The book "Nature of Form for Designers" by Bhagvanji Sonagra, Bhavin R Dabhi & Susmita Rao contains 432 geometric forms, 231 patterns, and 793 colors mostly abstracted from plant and animal forms as well as a few from ice crystals and flows of water for creative industries such as Graphic Design, Product/Industrial Design, and Interior Design as well as such ancillary areas as Fabric Design.
It may be viewed as a database of 150 plus of natural elements (1454 plus entities: forms, patterns, colors). These elements could be combined to create new elements; one can look at them as an alphabet for forming Design "Words" and "Design Sentences" (requiring a Design Grammar).
This opens up the possibility of applying algorithmic techniques to these elements.
Let us say we have two existing Designs - irrespective of the way they are realized, e.g. two different patterns for vases, for articles of clothing which combine a number of the elements in the database. Treating each Desing as a parent, we can apply Genetic Algorithms to evolve new Design Patterns that are based on the initial parents.
In this parlance, Design Patterns based on the book's elements are Design Words and we would be creating new Words. These words may or may not be useful for attractive, in this case, the Human sense of Beauty would be the acceptance criteria for the Genetic Algorithm.
Another path for exploring more forms is by applying coordinate transformations—such as shearing, bending, or stretching, e.g. the skull of a chimpanzee can be mapped onto that of a human. A computational process could extract these elements from the database and apply various transformations to them and leave it to human beings to determine if the resulting shape is useful or not.
In order to form Design Sentences with these Design Words, one has to have a Design Grammar. Joan L.
Kirsch and Russell A. Kirsch have demonstrated a shape-only grammar for the
styles of Richard Diebenkorn and Joan Miró. There has also been similar idea in architecture, please see: A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction (Center for Environmental Structure Series): Christopher Alexander, Sara Ishikawa, Murray Silverstein, Max Jacobson, Ingrid Fiksdahl-King, Shlomo Angel: 8601404694998: Amazon.com: Books which influenced the software development community with the book Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software: Erich Gamma, Richard Helm, Ralph Johnson, John Vlissides, Grady Booch: 9780201633610: Amazon.com: Books.
So, in principle, multiple Design Grammars could be developed; either in an ab initio manner or based on the study and analysis of designs produced by others. Each grammar may contain a number of production rules, most of which offer options for how to
subdivide regions of the Design Pattern. Some of these rules may be recursive and/or self-similar (fractal) insofar as
they produce subdivisions that, in turn, re-invoke the original rules. Such
recursion enables the grammar to account for an infinite number of distinct
compositions.
I also think it possible that an attempt could be made into takings existing Design Patterns and decomposing them into more elementary Design Words that are in this database. What could not be mapped, could be treated as new elements and added to the database.
I am sure that a lot more can be done with this database, basically it provides an initial set upon to which many different mappings and transformations could be applied.
