The five easy steps to design space mastery.
October 19, 2009
October 18, 2009
Dilation and vision.
Artists: Vincent VanGogh
The Café Terrace at Night
The illusion of receding space is a dilation called “perspective.”
In fact other illusions of 3 dimentions called “projections” are dilations as well.
Dilation as “fractal” or “iteration” or “hologram”
Any space within a dilation can be a new dilation or “fractal” or “iteration” or “child” copy of the original like a holograph.
October 2, 2009
Dilation in Babylon about 1900 B.C.
I’ve read that this cuneiform tablet is an instructional for scribes. It is thought to be 3,700 years old.
Graphic designers have been around for awhile.
“While the tangram is often said to be ancient, the earliest known printed reference to tangrams appears in a Chinese book dated 1813, which was probably written during the reign of the Jiaqing Emperor.[1]” The o.5 dilation inscribed lower right in the clay tablet above could easily have produced the geometry of a tangram 3,700 years ago in Babylon.
February 1, 2008
DesignJanuary 22, 2008
January 6, 2008
Back to the Future
Before the grid there was dilation and after the grid there will be dilation. The postmodern, if it ever arrives, will look much like the pre-modern, because the grid, the metric of some long dead king’s arm, is completely irrelevant to how space organizes it’s self, this realization combined with the fact that tension structures deploy material more efficiently than compression ones can, will drive our going “back to the future.” The realization that space can be self metric is the missing link between where we have been lately and where we are going. Design efficiency.
January 5, 2008
The divine proportion
Problematically, I thought all spirals looked fairly well beautiful, not just our “golden” one. The divinely favoured one’s beauty seemed to be emanating more from other people than my own experience and searching for an ugly spiral proved fruitless. Another concern regarding “good design” and Phi is that designers who never employ the divine strategy still achieve “good” results. How so? <!–more–>
January 4, 2008
Up date
For a designer, they are a dream come true.
A dilation can be assigned any proportion and this won’t change internal metrics.
By internal metrics, I mean the # of units, regardless of proportion, remain constant and each unit ( except 1/2 in this case ) will tile to fill the entire space. What this means is you won’t see a grid unless you want or need to. When using this strategy grids become secondary as most needs are satisfied by finding points on the Z axis rather the x, and y, axis. Another way of thinking about this is to imagine that your grid will scale to your work.
Think SVG ( scalable vector graphics ) or grid “squares” that stretch to fit the given task. Within such an environment, because there is always an harmonic spiral, proportions can’t be lost. More…
Dilation - Design Strategy Blog 
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