Form and Fungi : A design exploration into nature.
Millions of years of selctive pressure and evolution has created this world of near to perfect beings all around us. So what can we designers learn from this? We also iterate, prototype, test and try, redo, retry, until we create something thats perfect for the enviromnent its going into. Perfect for the people who are going to get their hands on what we create. We study these people and their psyche so deep, concious and subconcious, and try to fit the pieces of their lives together using design as perfectly as an enzyme fits its substrate.
But theres more….
Creation has the most mysterious ways for making things the way they are. And that is what I am going to explore through this blog over the next couple of weeks. I want to know where studying an organism’s form will take me. what will I learn as a design student? as a science geek? as an advocate for sustainability? And also as a fellow being of the universe in general?
There is a lot of biodiversity out there and literally millions of beautiful features of nature that I could explore to study form, but I had to niche down as i had a time constraint of just four weeks, and there was somuch learning to do. I was also aware of the other limitations i had to consider while picking a creature to study, like accesibility and availability, A lack of workshop where I could do hands on work (credit:thepandemic) and access to limited raw materials around me.
I also didnt want to pick something so basic as a leaf (which I admit has excellent potential too, but wasnt my cup of tea at the moment). It had to be available, sustainable, with a little bit of “wow” factor so that I would actually be hooked to it and be okay at looking at this creature for four weeks straight and still not get sick of it.
Contrary to popular belief, it is a huge commitment for a designer as when you actually dive into your work, its everywhere. You think about it all the time, you dream about it, you see abstract sillouettes of it everywhere, it even starts haunting your favourite k- drama! (no joke, that actually happened)
After a while of brainstorming and consulting my faculties and peers back and forth, I had that “AHA” moment.
‘Fungi…’ I thought to myself
It was perfect. It has a multitude of very interesting forms, its practically everywhere, it has an interesting history and has a lot of potential and relevance in the future.
And from a design point of view, I could see myself learning a lot from this magnificent organism…or rather, this ‘kingdom’ of organisms..?
Apparently, theres a lot to learn!!!
The Beginning: Raw Research
I tried to collect as much information about fungi as possible, so that i could devolop a starting point. like a base or an anchor for all my follow up research. It was a lot of raw unrefined data, from everywhere, compiled into a miro board, like a messy mindmap.
I realised how unorganised it was. Science, Design, history, folklores and culture, all in the sme space. I had to break it down futher.
Looking back, I think researching too broadly on a subject limited me to only scraping the surface of the fungi universe. I had to let myself actually fall down the rabbithole of everything fungi if I had to actually learn something in this course.
What I was laking was that analytical perspective. Afterall, I was attempting to study form, not write a thesis on mushroom history.
So I tried once again, to put things into perspective.
This time is was a more form based direction, so I started with some form abtraction excercises. I used clay to explore and understand fungi forms.
Mushrooms were the only part that was observable by the naked eye to study the “form” of. The rest of the fungus, called mycleium is just long strands/ networks of microscopic hair like fibres underground.
Another thing was that mushrooms have extreme biodiversity, with their forms also drastically different from eachother, so after some general exploration, I knew I needed to narrow down to a particular type of mushroom.
As I worked, I had a natural inclination towards oyster mushrooms, dude to its peculiar form. it was sleek and elegant, and it was different from the stereotypical image of a mushroom- a cap, a stem, and an overall bulbous look. So, there was more scope for me discovering new things and stay away from mainstream depictions of mushrooms influencing my work.
Oyster mushrooms at some perspectives seemed to onlu have one surface, that curled out at the edge like a petal. But the fact that they grow in groups only added more dimension and depth to the creature.
Sometimes, they looked like three dimentionsals tesselations, because they fit so perfectly in a pack, and i could just repeat the pattern in 3d space, like some sort of modular system where you could just add on, till infinity.
Next, I tried form abstraction on paper. This excercise was inspired by Pablo Picasso’s bull abstraction, in which he shaved off a little bit of detail from the bull, step by step, until in the last step, we were left with an oversimplified stick figure. This was a good excercise to fing out hoe far i can go with abstracting something, and it still holds the essence of the object, and still conveyes that this is an oyster mushroom.
I feel like this is when I really started breaking away from my preconcieved concept of a mushroom and started appreciating the form and multi dimentionmality of the creature.
I started thinking about things like- will it still look the same if I dont incorporate the gills? because most of the objects in my everyday life that remind me of these oyster mushrooms resemble them because of these “gills”. So what really happens if i take that away?
What happens if i start looking at it in terms of planar structures? Will my perception change again? how do i represent them in the most simple manner through planes?
Is there other ways in which I can percieve this form? can i break away from the pshisiology of this creature, the very findamental biological form and still have elements that make it an oyster mushroom?
How far can I use and manupulate the language of the lines and visuals, in a way that they are percieved as an oyster mushroom?
What happens when I start switching betwwn two dimenstional sketches to 3D forms? what all are the variables then? Can the material be a medium of manupulation and communication?
What do i really percieve as form? Really? as of now i realised that its way beyond the three dimentional silhouette that i earlier assumened it to be.
Luciky, the next exercise we were expected to do in class was to create a moodboard. The process was just a simple collage out of pictures from the internet, but honestly, it helped me declutter and organise some of these thoughts I was being haunted with.
What I noticed was that in some of these products, the designers have just incorporated just one or two aspects of the whole being, abstracting the mushroom not just based on form, but also as a concept. It was a really interesting perspective as I never thought that abstraction could go beyond the form and into the attributes as well. this whole idea sounds a little abstract, i know, it took me a while to wrap my head around it, but it really opened more doors for exploration!
Now that I had stumbled on to the marvelous world of concept abstraction, my next task was to, well, dwell into concepts and attributes. This entrire course felt like a cyclic process of diverging exprorations and then converging into organising those explorations. Explore, declutter, repeat. this way, I was able to touch upon a lot of perspectives and exploreations.
So, keeping the oyster mushroom in mind, I started listing down atrributes that I associated with it. it had to be extremely spontaneous.
Then I moved on to generating concepts, so that I can see what all I can explore in that particular area.
Lucid Movement
If you ever watch a timelapse of mushrooms growing, you would notice that even though to the naked eye they seem stagnant, the are actually moving in another dimension of time, in a very surreal fashion. the edge of the mushroom hood seems to be dancing in a very lucid manner. This effect is created as it is moving and growing at the same time, making it look visually pleasing. So I coined the phrase lucid movement to describe a concept+attribute feature of the oyster mushroom that I was to further explore upon.
So again, I created a moodboard on Miro, to visually put down what i mean i terms of form when I say “lucid movement”.
This first section was a good abstraction of the growth atrribute of this concept, as these forms looked like they were bubbling up and expanding, but also they had this slow pace conyeyed by the shape , which was vey bulbous and not streched and pulled like how it would have looked if it was fast movement. rather it looked like slow dissolving paint into a fresh mug of water, which was like absract growth in some sense.
these sculptures lookes like a frozen still from a timelapse of the mushroom gills growing. They move from left to right and arent really straight parrellel, but like flowy ribbons that are alive when timelapsed.
This stoneware sculpture captures form in dynamic motion while testing the limits of ceramic technique to create an organic shape that seems to defy gravity and solidify movement. I could really relate these works with the organic nature of growth mushrooms exhibit.
Earlier, when I thought movement, I used to think that I had to look for animated GIFs or working models to relate with the concept. Only after coming across this artist did i realise that “movement” is an attribute that could be conveyed by a still form that depicts the essense of motion. it could be anything from a simple twist, a bulge to exhibit potential energy or something as magnificent and intricate as Ceramic Artist Satoko’s work.
These two sculptures reminded me of younger mushrooms budding in groups. If you observe mushrooms, as they but out, the are really densely packed, and push eachother constantly as they try to squirm their way up as they grow.
These forms really seem to resonate with my idea of the pushing and squirming movement that results from their density.
It would have been an injustice to the concept of lucid movement if I did not explore performing arts as they thrive on abstraction as inpiration for everything from choreoraphy, form of dance poses to even the costumes.
I was really awestruck by some of Jody Sperling’s company Time Lapse Dance Company’s performances as they were really a visual manifestation of what i was trying to express.
“I tried to capture the beauty of both the human body’s figure and its motion. By putting together uninterrupted individual moments, the resulting image as a whole will appear to be something different from what actually exists.”
These long exposeure shots of nude dancers created in collaboration with the choreographer Jessica Lang, really inspired me to start exploring with surfacing to create the visual essence of mushrooms in a planar sense.
It felt very bizzare to me to abstract mushrooms somuch that I started comparing them with smoke. The organic way in which smoke moves, and expecially the way in which the smoke forms expand as they rise up is so much similar to mushrooms expanding/growing as they get taller.
Also comparing the nature of flow of the smoke to the lucid beauty of sporation was also an interesting comparison. Bizzare, but it made sense.
The objective was just to test the limits of the concept, and see how I could manupulate form in 3d in different ways to convey the same ideas.
Again I found ,yself overwhelmed with concepts so I had to declutter and organise my thoughts. I had waay too many pictures from the internet, many clay explorations and many intersecting keywords that clashed with my concept’s attributes.
Pinning these ideas into an attribute map was the perfect solution to understand what falls where. Attribute maps are more of a process, than just the final picture infornt of you, because it really let me decide what goes where. I did a rather simple version of attribute mapping as its function was just simple understanding.
I put the main words that kept recurring in my mind, ‘ flowy, growth, layered clustered, alien’ into four corners of the map and started mapping pictures from my previous work in proximity with their respective attributes.
It was quite interesting placing differnt images from different stages of my process, as I could literally see the visual diversity in my works. But what was most interesting to me was that some inages had more than one attribute they diplayed, so I had to place them somewhere in the middle of the two keywords. There was a lot of internal learning that happened when I debated with myself about where exactly it will fall, not just compared to the keywords, but also the other images in its proximity. It was a very time consuming activity and at some places I still am not satisfied with there these images are kept; but I was really amazed by the amount of insight affinity mapping could produce.
Designing a Product From Form and Attributes as Inspiration
Okay so this is where things got more interseting because I had four weeks of research and form studies to back up a product that i will be designing.
I went back and forth with different product concepts, some based on the pyster mushroom itself, some based on arrtibutes, some based on both, some based on “lucid movement”. I had been thinking about concepts for cat hammocks, wireless earbuds, chairs and so on.
I went back and forth with it, until I went back to my comparison I made wih somke/steam to lucidity. Thats when I decided that I wanted to move towards something with atomising properties.
Not long after, I started concept sketching for Ultrasonic Diffusers.
The Ultrasonis Diffuser
An electric, ultrasonic, diffuser dispenses essential oil mist into the air through vibrations of a piezo electric plate which causes ultrasonic waves, creating microscopic particles of oils which atomise and disperse into the air.
So its basically a safer and more efficent alternative for aromatherapy and airpurification compared to candles and oil lamps.
Components:
A piezo electric disk atomises the liquid when vibrating at 113kz.
While ideating, I needed to keep the function in mind. I needed a small space as a reservoir of water, and space for the circut board seperately, so that they dont interfere. the piexo electric disk needed to atomize all the water in the reservior. And the atomised vapour should escape before it condenses back. I also had to think of power input ans output, visual balance, and most importantly, as this was a form based project, the form.
FIN
