Invisible Design

Design is invisible when it works. The interface on my Macintosh is very carefully designed, but I don't even notice it. If it was buggy or poorly designed, I would notice it. It would annoy me and I wouldn't think much of the product. Without good design Macintosh wouldn't exist. (What about Windows, you might ask?) Getting back to the subject...

Good design IS invisible. We see it in nature all the time. The design of how trees branch works perfectly every time. You don't see some trees branching at the wrong angle or 'attempting' to branch. That design is built into the design of a whole system that extends not just to trees but also to nervous systems and coral reefs and root systems and neighborhoods.

We're talking about real objects here, but their design can be reduced to numbers or a c ode, just like the DNA code, which is a meta-program. In the case of trees branching, the code sequence is called the Fibonacci sequence. It is named after the man who invented it in the 12th century.

At some point a designer reaches a threshold where they realize that they cannot actually execute an idea that mimics nature without understanding math and programming. If you want to create an animation where trees branch realistically, then one way to do it is to simulate it visually on screen. But if you want to apply the meta-pattern to snowflakes, or raindrops or showing growth on a tree, it might be easier to figure out the code for it once, and then use it again and again. Similarly, if you want to change or impact the design of human consciousness, the meta-code you might turn to is DNA. The code of language impacts all of the above, and this code is more elusive, because we think we know what words mean. But it isn't called "spell" for nothing.

Good design is also visible in many everyday objects around us, frying pans, paper clips, wheels, cars. We are not stirred by the novelty of their design anymore because we're so used to them, but they are examples of good design that works. Our understanding of how to design things better has evolved, and keeps evolving over millennia because that's in the grand plan or 'design' of things. (Who designed that, you might ask?)

At different eras in human history the focus or emphasis was on different things। Cave men were designing tools with stone, today it's more complex. But still design. Some designs have been perfected in their function, but stylistic differences keep evolving, like toasters, or bows and arrows. Others seem to evolve infinitely, like star systems or computer systems.