From concept design to reality: from fractals to design




The accomplishment of a concept goes across a long way of many phase until the arrive of the product design to market where a client can buy it and the company can verify if the product collects the consent and the expetation of clients.

If a design competition represents a way to see a great deal of possible concept or not, the accomplishment of a marketable concept is rather different. In architecture it's known before of a preliminary project there is an important step that it's to have a committment and a real demand of the architectural project respondent to the necessity of a service for city or people.

In the design it's seems similar but the planning of an object is tied to the possible industrial production and if there isn't the market or clients for that product it's useles to begin a path for the concept design to the realized product.

To plan, any object or in any scale, it's a complex operation. It supposes a synthesis of function, technique, form and aesthetics. A project is the functional response of some needs, but its formal construction cannot derives necessary from function and neither from the technique used.

Therefore we need to search ispiration elsewhere, to ispire ourself we can use something aroud us or an image stimulates our interest. In three of my concepts for design competitions I have used as ispirational source the images generated from fractal software. What interested me to show in these project was not only the function and the technical response but also a solutive composition that from a formal point of view it complied the required use searching a form in the place not usual.

The experience of that moment was more satisfying although the result of the competition, so I have pin the possibility for next time to use fractals as inspirational source. The characteristic of fractals to be organic and in nature as territorial orogeny and vegetable or animal complex forms render the graphics very good for pattern design or fashion sector but also as a basis to obtain products tied to biomimicry.

From the story of architecture we learn that for example Greek used the nautilius or the leaf of acanthus to decorate the capitals of the columns while during art Nouveau flowers and plants were used as ispirational bases to decore stairs and wall.

Recently I have resumed the possibility to use fractal graphic as pattern for design doing right graphical manipulation so to obtain a texture suitable for market. Fractals being more colorful don't like some stylistic flavor of consumers. This is known to fractal artists that in many years have done fractal competitions. Often the demand is for vintage image rather than minimalist images according to modern flavor. The same fractal art is art for limited persons and so there are few artist known.

If so in the art we can find hard to meet the flavor of clients, it's obvious in the design this fact is more evident although some fractals with their forms are tied to old handcrafted works of our grandmothers such as doilies for table or crocket works for table cloth or bed blankets.

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