I rounded off last week’s posts with a number of questions for investigating systems in the living world. Answering these questions can help us develop a palette of systemic design principles that can help engineers (and other humans) create thriving with limited resources. The living world does it so well, and we might rely on it for our survival as a species, it is worth spending some time on it.
My first question, why is that the shape it is?
Sitting where I am, I can see a lot of straight lines. The awning above the cafe, the tiles of the floor, the lamp posts, the window frames, the balconies, the scaffolding, the road leading into the distance.
A straight line is the shortest distance between two points.
A mathematician once told me that a straight line is the circumference of a circle of infinite radius. That one has caused lots of debates in the pub.
The path of a beam of light (unless there’s a particularly heavy star in the vicinity).
To this list of definitions of a straight line, we might add ‘a shape made by engineers (and other humans) in their manipulation of the physical world’.
Whether by scoring into, connecting together, extruding from our driving through the substrate of the earth and its derivative materials, we tend to make a lot of straight lines.
There are straight lines in the living world, but you have to search for them. A spider’s web is straight line between the nodes of its structure, until the wind blows. At a microscopic level, crystaline structures contain straight lines, and occasionally these are translated to the macro scale, as in the basalt extrusions of the Giant’s Causeway.
Visitor’s from another planet would easily be able to spot the systems on planet earth where humans have been the chief engineers by the abundance of straight lines.