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28. Slowdown landscapes: Small pieces, loosely joined
How the virus reinforces the value of different patterns for our social infrastructure, infrastructure, farming, and habitation. From the eco-feminist robots of pixel farming to inverting San Francisco’s sewers as gardens.
“Patterns are the work of the human hand but their mission is to make nature even more natural. Skilful patterns are not created as a display of human pride and glory, but as a hymn to the mysterious power of nature. Through patterns and their deep humility and simple modesty, humankind is revealing its devotion to the laws of nature.” — Yanagi Sōetsu, ‘The beauty of everyday things’
Design not only articulates what we stand for when it produces particular instances of things, spaces, or experiences. Design can also articulate and describe these broader abstract formations, these wider systems, as repeating or generative patterns, dynamics, scales, and conditions. Recall Victor Papanek’s classic framing of design as “the conscious effort to impose meaningful order”…
“The order and delight we find in frost flowers on a window pane, in the hexagonal perfection of a honeycomb, in leaves, or the architecture of a rose, reflect man’s (sic)…
