Natural Systems

The “living quality” provided by well-made things seems to combine the experience of fully satisfying services for both users and providers, and the way they spread delight and a feeling of wholeness in the world around them.  The “simplifying ideals” of their design patterns can be described as “unifying responses”  to the “forces” found in their recurring situations, defining the essentials of organizational solutions having “emergent properties” not achievable other ways.  The interface between such designs and the worlds of their users and providers needs to be created and made whole with each application.  It’s enhancing the living quality of those connections that is the focus here, considering designs as bridges exchanging services between the worlds of served and providing communities. Methods are offered for finding guiding examples of the elegant ways natural designs make their connections whole, exposing how they contribute living quality and fitness for their worlds, and may suggest ways to improve direct performance too.  A formal design pattern is discussed: “Mining Connections for Living Quality”, using pattern papers from last year’s PLoP meetings for examples to illustrate.  That is followed by sections on general theory, methodology and the large repositories of natural patterns available to learn from.  The paper follows one for PURPLSOC 2015 (Henshaw 2015) that introduced the study of guiding patterns of naturally occurring design for improving our ability to recognize and work with the design patterns of nature in general.

Pattern language can be used to describe transformative ways of resolving disparate forces in complex contexts, making explicit the ancient practices of holistic architectural design, creating new forms with living quality.  Discussed here are ways to use pattern language for learning from recurrent design patterns of nature.  Common patterns of naturally occurring organization and transformation are used to search in great repositories of natural design patterns, and find diverse living 


examples to learn from. For example, the familiar way designers work from early concepts to finished products is can be described as a recurrence of the natural process of complex designs developing from small beginnings to emerge in new forms. The technique of “pattern search” uses a “dual paradigm view” to separate the subjects of conceptual models and of observed natural forms, allowing attention to turn back and forth from one to the other as one studies their connections.

Doğal sistemleri anlama biçimimiz, özellikle son yüzyılda gerçekleşen bilimsel gelişmeler ile birlikte  oldukça gelişmiştir. Farklı bilim disiplinlerinin arasındaki muğlak sınırlar etrafında, doğadaki davranışların, son derece kompleks; fakat birbirleri içinde farklı ölçeklerde harmoni içinde büyüyen sistemler bütünü olduğu görülmüştür. Beliren davranış, morfogenetik süreçler gibi kendiliğinden örgütlü sistem tasarımları, sistem teorisi etrafında kurallı tasarım organizasyonları üretmenin önemini ortaya koyar. Doğal sistemleri tam olarak çözümlemek ve bunu birebir tasarım bilgisine dahil etmek, iki durumun süreçlerinin farklı işlemesinin de sebebiyle neredeyse imkansızdır. Doğayı tam olarak çözümlemektense, onu bir yeniden yapım sürecine sokarak kendi içinde sentetik ve doğalın bir arada olduğu yeni bir organizasyon üretmek mümkün olabilir. Bu bahsedilen organizasyon, bir mimari tasarım seminer dersi boyunca katılımcılar ile birlikte denenmiştir. Ders boyunca fiziksel materyal etkileşim deneyleri yapılmış ve bu deneylerin getirdiği sonuçlar ile bazı sayısal tasarım teknikleri tasarlanarak uygulanmıştır. Elde edilen yeni teknik ile, belirlenen bir mimari programda, tasarım bilgisi, mimariyi üretmek üzerine kullanılmıştır.

Nature-based tourism in protected areas, which is growing worldwide, offers much potential to enhance biodiversity conservation, poverty alleviation, and ultimately sustainable development. Understanding the evolution of protected areas as tourism destinations and the causes and consequences of changing supply and demand elements is an essential step toward sustainably managing tourism in these critical ecosystems. This research applied the Tourism Area Life Cycle (TALC) model to illustrate and analyze the 30-year evolution of tourism in Wolong Nature Reserve. Being inscribed in UNESCO Biosphere Reserve and World Heritage programmes, Wolong is a flagship protected area in China. We showed that the Reserve experienced exploration, involvement, and development stages of the TALC before tourism growth was completely halted by the Wenchuan Earthquake in 2008. We systematically investigated the changes related to the evolution of tourism and identified various internal and external driving forces. We examined the dynamics of politics, economy, and tourism growth that might propel the Reserve through the life cycle and identified significant tourism governance structural changes through the stages. The results have implications for sustainable tourism development in China’s protected areas and also contribute to a broader and general understanding of the complex relationships between protected areas, sustainable tourism, and community development.