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Applied Philosophy and ... Product Design?

man said in #3761 2w ago: received

https://www.core77.com/posts/12752/a-periodic-table-of-form-the-secret-language-of-surface-and-meaning-in-product-design-by-gray-holland-12752

Wanted to share one of my favorite pieces of aesthetic philosophy (as a branching off from >>3734). It is cleverly disguised as a product design blog post. If you haven't ever given much thought to why things look the way they do, this should be pretty convincing that there is a sort of Goethian science that the upper echelon of designers engage in with manufactured objects. More specifically, they have figured out how to strategically use the results of billions of years of Gnon's intelligent design process to imbue their objects with various desired emotional/psychological properties.

I'm generally interested in how to actualize the philosophical results of this milieu in ways that aren't just the obvious ones like politics. I very strongly believe we have the actual Truth at our fingertips around here, so we should be finding interesting ways to apply it in non-subversive, purely generative ways. Picking up the mandate of heaven in various disciplines/industries using a superior understanding of Nature seems like an easy way to build up smaller wins that improve the lives of individuals and also confer legitimacy upon/accrue resources to the broader sphere. Where else could we be doing this?

Here's a sneak peak of the post:
>Remember that the Tangent category does not exist in nature in pure form: it is a mental construction from man's imagination; an abstraction of functional form designed to simplify the task of product development. Predating CAD, this geometric linear- and arc-based approach evolved out of the mental constructs of design technique, industrial fabrication, and reproduction of the objects of the 20th Century.

Wanted to share one received

anon_mino said in #3762 2w ago: received

I apologize in advance for criticizing your favorite piece of aesthetic philosophy.

I find the argument that lack of tangent curvature in nature means we should use less of it unconvincing. Practically speaking, a device with sharp corners can be dangerous. Moreover, that less of tangent curvature implies "truth of beauty," "conscious our unconscious choices," and other voo-doo phrases holds meaning like tarot cards and astrology. That's not to say certain designs don't evoke feelings. But it is more complex than just curvature.

To describe how I think best fits humanity in this age: we are a bunch of boxes. Screens, houses, containers, warehouses, packages, tables. These shapes are easy to stack.

I suspect the lack of tangent curvature in nature has something to do with cell differentiation more than any sort of divine will. It's always cool when something man-made breaks out of the box, but maybe as humans we aren't good at conceptualizing higher order curvature and its implications, perhaps bound by our three spatial dimensions itself.

referenced by: >>3765 >>3820

I apologize in advan received

anon_mino said in #3763 2w ago: received

As a side note I did look at whether G0 and G3 continuity were easy to make using a lathe and mill. Sharp corners (except for inside ones) are relatively easy to make, but curvature requires multi-axis machining. And to create something itself often requires standardization of materials: rods, beams, and blocks. Alas in Minecraft-world we shall continue to live, unless we visit untouched nature or old, naturally grown cities.

referenced by: >>3765

As a side note I did received

anon_mino said in #3764 2w ago: received

Once you start seeing the world by drawing bounding boxes around things like a Vision AI classifier, you can't really unsee it. Beep boop.

Once you start seein received

anon_cevi said in #3765 2w ago: received

>>3762
>>3763
Well the point is that the ease of making tangent continuity is why it has that utilitarian aesthetic. The aspirational design is continuous curvature because it feels more natural and is harder to make. Classic veblen.

referenced by: >>3784 >>3820

Well the point is th received

anon_mino said in #3784 2w ago: received

>>3765

I feel it extends to shapes such as squares, boxes, rectangles, circles, or triangles more generally. If you look at any human housing division, the inside of warehouses, or even cars, you can draw mental bounding boxes around every component.

You can't do that to nature. Where does the stream end and the dirt begin? When does grass become gravel? When does one human fit into a certain type? Thus, I argue sharp distinctions and categorizations are the most unnatural.

We find the most developed human cities the most beautiful, or we find pure nature as its mirror. We enjoy the wisdom of those content or the innocence of children. For these examples ugliness lies in the middle, but in education a teacher must tread the middle itself, being contradictorily both tolerant and stern.

Of what lies the future and in what designs will have legitimacy? It is that which provides the most basic needs of humans: that of health, food, shelter, education, and community. There is a power in warehouses, transportation, container ships, and boxes waiting for those who can wield its power.

Simultaneously, there is legitimacy in those who can make Nature beautiful and powerful, for the modern world only pertains to its destruction. Furthermore, there may be social power in illegibility, gradients, and discontinuity rather than categorizing and qualifying. (I borrow this 'qualifying' term from sales for it is about eliminating leads, like asking of someone's school or their wealth or their major).

Legitimacy yields to whoever does what is difficult. In the past, that was reading and writing itself. Churches and universities served as stores of internal state and coordination. Simply having the message was enough, like stories of those on the frontier waiting all day for a call. Now anyone can draft some Google Docs.

I'll leave it to the reader to decide what is difficult today. In my opinion, it is alignment, making money, and building things of sufficient quality. But it differs based on your position: someone already leading an organization may find finding quality people hard. And someone who struggles to write clearly may find it is communication itself.

referenced by: >>3789 >>3820

I feel it extends to received

anon_cevi said in #3789 2w ago: received

>>3784
You normally wouldn't catch me defending the rectangle ideology, but i must protest your characterization of rectangles as “unnatural”. They are natural to rational thought. We did not invent the rectangular grid just out of pure postmodern arbitrariness. Of course once we noticed this fact *then* they became a genre of pure postmodern arbitrariness, an unnatural ideological self-parody. This is most obvious in architecture. But the source of the idea itself is natural, just as much as the “organic” forms we also parody and imitate without preserving their reasons.

referenced by: >>3791 >>3820

You normally wouldn' received

anon_mino said in #3791 2w ago: received

>>3789

wordcel.

wordcel. received

man said in #3820 2w ago: received

>>3762
The whole point of posting here is to get some spirited discussion and disagreement so while the politeness of your response is appreciated it is absolutely not necessary. Cheers.

This post certainly gets some things wrong. It does have voodoo phrases. However, the classification of various types of surface continuity was not something that I knew was utilized to such great effect by people I once considered to be a underclass of engineers (i.e. designers). That alone was surprising enough to justify the post as a whole for me.

> I suspect the lack of tangent curvature in nature has something to do with cell differentiation more than any sort of divine will.
Firstly I think cell differentiation is definitely divine will. Secondly, the I think the lack of tangent curvature is divine will. Selection needs variation to work. Ever more continuous lines and surfaces have ever more degrees of freedom, and so nature (life, agon) loves curvature. There's some upper bound on that though that I don't really understand but smells roughly information theoretic. In any case the equilibrium seems to be around G2 or G3.

I'd be remiss to not mention minimal surfaces here too (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimal_surface). They are absolutely everywhere in nature, and rather than just G2 or G3 are actually real-analytic or G∞ (on their interiors).

>>3765
>The aspirational design is continuous curvature because it feels more natural and is harder to make. Classic veblen.
Exactly. Apple, luxury cars, Zaha Hadid, Oakley under Peter Yee, etc.

>>3784
>you can draw mental bounding boxes around every component...you can't do that to nature.
Your perception of nature seems cherry-picked. You can draw mental bounding boxes around pretty much anything that's alive, and depending on scale can totally do it for inanimate objects too. Sure there are some things that are less boundable like a river but thinking of the river as a river anyways is kind of for the sake of semantic convenience more than any inherent truth about riverness as nature decrees it. This latter argument about discarding boundaries for the sake of semantic convenience is actually a very interesting framing that can lead one towards something like Eric Smith's "The Origin and Nature of Life on Earth: The Emergence of the Fourth Geosphere" where life is actually more akin to a geological process than individual organisms as such. I digress.

>>3789
Glorious. Spot on.

referenced by: >>3847

The whole point of p received

anon_cevi said in #3847 2w ago: received

>>3820
Zaha has some cool stuff but IMO would be more interesting with more classical symmetry. Postmodern asymmetry was cool at first to break the previous rigid conventional refinement, but it's pretty stale at this point. Same idea with the arbitrariness of shape and formal minimalism with no hierarchy. Like yeah your nurbs surface looks real smooth like an alien spacecraft, but why that shape in particular? It gets boring once you look past the silhouette.

I'd like to see more done with grand symmetry, hierarchy, and necessity. The real scarce resource in an age of infinite possibility is necessity. This is why we end up with minimalism. We can do anything, so the only thing that isn't total noise or kitsch is to do so little that we run into the lower limit of complexity. But compared to the "fearful symmetry" of the tiger our stuff is obviously deeply impoverished of necessary form. What does architecture or product look like when optimized as hard as a higher animal?

referenced by: >>3849

Zaha has some cool s received

man said in #3849 2w ago: received

>>3847
I just say ‘spot on’ because drawing together Veblen with curvature continuity is totally correct. I don’t think it’s the be all end all, and I actually don’t like Zaha as a firm. I call their style cetacean carcass core.

Grand symmetry, hierarchy, and necessity are all great things to shoot for. The former two have classical solutions and are not all that difficult to re-implement. The latter is superbly difficult, but if you can do it well it serves as a great way to win the hearts and minds of people who are currently impoverished by the modernist paradigm. I think things which go fast are the closest we have to being optimized as hard as a higher animal — fighter jets, race cars, etc. People will look back in a few centuries at the e.g. SR-71 as a cathedral-like object.

I was going to argue that what we have is still primitive by nature’s standard, but that might not be true. The peregrine falcon must dive and maneuver at incredible speeds, but it must also do many other things like digest food and procreate and rebuild all the cells in its body. The SR-71 is a more constrained problem and so perhaps the highly optimized solution is much simpler. Alternatively, in the case of the iPhone it’s so difficult to tell what the purpose is that I don’t even know what an optimization scheme would look like.

referenced by: >>3861

I just say ‘spot on’ received

anon_cevi said in #3861 2w ago: received

>>3849
The history of the sr71 is interesting and you can see from it exactly how much optimization went into that form.

The a12, which is the nearly identical precursor to the sr71, was drawn up in the latter 1950s in the archangel program. The thought process was well informed but not very deep. It was basically “lets give it a delta wing for high speed flight, some chines for stability, two engines, and cant the tail fins for radar stealth.” They did some rough calculations to work out dimensions, but not very finely because they changed them a few times for random reasons like “we need a bit more length to fit a camera”. Lots of technology and hacks to make it work in practice, like the cones in the engines that had to work the shockwaves in particular ways.

A modern airliner probably gets an order of magnitude at least more fine tuned form optimization than the sr71, though they are also quite limited by convention. I don’t think either is anywhere near the level of optimization detail of an animal.

Much of the beauty comes from the exotic one-off nature of the feat. Its the uniqueness of being able to put something up there like that at all. But speaking strictly of form, while the form is beautiful and quite constrained, the actual level of detailed necessity or optimality is not that high.

referenced by: >>3866

The history of the s received

anon_sela said in #3866 2w ago: received

>>3861
I take your point. There's an interesting technical discussion to be had here around optimality. The amount of compute required to run optimizations over form within an aero CFD environment is very large. I looked around a little while back and believe that something called the discrete adjoint method is SOTA, DAFoam has an implementation: https://dafoam.github.io/index.html

Their examples are all pretty trivial and only have on the order of 10 "design variables". Overall my guess is that this whole discipline is in about the MNIST state, and under-explored given the currently more obvious returns of baking chatbots using any given compute. That tradeoff space will probably change substantially in the next decade though, at which point more interesting work will become feasible. What are the scaling laws of form-optimizers?

I take your point. T received

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