L.A. like Living Artefacts

Artefacts are familiar to most of us in connotation with art or design. So by adding the word artefact to life, organisms or creatures descent down to the level of design.

To see living things as design or art is not so easy because our common notion of the artificial and the natural is strictly separated. If you want, by using the word Living Artefacts the natural is seen from an artificial perspective. When I developed the term and the whole concept I started to analyze all human made artefacts and found surprising similarities between living artefacts and human made artefacts.

So Living Artefacts are all living creatures on the planet that have genetic material, including human, which are in the scope of our interest when we need inspiration. Obviously, all of them are totally related to each other and have many similarities. But at the same time all species have adapted to their environment and distinguish themselves by their specialization.

The challenge here is to know about the creatures as much as possible or to be surrounded by them as many times as possible.

Here I would like to share a story that triggered my fascination for La's from the beginning of Laliaflia. What actually made me think that putting La's at the beginning of any design process will mostly be a good idea?

When I started to read about the rhizom theory I found an escape from the common way of thinking what life means and how it can be interpreted in design.
The statement in the rhizom "Thought lags behind nature" helped me to understand the overestimation of thinking compared to life (evolution). Evolution-algorithms are a clear indicate for that. The beauty of the rhizom theory is that it doesn't see life or nature historically, it sees life or nature futuristic, which is an incredible revolution compared to the European tradition as introduced by Darwin. Surprisingly, life and evolution happen only forward. We are talking here about recombination, evolving, and becoming of something random.

This is the magic of life: "There is neither imitation nor resemblance, only an exploding of two heterogeneous series on the line of flight." This is the representation of the Laliaflia way of design thinking. You do not imitate La's, but you recombine them in a way that they become a Flia. The metaphor of a starfish is the method of Laliaflia. By starting looking at La's we can abstract an Artefact like the world wide web, which is completely different from the source of inspiration, but it is a recombination of two existing components: the web structure and the computer technology.
My class mate and friend Thorlak has found out that "MIT professor Donal Schon has argued that metaphors can actually generate radically new ways of understanding things." The starfish as a metaphor for creativity is indeed one of the most powerful metaphor we can imagine.

It is important to remember that La's are not the blueprint for innovation and design, but a stimulus and support for creative thinking.

When I just remember what Prof. Michael Weinstock from London's AA said to me: "Human have never managed to design a joint as delicate as nature", it becomes clear, that understanding the superiority of life (nature) and the relationship between human made artefact and living artefact is crucial to apply this methodology.