Thursday, January 10, 2008

fractals in African design



Check out this nice TED talk by mathematician Ron Eglash on how fractal patterns actually emerge from bottom-up design thinking in African architecture and design, and how different cultures differ within this conceptual framework. Once again it shows that the most symbiotic designs stem from intuition derived from iterative experience in the real world, not from detached analytical thinking; on the question of the Western scientist as to what algorithmical rules he applied, the African answered "no you silly, it just looks pretty". How detached have we become. Damn you, Descartes!

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