LANscapes: Powers of Ten: Observing Relevance of Scale in Design

(Tourmaline, Richard Weston)

(Guanabara Bay, RioDeJaneiro, NASA Earth Images)

As I continue to scrub the internet for all things design - jumping from one website to the next in a frantic furor, all the while flirting with obsolescence - I occasionally come across something or someone simply magnificent and inspiring. Combating our superficial search for style (minimalism) in a manner that resembles ones reaction to complexity, Richard Weston's 'Earth Image' scans - high resolution images of crystals and minerals - instead reveal intricacies of their composition in exceptional detail and suggest a broader understanding of complexity (simplicity).

Certainly not alone in my fascination and adoration of these images and the spectrum of possibilities and connections they represent, I am immediately drawn to the subtle implications and appeal of 'organic design' and the vernacular. Weston's process of technological transference from 'Rock to Frock' does illustrate a tendency of designers to unleash their anthropomorphic abilities in a continued attempt at replicating a seemingly apparent chaotic order; arguably it's worth it.

(Flame Agate, Richard Weston)

(Yolla Bolly Complex Fire, NASA Earth Images)

At first take and by a power of 'x' I was convinced that I was looking at captured images of the earth's processes. Both smaller and larger than human (x1.0) scale, "from drifts of liquid purple in amethyst to the ‘ruined cities’ of tourmaline", the dozens of agate, jasper, quartz and other rare rock and mineral types appear to even "capture the beginnings of planet earth". What is most fascinating to me are the revelations that accompany such imagery. Are the interventions we, as designers, impart on the landscape not strikingly similar - even familiar - to the patterns of natural geology or fractals? Are we more connected to the earth and our environment than we care to admit? Or is it simply centuries, even millenia of collective memory that has entrenched itself in our evolving species an inherent tendency toward a sandbox-like, hyper-intellectualized, manipulation of matter? At a scale beyond what most experience first hand - out of this world - do our cities appear as amethysts and our seas simply agate? It is the powers of scale that enables designers to observe, deduce, and learn. If we are to continue to evolve as thinkers we must learn to become terminally curious, discovering our world and the space around us through new lenses. I am willing to bet, then, that we may very well see the same designed patterns in similar form but at continuously grander scales.

(Sagenitic Agate, Richard Weston)

(Sulfur Dioxide and Vog from Kilauea, NASA Earth Images)

I'm not sure sure we will ever be able to explain the how or why these patterned consistencies exist, nor do we really need to. However, if you are like me and find power in such magnifications, there remains a strong potential to ground ourselves in the significance of such (in)visible finds - that we all come, go, and live on in all that we create and all that surrounds us.