about a product which is much more complex than what we ever created. I'm am talking about the form derived out of a extremely sophisticated function. My question is - is there beauty emerging, when the function is becoming more and more complex. And from that, are we coming into a stage of development where we are crating technical organisms which are showing signs of beauty by pure function. An organic beauty.

Apart from organic beauty I want to define an inorganic beauty. If the organic beauty is derived from complexity of physical and chemical systems than inorganic beauty is derived from mathematical systems. The main difference is that mathematical systems can be both, very simple or extremely complicated. The rule of golden section, fibonacci numbers opposite to the chaos theory. Starfish, pinecone, pebbles on the beach, mountains, clouds, flag in the wind. The inorganic beauty of chaoitic kind is fairly easy to design, if you let a certain amount on unpredictability in your shape or if you rely your design on a another element such as water, wind, mixing of liquids or other inorganic process.

My project manly deals with these two kinds of beauty, but of course there is a certain amount of human designed beauty, which is the third kind. The most questionable, the most intriguing and definitely very interesting. But at this point I am more focusing on NOT designing. What I do design is more filling up the gaps.
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