Part 2: Natural Design

Or: The end of regular shapes and orthogonal corners!

Look around you! If you are inside you will notice many orthogonal corners, sharp and straight edges, blocky and regular shapes in your surroundings. In contrary, the picture will be a completely different one, if you were outside, surrounded by nature.

Nature builds incredibly complex things, living organisms and structures that are specifically adapted to their unique environmental conditions. Each one purposely formed in a million-years long running selective algorithm called evolution.

Why do human builds on the other hand look so primitive? In my opinion that is mainly a consequence of the tools that were available. Construction had to be easy. And it was found to be easier to subtract bits from a big piece of material (may it be a wooden trunk, a block of metal or marble) until the desired surface was exposed. Existing CAD-tools and manufacturing methods like CNC-milling work on that premise by using surface-based boundary representations. Furthermore, existing analysis tools also presented an incentive to stay away from complexity.

Consequently, most technical products were made from simple geometry, which in return nudged our perception of design during tech-driven eras towards a shape-centric minimalism à la Bauhaus or the re-use of regular patterns like seen in the Art Deco time.

Meanwhile, a strong differentiation between functional, technical designs (not good-looking, but it works) and artistic designs (good-looking and non-functional, therefore no need to understand the design) can be observed. It struck me, that in nature such a distinction does not exist. Every natural design obtains a certain elegance/beauty because of its intricacy and perfectly purposeful adaptation. Due to the efficient way organic structures grow, they are inherently topology-optimised and lightweight.

I am writing this because I believe that the way humans build objects will dramatically change. There are two enabler technologies that will help designers deal with complexity and create things similar to how nature does it, resulting in products that are both functional and beautiful.

The first enabler will be additive manufacturing. Here, complexity comes for free as the production cost of a part is almost exclusively driven by its volume. In contrast to subtractive manufacturing, the material properties are no longer predefined, but can be specifically manipulated within the building space.

The second enabler will be the software that will handle generative design processes. Broadly speaking, the designer will no longer manually define an object’s shape in a CAD tool, but will provide boundary conditions, constraints, product requirements and design patterns to feed generative algorithms which will then come up with the optimal shape. Similar to the evolutionary selection, this optimum will most likely be obtained by iterative “breeding” processes.

Finally, my prediction would be that designs will become highly customised, more complex and resemble organic structures more closely as a logical consequence to this new design paradigm. This also means that our surroundings will look differently. Less straight lines, less LEGO-like blocks and less probability to hit your toe on a sharp corner!