I'm somehow never quite able to key into the mindset of design and
popular asthetics in general. I can follow it so far, but at some
point discussion of it always seems to become an echo-chamber of
nonsense, usually not even true to its own stated intentions.
Nevertheless I recently thought of my own design philosophy. It's
pretty pointless, and likely only capable of making a mess, but has
a strict rule-based aspect to it that I like on a theoretical level.
Design a basic home interior - plain, boxy, with all the fittings.
Pretty much the house I'm living in really, minus a couple of token
1970s flourishes like that textured feature wall. Now take the
perimeter lines of all the features such as windows, doors, and
cabinets. Maybe even the furniture too if we're taking things that
far. Now radiate patterns of lines out from these on the
wall/floor/ceiling surfaces, with a fixed (or possibly decreasing)
gap between the lines, decreasing in intensity the further away
from the feature they get. When two of these wave fronts meet, they
sum together their visible intensity at that point and also distort
each other in an opposing direction, while still continuing in the
same general direction. If one wavefront continues far enough to
actually reach a physical feature, it distorts the physical feature
in the same way. Iterations of this can then be applied to
degenerate the rigid structure of the original design, twisting it
in ever more extreme and unpredictable forms.
It might work best if the features radiate spherical patterns:
((([]))), rather than reflected lines: |||[]|||, but either might
produce interesting results. Each iteration might be respresented
by changing colour of the visible wavefront lines. Although there
might be some advantage to tweaking the behaviour in an inexact way
while calculating the iterations manually, it obviously lends
itself particularly well to computer modelling.
Of course the product of this is a design that's been made
pointlessly difficult to build, where every feature is curved and
twisted in a most impractical way. But that indeed is the fact of
unique building design that I always struggle to accept, those who
aren't concerned in that way might quite appreciate the resulting
asthetics. I, at least, would appreciate the concept behind them.
