LALIAFLIA - The 'star' beats the 'tree' in creativity!

The Trinity of Innovation

2010-10-13T00:59:00.000-07:00

The iteration of LALIAFLIA has been fostered through Innovations we created at our life-inspired company ceedin - LOVE LIFE.
When we developed a secret product we were stuck and had no idea how to solve the problem.
What we figured out was that any patent we had found was very predictable and followed the DID-Pattern. All patents we found were based on inspirations from other design solutions. Having LALIAFLIA at hand, we were clear about the approach we had to undertake. We had to apply the LID (Life Inspires Design) Pattern and start to ask the question: which creature (human, animal or plant) can give us the boost we need to get to an ORIGINAL result? For one version we used a part of our body as a source of inspiration and a dolphin for the other.

LALIAFLIA was not just a conceptual guideline to understand innovation in general, but also a way of solving a problem in an innovative way.

In the patenting process I talked to a physician from the University of Bremen who referred to TRIZ. Dr. Walter and his collegues use this method, which was developed by a Russian engineer called Genrich Saulowitsch Altschuller. The idea behind TRIZ is that there are over 40 Principles underlying any innovation. If you take the 40 princiles from TRIZ and compare them with LALIAFLIA and the properties living things can have, than you can be certain, that all of them fit into any living phenomenon and can be extended with thousands further more principles that Mr. Altschuller couldn't think about.

But TRIZ is not the only place someone was looking for originality. Recently there was a video published by the RSA about where good ideas come from by Steven Johnson. The first thing that fascinated me was the fact that we see a lot of drawings of living things like turtles and so on. Steven Johnson has focused in his research on the "spaces" where good ideas come from. He argues that most world changing innovations didn't come in a "sudden stroke of inspiration", the ideas needed long time to incubate. Other ideas, Steven argues, needed a place (hunch) where they can meet other minds and make up a new better idea. The same process can be found in meiosis, where two genetic informations come together and make up a new one. Even though this process might appear to most people as a breakthrough in developing innovative ideas, from the perspective of LALIAFLIA, what Steven calls "The chance favours the connected mind" is not enough. The connection needs to happen between people with each other and other creatures and living phenomenons. Instead of waiting for years to get the right source of inspiration from people, we can use LALIAFLIA as a creative method and shorten the creative process from 5 years to 5 seconds by using LIFE as a source of inspiration.

Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook (Todays most successful digital LIA) talked to his co-founder about: "...taking the entire social experience of college and put it online."
The abstraction of the college social experience is now connecting us with our friends and family members. "Add me as a friend" has become a way of staying in touch with people.

Surprisingly, great ideas don't come from brainstormings and thoughts of other people or by observing new trends in technology and design. Great ideas come from thinking in the LALIAFLIA pattern.

By using LALIAFLIA, we can invent a new product and service every single day.

If you don't innovate using LALIAFLIA you most probably use the DID-Pattern or the NID-Pattern. These options lead to predictable and copy and paste results. Most leading creative minds talk about "It's not about evolution, it's about revolution." The revolution is the star, which is the `original´ approach and the evolution is the tree, which is the `add on top´ approach (a.k.a. Benchmarking)

Don't get me wrong, LALIAFLIA is not aiming to set a totalitarian rule that innovators have to follow (I have to mention this to avoid comments from PhD students like: "Are you trying to say that everything is wrong?" or "...you know that creatives think there is nothing above them, even not god...").

LALIAFLIA is more a free associational method that leaves room for more greater unknown ideas than most people could think about.

The method is there to rescue LIFE from being taken as hostage by Science (look at ZOO's) and to facilitate the vivid ideas to creatives.

The Trinity of Innovation consists of only three ways to create things. Any design can be seen in the forefront of these three patterns. Recognizing the pattern is key to escape into smarter ideas:

LID (Life inspires Design) like Birds-Wing

The whole idea of LALIAFLIA is "how to create innovations by taking any living thing as inspiration or even how to transform every human made thing into an abstraction of LIFE". In the beginning of LALIAFLIA I was talking about "I gave up human thought as the answer to all problems in life. In my eyes the greatest men in the world had lost the battle against the suppressed mother of life – Life itself."
If you look at the innovative air-moving systems developed by the company FESTO, you can witness this scenario.
In evolution studies this process is described as: "Design out of Chaos without the aid of Mind."

LALIAFLIA is a guarantee for originality. A business designer said instantly to me: "I never thought about the real meaning of originality."

Any innovator who is engaged in this process will lead the innovation scenery! That's why Kevin Kelly talks about: “Organic life is the ultimate technology, and all technology will improve towards biology (he means life).”
The difference between life and design is deminishing, LALIAFLIA accelerates this process by provinding a method that helps innovators to abstract life (even humans) in design.

DID (Design inspires Design) like NOTE BOOK

Most people would think that Renaissance (re-birth) is LALIAFLIA in a way, but not really. The age of the Renaissance is the re-birth of dead ideas. Maslows pyramid of need is a dead metaphor illustrating the need of humans in the frame of a triangle. Cranes try to be big arms carrying heavy loads and reaching difficult places, but they never made it out of the DID-pattern. The examples are infinite.

Gilles Deleuze said rightly "And when it thinks it is producing something else, it is in fact only reproducing itself."

About 99% of the innovation found in our society today follow the DID-Pattern. One of the most conservative of all is the design of letters and spoken-sound. Many creatives are blinded by tradition and semiotics to recognize this phenomenon.

Any innovator who is able to transform a DID-Pattern into an LID-Pattern has been worshiped as genius like Darwin, Gaudi, Steve Jobs, Da Vinci ect.

NID (Nature inspires Design) like "Be water my friend"

Not only Bruce Lee used this way of innovation, but also the inventors of the first clock were using nature (physics) to invent our time. As we all know, a day comes from the rotation of the earth around itself, a month from the rotation of the moon around the earth and a year from the rotation of the earth around the sun. Since I have no clue how to read a TRADITIONAL watch within 2 seconds, I thought about a real NID-Watch that shows the dark and bright part of the world in relation to someones's current position.

NID is not LALIAFLIA and LALIAFLIA is surely NOT about nature. But there are a few products and services that take physics as a source of inspiration and even they will be replaced by LID-Patterns.

Difference between LALIAFLIA and Bionics, Biomimicry ect.

2010-07-20T05:35:00.000-07:00

A psychology friend of our family ones said to me that there are two ways to learn something new.
One is by recognizing an information or experience, and two is by being disturbed by a new information or experience, which forces us to adapt to the new circumstances. That's why I am not surprised that many people who have no clue about the depth of LALIAFLIA trying to find parallels to other concepts.

An innovator friend of mine met someone from the innovation company "Festo" and said to me: "Esayas, I know this company which is exactly doing what you are doing." Sure "Festo" is imitating and abstracting behaviors from living things and applying it into technological solutions, but still that doesn't mean they are doing LALIAFLIA.

LALIAFLIA has elements of Bionics and Biomimicry, but as a whole it is much larger and comprehensive than both fields as it considers the layers of inspiration, all life on earth, all inventions that are based on inspiration taken from living things and all innovations that will be possible in the future by applying this method.

The reason for that is the enormously flexible applicability of the term INSPIRATION and ABSTRACTION. By having inventions based on inspirations and abstractions from living things an entire new world of life inspired design is possible.

Another important strength of LALIAFLIA is the possibility to design immaterial concepts and models based on living things. The famous Boston Consulting Group Matrix is a very simple example for a LIA, which represents an inspiration and less an imitation of life. The Matrix is an abstraction of a product life cycle that originated from an inspiration taken from any living thing. The metaphors taken by BCG can be re-imagined as baby, youth, adult and grandfather. In principle the matrix expresses that all products and businesses are like a living thing.

To say that LIA's are imitation of Living Artefacts is not correct. Even Biomimicries advocate Janine Benyus emphasis more the inspiration process and not the imitation process. The Beijing National Olympic Stadium (Bird's Nest) is not made to inhabit huge birds so they can incubate eggs, right...?

"The whole is larger than the sum of it's parts".

For LALIAFLIA it means: IT IS THE WHOLE!

For the other concepts, models and methods like: DNA, GINA, Zoomorphic, Bionics, Biomimicry, Robotics, AI ect.: THESE ARE THE PARTS.

Bionics and Biomimicry are like the other models and concepts part of the larger family LALIAFLIA.

Design-Life Thinking

2010-04-28T09:12:00.001-07:00

What the hell is `Design-Life Thinking´?

Design-Life Thinking is basically a conscious way of designing something, while assuming that what you want to design will be at the end of the day something life-like.

Why can't a heater detect the temperature on itself and adjust the heat accordingly?
Why can't a heater recognize when someone enters a room by sensing someone's body temperature and switch itself on?
If you practice Design-Life Thinking you will be blown away how much you will invent within a single day.

This advert of Nokia is a very good example for how much life you can add into a simple ball. Each ball has a behavior, which is abstracted from living things.

Design-Life Thinking works in everything you design, because you just pretend as if the objects or concepts you design is supposed to live.

How often have you lost your mobile phone at home and you were unable to find it? Have you ever called it...? No, you just say to your friend "please give me your mobile so I can call my mobile..."

Even web designers pretend subconsciously as if a website was a living thing by calling the top of a page "header", the middle part "body", and the button part "footer".

Design-Life Thinking is a shortcut for innovators.

Tom Peters, the business and innovation advocate, describes his notion of innovation as follows: "It came to me in a flash: Innovation is a lark!"
Nirvik Singh, CEO of Grey Asia Pacific says: "We bring brands to life - across the world."

Our recent innovation, which is based on this thinking had the following response: "Wow, I want to have it. Right now!"

Here is an application of Design-Life Thinking from BMW that a car-innovator showed me.

Chris Bangle, the director of Design BMW Group uses "GINA" as an acronym to describe his method. If you familiarize yourself with the method LALIAFLIA more deeply you would find out that "GINA" is a tiny bit within the concept of LALIAFLIA. The source of inspiration for the GINA concept (LIA) are humans (LA).

He literally says: "The level of humanistic content we can bring in."

Design inspires Design

2010-04-21T02:40:00.000-07:00

The hidden Problem Behind All Problems

It is almost universal: A design solution as a source of inspiration for the next design solution (iteration) is where most creative ideas have been stuck since day one. To make this creative problem accessible, I like to use an analogy that everybody is familiar with.

The technological "evolution" of computer devices on the hard and software level shows this phenomenon very obvious. The first computers used to complete small calculations had a size of a building. With shrinking transistors the devices have become smaller and smaller.

When Apple revolutionized the computer industry by introducing a personal computer, a product used for industrial services was now accessible to the masses. The big sized computers were scaled down from room size to desktop size. So far so good.

What was not good is the fact that the fundamental idea of the personal computer was a combination of two existing design solutions that were there before: The screen and the typewriter.

Ok, why is that a problem, when recombination is actually a principle of life itself?

Because, the source of inspiration follows the "Design inspires Design" pattern. Instead of using a living thing as a source of inspiration, the personal computer has been based on ideas that were solutions for other problems. The typewriter was used in the industry to capture text based information. The screen was used for moving images.
In a way the input and output devices were the revolutionary parts of the first "Personal Computers" as integrated circuits systems existed from back to the 50th.

An interview with Steve Jobs shows that he actually got it right by making analogues with "our minds". But using again a bicycle as a metaphor to impose that computers are an improvement of the brain can be seen as misleading. Or have you seen a computer that was smarter than a human being. Of course computers can render predictable information faster than humans, but what would they do without our input?

If we go back to the pioneers of computers John Halland and von Neumann, we know that the computer technology in it's birth-days was a highly "Life inspired Artefact". John Holland and von Neumann used nerve systems and the DNA as inspiration when they design the computer architecture.

The usage of a typewriter and a screen as an input and output device can definitely be seen as one of the biggest obstacles that occurred in the process of computer design.

Ever since innovators and designers have been relying on inspirations taken from existing design solutions. This is the problem of all problems as it narrows down more and more the "circle of inspiration" to a level that "Life inspired Design" becomes almost unthinkable.
That's basically why the moving restriction we face today in front of a computer device is inherited from the DID-Principle.

The "advanced" iterative process of computer devices is hindered by ideas adapted from existing design solutions like the "Notebook". A notebook is literally an abstraction of a book. When we look at it from the "Layers of inspiration", we will quickly realize that we're dealing with an abstraction of a book in an electronic device. Using a book as a source of inspiration is the highest possible limitation one can imagine when considering the infinite possibilities of "Living Artefacts" and the "Layers of Inspiration" as a method to abstract ideas.

But this is not the only restriction build into a personal computer. We have something called the "desktop", "trash", "folders" ect. which is again inspired from the items in our office. Trends like "spotlight" and "time machine" are less an advancement of technology but a sign of the superiority of the principle "Life inspires Design". The last features are more life-like than the one abstracted from the office.

To predict the future of the mechanisms in which we will interact with computer devices is pretty simple.

When a revolutionary innovation emerges we witness mostly a transition from "Design inspires Design" to "Life inspires Design". A touchpad is not "there yet". A voice or even thought controlled device is actually something "we all want", right...

The "Design inspires Design" phenomenon can be found in ANY design solution.

This has to do with the overestimation of "Design inspires Design" and unconsciously underestimation of "Life Inspired Design".
A car innovator said to me ones that doors of cars are in a way a silly idea. The doors build in cars are copied from the doors in our homes.

Sliding doors would be more clever as one would avoid crash accidents by passing vehicles. Sure, sliding doors are still "Design inspired Design" solutions.

If we would implement a "Life inspired Design" instead, we would take inspiration from eyes, mouth or any other "smarter" living opening and closing concept and abstract it in our design process.

A window based on inspiration taken from a living thing would be able to "see", "move in together", "clean itself" or the ground using brushs...ect.

The future of design is life centered

2009-11-06T06:44:00.000-08:00

In other words: The future of design is Laliaflia

It would be quite ignorant to say that the future of design or innovation is human centered. Human centered design is exactly the problem that humanity is facing today.
Everybody who has a little interest in the big picture of the world would embarrassingly agree that the amount of biodiversity is rapidly declining and the impact of human "behavior" has caused many environmental problems such as pollution and global warming.

Even-though I am thankful for the many organized and individual initiatives that promote and practice sustainable creativity, I am somehow "shy" to use the word sustainability today at all, because sustainability was the natural status quo from day one, which doesn't need to be mentioned.

By putting human needs at the center of any design challenge, aren't we assuming that people are well informed about the interaction of their life and the life of other creatures???

It is obvious that human rational is not sophisticated enough to solve the problems we face in our world today.
The tree-thinking, which has incredibly thousand years of history is dying out and a star is born to change this one dimensional perspective. John Thakara argues astonishingly that

"we need to design macroscopes as well as microscopes to help us understand where things come from and why".

If you want is Laliaflia the microscope and macroscope for sustainable design. Another alternative to Laliaflia is Flialiala that Louis Downs, my business partner, introduced recently.

As Sylvia Earle, the oceanographer says correctly is "business as usual" the cause for overfishing and therefore the cause for extinction of many species.

By looking on the impact that human needs has on the environment and life on the planet will surely convince all of us that life has to be in the center of any creative work. The beauty of this idea, which is expressed by the method Laliaflia quite simple, is on one hand that it will make every designer/ innovator aware of the sensibility of any life form, and on the other hand we will realize that life is the best place to get inspiration for innovation.

In my research I found out that all economic value is actually based on living things. Any cent can be traced back to a living thing. Some scientist and sustainable experts talk about the ecosystem as "The Real World Bank". This is where the energy comes from, where ideas have been shaped in sustainable materials.

So what do I mean when I say the future of design is life centered? Do we go to the north-pole and ask a polar bear what he wants? Of course not! Design and innovation as a technological or social application will mainly remain a human activity, but it will be based on a wide range of knowledges about the natural world, which has to involve at least this layers of inspiration: concept, material, use of energy, behavior, form and function.

By putting life as a whole (including humans) in the center of any creative work we can be sure that the impact on the ecosystem is less harmful than if we would concentrate on just humans. When we create Future life Inspired Artefacts (FLIA) our understanding and relationship to the living world will change entirely and we will start to appreciate the little things of life like the spider web that gave us the power to design a world wide web.

The future of design has to be initially life centered and after that it has to meet human needs by applying alternatively the methodology of Laliaflia.

What do Laliaflia and TED have in common?

2009-08-29T02:03:00.000-07:00

"TED is all about pattern in the clouds, it's all about connections, it's all about seeing things that everybody else has seen before, but thinking about them in ways that nobody has thought about them before. And that's really what discovery and imagination is all about." Jay Walker

F.L.I.A. like Future Life Inspired Artefact

2009-08-26T18:21:00.000-07:00

Lia's become Flia's when we add the word future in the front. What are Future Life Inspired Artefacts?

Fllia's are basically concepts, ideas, and sketches that don't exist physically yet, but are based on La's.

This is the starfish approach that I was talking about in "The star beats the tree in creativity". The "body" of the starfish is the source of inspiration and the "legs" are the different interpretations. The sunglass with a camera attached is a Flia. An entire airplane, which is inspired by the skin of a shark is a Flia, ect.

The ultimate goal of Laliaflia as an enterprise is to generate or help other creative people to generate as many great Flia's as possible. We are talking here about unleashing potentials, about transferring the talent of life inspired design to creative people. In my MA I have done it with some students in workshops with surprising results, like a traffic light that can see or a window system that is inspired by a fish.

The early examples of Flia's can be found in the sketches of Da Vinci. Da Vinci is perhaps one of the first dedicated pioneers in the art of life inspired design. His studies about human anatomy and bird behaviors found their way into his technologies and inventions. Da Vinci was highly a life inspired designer, which shouldn't suggest that he exploited this creative process to the maximum. My statement "was Da Vinci wrong" is supposed to help us understand, that nature is superior to any human thought and that the amount of Flia's is still infinite.

If we start to step back from history and look on the amount of Lia's that have been emerging in different design solutions like the famous Velcro system, we will start to realize that Flia's are the only reason why Laliaflia actually exists. Flia's are the missing part in Laliaflia, the dynamic element, which evolves by understanding La's and Lia's. As Bruce Mau says rightly:

"Allow space for the ideas you haven’t had yet, and for the ideas of others."

Nick Leon, the director of Design London said to me, when I tested Laliaflia on him: Design is a process not an outcome. That process is a socially-constructed activity."
In workshops I made good experiences by providing a common problem. And this is where Flia's become valuable, when they relate to a specific problem.

My favorite Flia came from a life inspired architect at AA, Prof. Michael Weinstock, who said: "My future life inspired artefact is an intelligent city."

L.I.A. like Life Inspired Artefact

2009-08-25T07:09:00.000-07:00

Lia's are without a single exception the most successful artefacts on the planet.

This may sound on the first sight like blown up, but you don't have to look no further than the source of inspiration for the increasingly addictive world wide web.

To come up with the conceptual idea of the world wide web it takes an inspiration from a spider web, which hangs "iggit" down from our ceiling when we go home. The web structure is not limited to the spider web only, it can also be found in the structure of the synapsis of the brain or the root of rhizomatic grass populations. We are all linked and connected like the spider to any part of the web and like every nerve to the brain.

As a matter of fact, the digital web is just a tiny micro entry point into the world of Lia's which could increasingly continue to dominate more and more the future of design and innovation - if applied consciously.

It is mind blowing when we quickly look through history what can be classified as Life Inspired Artefact. We got Da Vinci's airplane inspired by birds, we got Darwins evolution theory inspired by the tree, we got John Hollands computation inspired by the DNA, and Muhammad Ali's fighting strategy inspired by the butterfly and the bee.

"The first language and the first technology was not created by humans. It was created by primordial RNA molecules. Is there any possibility that an evolution process with the potential of leading to comparable results could be started in the memory of a computing machine?" - Nils Aall Barricelli

Immediately, the notion will arise that we have always been using Living Artefacts to get inspiration for Life Inspired Artefacts. This may be true for cultures like the Egypt's and the Maya, which were surrounded by living things, but in our modern urbanized culture, we have surely a limited source of inspiration.
One of my external reviews from Goldsmith University, Terry Rosenberg came up with the great thought:

"It bags the question what is not all this?"

Lias vary a lot in their level of imitation and abstraction roughly between 1 and 99 percent. 0 would be no life inspiration and 100 percent would be life itself. Today I was fascinated by a Lia example from Boston Dynamic, who created an abstraction of a dog that could run through the forest. That would be a Lia with a high degree of life inspiration.

Than another example of a Lia that an innovator recommended me to read is the book "The Starfish and the Spider". I was literally stunned when he showed me the book without knowing what I am doing. I saw it as a fate, because the idea behind the literature is so similar to what Laliaflia stands for in the field of design and innovation. The authors encourage organizations to be build up on the structure of a sea star instead of a tree to evolve better and to be more creative.

Life inspired design is as the author of Zoomorphic, Hugh Aldersey-Williams, said to me: "a huge and complex area, but the structure LA / LIA / FLIA is sound"
So the term Lia allows us to recognize in seconds a design that is build up on an inspiration from a living thing.
Ask yourself why is Facebook, Google, Apple, or Twitter so successful? Is it just the technology or the source of inspiration?

To find Non-Life Inspired Artefacts you don't have to look further than your actual surrounding. What inspired your bed, your door, your PC, your table, or even your business structure? The more the artefacts consist of simple shapes like circle, square ect, the more we can be sure they are based on our thoughts or simple mathematics.

When ever I see a seagull flighing over my head and in the next moment an airplane (as an easy example) I see the huge gap between what has been abstracted from the bird and what is still left. The seagull glides, turns and twists with so much elegance and so much superiority that you start to think that the airplane is designed like a bomb with two reference points, the starting and the end. What holds engineers up to divert behaviors and functions from the seagull?

If the two sensory innovations we abstracted have found their way subconscious through the camera and the telephone, we have to admit that the space for Flia's, Future Life Inspired Artefacts, is incredibly immense. Of course, material science, computation, and architecture have been practicing life inspired design for many decades, but not in the simple structure of Laliaflia.

Why is this important to mention? Well, when you want to create something and you have a well defined structure like Laliaflia, which is dynamic, you will get quicker to a result and you will be totally aware of what is possible.

L.A. like Living Artefacts

2009-08-24T17:03:00.000-07:00

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.

Fast prototyping using Laliaflia

2009-07-22T20:08:00.000-07:00

This is the fastest camera in the world.

Imagine you are going to a place where you have never been before. You meet people you haven't seen for too long. Imagine you experience a situation that lasts for not more than 2 seconds.
The german fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld said that people don't see things anymore, because they keep taking pictures when interesting things are going on. We grab the camera and loose often the consciousness about the situation.

If we look at the process how we take pictures and why, we will quickly realize that the most interesting things we wanted to capture pass quicker than we can react.

This prototype solves the problem, because it has a camera which is attached to a sunglass. When you wear this sunglass you won't be missing any situation that you would like to capture. You can trigger the shot using a remote control.

This simple prototype should be an example how we can generate valuable ideas using Laliaflia in seconds.

What you see is what you get.

Out-source the power of In-spiration!

2009-06-28T05:31:00.000-07:00

99 percent of any creative or innovative work comes from in-spiration.

Inspiration can stand for provocation, suffering, stimulation, influence, emotional drive or anything that changes the way we think and see the world.

Actually, I didn't make the number 99 up. All my and other peoples creative work is based on inspiration and imagination. Inspiration is typically as much underestimated as imagination. In a way this two are linked. Inspiration is often the "trigger" for imagination and designing.

Alexander Graham Bell was for example inspired by his mother's gradual deafness when he developed the telephone (from Laliaflia way thinking, a replacement of our voice and ear). I didn't know about it until I researched it now, because I could bet that he was inspired by something. I could even imagine that he was inspired by the mouth and the ear before I did the research.

In a way promoting "The Layers of Inspiration" is very challenging for Laliaflia. Many creatives have their individual way of getting inspiration. Some travel through Africa for three month, some go to a museum, and others just watch movies.

Inspiration can come from anywhere.

Yesterday I was in a Design Studio in London and saw many inspiring books and the ones with plants and animals caught my attention the most. Even Michael Jackson's love for creatures bags the question if his creative work was inspired by creatures. When I look at my research I am not surprised.

David Simoes-Brown from NESTA said to me when I introduced him into Laliaflia: "So many creatives get inspiration from 'nature' why do we create in the first place?". It's a great question actually, why do we create? Because we can? This is another story.

What Laliaflia is all about is not whether we get inspiration or not, because we get it in ninety-nine percent of the cases.

Laliaflia is about WHERE we get our inspiration from and HOW.

We can get inspiration from artificial things or living things. Every time I see how a design is inspired by one of both I am fascinated by the incredible possibilities of life inspiration. Most people don't even care where they get the inspiration from.

When it comes to how we get inspiration The Layers of Inspiration™ are very useful and therefore optional. Dr. Antwerpes said about them "The subconscious perception of the layers can help to design better."

Prof. Michael Weinstock from London's Architecture Association suggested me to use three layers: material, energy, and information, because in life the three parts depend on each other. I want to thank him for getting me in the idea of behavior as a layer, which I called transformation at the beginning. Everything in life is highly designed to be efficient otherwise it will die. But our creative work is far away from life and requires a step by step adjustment.

The Layers of Inspiration represent a way of interpreting life in design. They look at life from design perspective and not from life. The reason is because we are in the business of abstraction and not imitation.

The Layers of Inspiration™ can be used in combination. Currently they are in an iterative phase.

The Layers of Inspiration

Concept
This layer stands for how we use a phenomenon of life in design. The London Oyster Card is an abstraction of the oyster. The card has a value inside like an oyster.

Methaphor
This layer is one of the most underestimated. It works mostly in the way we think or imagine. The web as an abstraction of the spider web is a great example.

Aesthetics
This layer is highly optional. You don't have to make it look "organic" or "symmetric", but your chances are just high that people will love it if you go for complexity.

Form/ Function
This layer is often used as imitation of life like the "Lotus Effect" or the "Velcro System"

Behaviour
This layer is used very rarely and is therefore my favorite one. Like doors that open up when you approach them. Or the ATM machines that give us money ect.

Material
This layer is where we can learn the most from life, because as J. Benyus says rightly "nature uses only a subset of the periodic table". The periodic table is based on the concept of atoms and the wrong definition of the word nature.

Energy
This layer stands for how life generates energy and uses energy. The heater in our homes is a replacement of living body. Bees heat their beehive with their body temperature, but did the scientist came up with an idea how they can integrate their observation? No. Am I thankful they figured it out? Yes.

Information
This layer stands for any phenomenon that deals with saving and transforming information. It is related to behavior. The DNA and the nerve systems are outstanding phenomenon's.

Laliaflia vs. Science

2009-06-15T16:52:00.000-07:00

"The most beautiful thing we can experience is a mysteries" - Einstein

For a long time I said, I don't want to get into any scientific thinking, because science was for me equivalent to knowledge for it's own sake. Philosophy "love of wisdom" turned into "love of wisdom using logical thinking".

Richard Dawkins who I have send an email regarding Laliaflia a year ago caught my attention recently again when I started to explore his "Selfish Gene Theory". I literally dropped some tears as I get into his idea of material based and gene dominated world. I just though for a second: Do you have to wear the coldest and most materialistic glasses to actually call yourself a scientist?

To find meaning in something and to get some breath again, I started to think about Dawkins theory in Laliaflia. Ones again I was shocked how one can reduce an opinion on life to one conclusion. OK, as a title "Selfish Gene" makes it easy to understand what Dawkins wants to say. But using Selfish as a personification of genetic material was for me a bit too much interpretation.

Of course, following Aristoteles method of logic that anyone can find today in his book "Organon" will demonstrate us that Dawkins is right. Dawkins is right in the mind-set of Darwin. Darwin is right in the mind-set of Aristotle. The tree structure can be found in this scientific treaties again. The scientific method that only allows one conclusion. One answer, and that answer is ultimate. They are still some mysteries left in life nobody still understands, but in the novel of Dawkins the statement seems to be absolute. "The genes misuse organisms as machines to survive and through them away to move on to next generation".
Science was never colder and darker than this statement. Moreover it was never filled with so much metaphor that is related to human made design. I could argue through Laliaflia that Dawkins would have come up with a better answer than "Selfish Gene" if he would have used a living metaphor to explain his point. I could say design inspires design when I look at the metaphor "Machines". The metaphor of the "Machines" against the metaphor of the "Sea Star".

I put this ad of Apple to illustrate how misleading a machine inspired monochrome designing can be and at the same time how hopeful a diverse life inspired designing can be. Apple beats Windows, because the Apple delivers through it's cooperate identity (apple icon) constantly life inspiration and Windows delivers also through it's cooperate identity (window icon) constantly design inspiration. Tom Peters says:

"Design for humans, not robots!"

This clip of apple brings this statement to the point. I was impressed by the subconscious insight of the creatives who shoot this scenes and made me think this: "Everything we have to understand is already part of us."

The finishing of the apple clip reminds me funnily on two statements I made while developing Laliaflia: "The code of life beats the code of light." and "The greatest men in the world had lost the battle against the supressed mother of life. Life itself."

In a way Dawkins thesis bags a principle which has been expressed in different context. I would rather call it "The Selfish Life" or "All in the service of life". But if not life, what else than?

Here are some quotes that caught my attention while developing Laliaflia:

"Leadership is all about love: ...Appetite for Life" Tom Peters/ Managment Guru
"If you do something for someone else, the satisfaction lasts." Martin Seligman/ Psychologist
"The future of design is human centered." David Kelley/ IDEO

To go on the level of genes, the "concepters" of life, is fine. But I see them as a "practical virtual living artefacts" that dominate every design. Check the document "Defining Artefacts".
Interestingly Dawkins developed a concept that he called "Meme" from imitation to explain how an idea in life travels from one generation to the next without being material anymore. And this is where his science changes into religion.

Why do people think in black and white? What's wrong with the rainbow? Is the rainbow maybe to rare to be recognized?

Babies rule, innovation rules, creativity rules and diversity rules.

Dr. Antwerpes said to me: "If you look at the metabolism process, it‘s a constant construction and deconstruction process. I don‘t believe there is something like good and bad in nature. We got the ability to create. If you want, we have the aspect of creation."

For now I got enough of science at the edge of religion and look forward to get back to design thinking and design doing.

What is the problem?

2009-06-14T15:26:00.000-07:00

- Most Designers are inspired by other Designers.

What is the solution?

- LA.LIA.FLIA. and the Layers of Inspiration!

What does LALIAFLIA ask?

- How can creatures inspire creatives?

Laliaflia in Yes and No

2009-06-12T23:44:00.000-07:00

Is Laliaflia an acronym - Yes
Is Laliaflia based on an MA project - Yes
Is Laliaflia an evolving project - Yes
Is Laliaflia made to make the world a better place - Yes
Is Laliaflia abstract - Yes
Is Laliaflia out of this world - No
Is Laliaflia possible - Yes
Is Laliaflia a creative thinking - Yes
Is Laliaflia experimental - Yes
Is Laliaflia a creative process - Yes
Is Laliaflia a tool for innovation - Yes
Is Laliaflia optional - Yes
Is Laliaflia made to know things - No
Is Laliaflia made to create all kind of things - Yes
Is Laliaflia practical - Yes
Is Laliaflia biology - No
Is Laliaflia about nature - No
Is Laliaflia about green - No
Is Laliaflia about life - Yes
Is Laliaflia about design - Yes
Is Laliaflia an imitation of life - No
Is Laliaflia an abstraction of life - Yes
Is Laliaflia a design method - Yes
Is Laliaflia applicable as a workshop - Yes
Is Laliaflia applicable in innovation - Yes
Is Laliaflia going to dominate the future of design - Yes
Is Laliaflia made for anyone involved in designing the future - Yes
Is Laliaflia also a database of ideas - Yes
Is Laliaflia independent - Yes
Is Laliaflia an ideology - No
Is Laliaflia a reality - Yes
Is Laliaflia a strategy to remain biodiversity - Yes
Is Laliaflia applicable in business design - Yes
Is Laliaflia applicable in product design - Yes
Is Laliaflia applicable in architecture - Yes
Is Laliaflia applicable in media design - Yes
Is Laliaflia applicable in social innovation - Yes
Is Laliaflia applicable in everything human made - Yes
Is Laliaflia subconsciously-applied as old as humanity - Yes
Is Laliaflia consciously applied as a whole an innovation itself - Yes
Is Laliaflia a new challenge for human creativity - Yes
Is Laliaflia a principle of life itself - Yes
Is Laliaflia available in all kind of media formats - Yes
Is Laliaflia a creative thinking that helps to come up with an idea in 5 seconds where others need 5 years - Yes

Any other question?

Abstract Principles and uncover Mysteries

2009-06-04T23:22:00.000-07:00

Principles like cutting that can be found in teeth as well as in scissors have a special place within Laliaflia and our creative thinking. The scissor can be read as a subconscious innovation based on teeth.

Malcolm Gladwell says: "Everybody is obsessed with finding universal principles". If we are not talking about any unique phenomenon, we probably talk about principles.

Why are principles much more in favour than unique phenomenons? Most probably, because principles help us to predict the future and backup our thoughts, whereas unique phenomenons remain mysteries.
Check J.J. Abrams if you are keen on Mysteries. If not keep reading. :-)

Interestingly, we would love to think about a creative process as something mysteries, something that comes from nowhere. But since everything growth organic, we can hardly avoid to abstract what we see.

A great example are fractals (self replicating patterns), that can be found in leafs as well as in the design of a building. The same applies for symmetry, which is indeed the most common principle we know within living things.

Dr. Antwerpes, one of my best external reviews said to me when I interviewed him: "Everything can be positioned in the corner of principles." And sure it is right. Looking at artefacts from a principle point of view reveals, that most things already exist in life. For example we use clothespin as a replacement for two fingers, ect.

I think innovation is scarcely a creation of something out of this world. Even-though we would like to think about it this way.

This is not to say that we can not create something, which was not there in life before. If we do, we might have to check if fits within the rhythms of life.

Principles are shortcuts, formulas, and boosters to design thinking. It comes down to: If you understand one thing (principle), you will understand everything (same principle in every context).

Design and creativity is highly related to predicting the future. For Laliaflia it means, the more principles we find the easier we can create something with value.
On the left you see relations of principles I came across while looking at living artefacts and human made artefacts. Each of the principles deserve a separate chapter, but for now the illustration should be enough.

independent = are inventions we came up with independently. they are exactly like life's design (roof and gecko's skin, helicopter and seed, pollination and advertising, lenses and fish eyes)

insightful = are inventions we came up with because we understood it's superiority (radar from bats, airplane from birds, computing from our brain)

subconscious = inventions that we came up with subconsciously even though they are in front of our naked eyes (clothespin like fingers, cameras like eyes, scissors like ncisor, mill like back tooth)

process driven = inventions that undergo a development, which results in life like solutions (crash test like evolution, recycling like ecosystems, cooperations like symbiosis)

instant logical = inventions that allow one instant conclusion (bridges and spider threads, bags and kangaroos, doors and eyelid)

ignorant = inventions which ignore life totally (streets, light bulbs, borders)

unknown principles = are just mysteries

Think about for example why businesses talk about growing, branches, and life cycles. This principles are used as abstracts, they require a sort of translation from the visible into the invisible.

"The Internet will be one big Organism"

2009-06-01T06:44:00.000-07:00

Kevin Kelly, a former writer of the "Wired" magazine, talks on ted.com about the next 5000 days of the internet. He introduces interesting metaphors and concepts that reminds highly on Laliaflia.

Kevin Kelly, who has a significant influence on the making of the movie "Matrix" describes the web as a brain. It's current capacity is according to him equal to one human brain. He describes the interaction as the process familiar to most of us in synapsis.
Even-though K. Kelly comes traditionally from a technological point of view of the world he can not avoid making comparisons to living phenomenon's.

The future of the internet will be driven by a more and more interaction of us with each other. K. Kelly says rightly:

"We will be totally co-dependent on it."

He calls the future of the web "THE ONE". The big ONE machine, which is the most reliable technology humans have ever made. It is like an ORGANISM. "We are the web. We are the one. The one is us."

The reason I put this idea of K. Kelly on this blog is because, if you want to predict the future of human creativity, you simply have to think in Laliaflia.

Either it is a replacement of a living thing or it's extension.
"What we really want to do at Google is create an Artificial Intelligence" says Larry Page, the co-founder of Google.

The idea of A.I. is scary to most people (maybe because it's inspired by humans ;-)), but if you look at it from the perspective of Laliaflia, you will quickly realize, that we will always remain the most reliable machines. A.I. is just an abstraction of human on the layer of inspiration: BEHAVIOR.

This is how we would re-design the web using Laliaflia:

The first LA's that we would look on are:
the brain, the sensess, and human as organism.

The LIA which is the web today:
can see, can read, can hear, can automatically link.

The FLIA of the web in the future:
can taste, can touch, can smell, can move, can talk to us and think.

THERE WILL BE NO WEB 3.0/ 4.0/ 5.0. THERE WILL ONLY BE AN ABSTRACTION OF LIFE IN DIGITAL FORMAT. :-)

If the web doesn't manage to replace us, it has to serve as a channel or a tube to connect us to others. Ones again life defines what design will be like. Not vise versa.

"You have to translate the visual into the abstraction and vise versa"

2009-06-01T03:59:00.000-07:00

Leaders have the ability to think abstract.

The story of the Velcro System is a very good example to show the fine line between imitation and abstraction. George de Mestral was inspired by a hooked seed that was hanging on his dogs fur. When he abstracted the mechanism and applied it on fashion design, he had to imitate obviously the hooks and the fur. In this case G. de Mestral has gone through a high abstractive process, because he used life's mechanisms in a new context - Not for seeding but for fashion.

To be honest, I am extremely bored by popular media examples in the field of life inspired design, because mostly they demonstrate imitations of life. A more highly challenging task is abstraction like the concept and metaphor of a web in world wide web. We can put it this way:

Abstraction is a diverting from one solution in life into ANOTHER solution in design.

Imitation is a diverting from one solution in life into the SAME solution in design.

If you build a building according to the design process of Laliaflia and you take inspiration from a bird you have to abstract life in your design.

The level of abstraction and imitation depends always on which layers of inspiration you are actually translating life into your design process.

The star beats the tree in creativity

2009-06-01T03:00:00.000-07:00

Most people think, that there is not much to invent. The reason for that is the difference in tree and star way of creative thinking and application. In the hierarchical thinking people truly believe they can only improve an invention by just adding a new feature to it. For cars, it's more power, for digital cameras it's more pixels, for computers it's more space ect.
But if you switch from the tree to the star way of thinking, you will be blowing away how much there is not invented. How much innovation and creativity is still possible.

Nearly nothing is actually invented yet

by which I mean nothing is abstracted from life yet. An innovator said to me when I tested Laliaflia on him, it would be interesting to design a building that changes it's color when it's on fire. Just like human change their colors when they change their mood.

The tree way of creative thinking adds extra features to the existing one and is just an improvement of a limited aspect. The star way of creative thinking in contrast opens up infinite possibilities for new ideas when you use the layers of inspiration.

I was thinking how a simple table can be inspired by life on the layers of behavior. Wouldn't it be cool if you have a table that can move and behave according to what you want to do, like a table that turns and twists to you when you want to write and another one when you want to go online. The same thing for your shower head. I mean look at it, it has already fixed behaviors installed.

Coding behaviors for Laliaflia

2009-05-21T06:33:00.001-07:00

Thanks to my friend Nils Klimm who is talented in complicated algorithms, I will demonstrate that Laliaflia doesn't only work on 3 dimensional products, but also in media design.

Follow this thought and take a look at media design solutions that catches your attention. You will find out that they try to bring something to life. Simple

A friend of mine send me this link:

Bio Bak

Is the wheel the worst invention in the world?

2009-05-20T17:43:00.001-07:00

All right, most people would expect something else here. Something like "You can not reinvent the wheel". Hell no! How do you want to reinvent the wheel? There are thousands of spheres in nature with the shape of a circle (wheel), like the orange. But when it comes to transportation a wheel is the worst invention in the world.

Why Esayas, why?

Because when you look at the wheel, and you cut it in the middle, and you stretch it, you get a straight line. So the wheel can only be applied on straight surfaces, which we know as streets. Straight streets.

How I get to this thought is, because I came across a shoe introduced by the company called MBT= The anti-shoe". MBT argues that our feet are not made for the street. They are made for a natural uneven ground. So I said to myself: Shoes are not the problem, it is the streets. Streets are made for wheels and cars. For the most primitive prototypes one can imagine to move people.

That's why I can say that wheels are a bad invention, because they require the flattening of uneven grounds. The reason we have got streets is because, nobody has invented a commercial vehicle that can manage to cross any obstacle. A 3 dimensional movement is reduced to a 2 dimensional movement.
So wheels loose against legs. Wheels can not cross every obstacle, but legs can. Simple.

Most of the time when I talk about Laliaflia people's associations are images of insect-like vehicles used for exploration on Mars. Robots with legs that can move around on uneven surfaces, what a surprise ;-)

The cool guy I came across during my MA project is Robert Full who practices life inspired design at the University of Berkeley.
I will send him an email to let him know about the idea of Laliaflia.

Branding of Laliaflia

2009-05-19T16:07:00.000-07:00

Today, everybody is talking about green and bio. A lot of "green-washing" is going on out there. Green has become the most predictable make up companies and organizations use to disguise from their inability to abstract from living things more than just the color.

If you are a serious company or organization, you have to consider yourself being environmental friendly and sustainable. Being green has become a fashion many blindly adapt to. Being a green company or a green idea means today: "We harm living creatures, but a bit less than before." The term green is often not related to life inspiration.

The color green however as an abstraction of chlorophyll, which absorbs the sunlight and transforms it into carbon-based energy, is good, but green as color does not represent life completely. Life (nature) is not green alone, it is all kind of colors.

So the color pink refers to the artificial approach of Laliaflia and rejects a pure imitation of life. The color pink as well as the star are abstractions from a living creature, that has this color pink: The starfish.

The star is a core principle of Laliaflia as a method, which is derived from a natural phenomenon known as the rhizom. The star or jelly structure against the structure of the tree.

Why the starfish or jelly fish as a brand and strategy are so important is, because they represent the beginning of a creative process. The sea creatures stand for the beginning of life in the oceans and their mysteries nature.

How Laliaflia came to life ;-)

2009-05-15T14:50:00.000-07:00

In the year 2006 I was traveling every day on the train between Cologne and Duesseldorf. I was working for a multi media company and was actually kind of bored by the aspiration of the company to sell products to random people.
And I was also moved by the loss of my great mother and thought about using my 3 hour daily ride more useful.

I started to read Aristotle's "De Anima" (about the soul/life). The 2500 year old source is, as many intellects know today, based on Plato's perception of the world: "a reflection of the transcendent ideas".

Aristotle's answer to Plato: "Get lost, the world is real, there is no archaic image of the world." Even though Aristotle use to come up with non-empiric theories, which were totally wrong, his talents in logic and systematic thinking actually helped him to proof that his notion of the world were more real than Plato's. In De Anima he says for example: "The eye has the potential to see, even when the eye is closed. So the light that the eye sees was there before the eye." Aristotle also analyses all other sensories like sound and touch to justify his theory of a real-world, which we really perceive.
He introduces the hierarchy of realization as follows: perception, imagination, thinking, faith, and on top comes science. Science was introduced by Aristotle as the most real observation of our world.

So science, even the science that we know today is a direct reaction to Plato's idealistic way of thinking. "The soul spends most of it's time in wrong perception" says Aristotle, because "when we see the sun we think it is as small as a coin, but we believe that it must be bigger than the earth". "The scientist has to explore what the sun is made of", is a 2500 year old brief many people still apply today. I am quite sure that the mission statement of NASA to go to Mars is based on ancient greek thinking. Searching for life on Mars is the natural human hope to avoid the senseless ancient mission statement of Aristotle. Laliaflia can actually explain why NASA searchs for life on Mars even though there are billions of living things on earth.

The innovator of the sciences (Biology, Chemistry, Psychology, Physics, Rhetoric, Ethics and Politics) has used living things as inspiration to define his principles. Not always, but sometimes. Like: "The mind is superior to the body, therefore there must be leaders and followers in our society".

But the way his ideas have been used and interpreted by many scientist and artists is scarily a basis of our model of the world. The idea that human can control the world has started with Aristotle, because he put human as the most advanced creatures on the planet. His thoughts were influencing Einstein, Bacon, Da Vinci, Newton and many famous people we know today.

Many people think I am a fan of Aristotle. But actually I am not. I am just fascinated by his mind blowing influence on the shape of our world today. Most of the things we know about the time of ancient Greeks is based on Aristotles hundreds of books. Bertrand Russell notes that "almost every serious intellectual advance has had to begin with an attack on some Aristotelian doctrine".

When I entered the MA course Applied Imagination I get in touch with the rhizome theory in 2008. On my flight from Cologne to London I read the book from Gilles Deleuz and Felix Guattari. I was shocked, excited and fascinated by the theory.

The rhizom appeared to me as the anti-poison against the Aristotelian way of thinking. Deleuz and Guattari introduce the metaphor of a connected root against the metaphor of a tree.

Deleuz and Guattari say: "It is odd how the tree has dominated Western reality and all of Western thought". You have the idea of logic as a trunk and than the branches as the extension of all logics. A fixed tradition based on analysis. And, of course was Darwin inspired by nature when he developed his evolution theory as his "tree-thinking" on the left shows. In Darwins case was the tree a useful metaphor indeed. No tree no evolution theory.

The rhizom doesn't know any limits any fixed structure. It is the middle and beginning of anything new. Where the tree is a hierarchical structure, the rhizom can be abstracted as a source-full structure.
Laliaflia is inspired by the rhizome (interconnected root) and not by the tree. The reason is, because the tree has it's limits, the root doesn't.

Laliaflia is not science. It is not the continuance of Aristotle's way of thinking. It is actually a continuance of life. A creative process, that looks into living things. Laliaflia is not Botanic, Biology, Technology or any LOGY. It is a highly abstractive and synthetic process. A new way of looking at the world. A new way of creating the artificial human made world.

I am not against technology (art) or science (thesis). But I question the superiority of both compared to the empiric life (nature), because life was there first.

From this point on, I started to exclude many disciplines which actually are based on Aristotle's mind-set and left over the most valuable phenomenon of all: LIFE. Increasingly life appears to be the most important phenomenon in the world.

Looking on the projects that I did in the past and projects other creatives did showed me, that life inspired artefacts (LIA) are actually always successful.

Life equals life

is the first hypothesis I formulated and funnily Janine Benyus introduced something similar independently: "Life creates conditions conducive to life".
Even though I don't buy into the term Biomimicry, Janine Benyus and her contribution in the promotion of life inspired technology appeared to me very brave and revolutionary. The only problem is that she also comes from the Aristotelian tradition of analysis, but could free herself from it by saying. "It's not about what we can learn ABOUT nature, it's about what we can learn FROM nature." Calling Biomimicry a science however showed me clearly that she is still thinking in the structure of the LOGIC-TREE.

Laliaflia is a conscious way of designing EVERYTHING by looking at life systematically. The name Laliaflia, which stands for:

LA = Living Artefacts,
LIA = Life inspired Artefacts
FLIA = Future Life inspired Artefact

describes the creative process which is going on today very precisely. Laliaflia is not just a categorization of creative phenomenon's, it is also a method that helps everyone to read and abstract creativity. For example, if you try to understand a car as a life inspired artefact (LIA) you would get nowhere when you use Biomimicry. But when you start to read it as horse inspired artefact (HIA), everything becomes clear.

The reason I used english words is to avoid dead greek words, which everyone would use with a scientific background. Life belongs to no one and especially not to ancient greeks.

I also introduced the layers of inspiration (metaphor, concept, behavior, energy, material, form-function, aesthetics) as a guide to not miss out any inspiring phenomenon like behavior from a living creature. Look at "Was Da Vinci wrong?" clip for more details.

When Laliaflia is applied, everything will be a life inspired artefact. Every human made system, product, and concept will be an abstraction of life to the highest possible level.

Just recently I was thinking about the invention of a car as a life inspired design. What inspired the car? The horse? Of course, the horse, not BENZ or DAIMLER came up with the idea of dragging human on a horse power (PS = Pferde Stärke). But here again is the horse reduced to only 2 layers of inspiration, Behavior (fast movement) and Energy (dragging mechanisms), and everything else is completely neglected.
And than comes Lexus with an idea of implementing sensors on it's car to perceive a deer or human on the street. The car is getting more and more properties that makes up a living creature.

If BENZ or DAIMLER would know about Laliaflia a hundred year ago, we would have cars that don't fart anymore, but can collect their energy by eating something on the field - instead of ripping us off by drinking petrol. lol

Trasportation from Laliaflia way of thinking is something only weak creature use, such as small fishes which attache themselves to sharks and whales to cross the ocean passively, or monkey babies carried by their parents. So transportation is a carrying, dragging by a creature bigger than us. So simple.
And this Laliaflia way of thinking is a basis to generate different methods of transportations. Not by just looking only on horses, but also by looking on kangaroos, wales, sharks and monkeys.

Hundreds of ideas and abstractions will follow.

Nature is Bad!

2009-05-14T16:48:00.000-07:00

Nature is Bad! Nature is Bad! Nature is Bad! Nature is Bad! Nature is Bad!

It has to be displayed a million times. Engraved in stones and on streets.

Life is Good!

Since the beginning of Laliaflia in summer 2008 I have been confronted with one obstacle over and over again. The problem has been the blurred association (semiotics) with the word nature in public.
Most people used to say: "But everything comes from nature". Meaning, the raw material of a computer was taken from natural resources. This is hundred precent right.

The problem here is, that the word nature stands for living as well as non-living things. This blurred definition can be traced back to - geuss who - Aristotle.
Aristotle wrote a book on physics, which means nature in ancient greek. He talks in this highly non-empiric book about everything in the universe: "A mover is a moved one". We don't want to get too far. But in the process of understanding the meaning of nature as just physical (something you can touch), to know the root is crucial. The greeks culture, which shapes our model of the world, had inherited the blurred definition of what we understand under the term nature. We say nature to radio active material and chicken.

Why is Nature bad and Life good Esayas? Why?

Getting inspiration from nature is completely different from getting inspiration from life. Living artefacts have much more phenomenon's to offer than non living things - see the layers of inspiration. Honestly, have you seen a stone that can think or water that can grow?

Life is more valuable when it comes to inspiration, because what we want to create will always be life-like or an abstraction of life.

What is better?

Something that touches you or something you can touch?

One hundred seventy-five

2009-05-13T18:30:00.000-07:00

175 is the number of flapping wings of a hover fly per second. This behavior is so amazing that you can not even imagine it. I mean our eyes are limited to 25 images per second, but 175 is sick.

Understanding Artefact and Design

2009-05-13T15:21:00.000-07:00

The power and also the limitation of terms can be demonstrated by the common definition of what design means. Design is known in public as the shinny make-up. "Have you seen the new design of the new Porsche?" means "Have you seen the new shape an Industrial Designer has created?". The meaning of Design and Designer is wrongly reduced to the surface.

This is exactly not what we understand under the term design in one of the best MA courses in the world - Applied Imagination. For us design is the solution to a problem. Of course not limited to surfaces. It incorporates a concept, a system as well as the product. So design is an Applied Imagination to a given problem.
The result of that process is an Artefact, which can be anything human made. The term Artefact is so powerful when you talk about designing something, that the possibilities of what you can design becomes infinite. Using the term Artefact you can design anything what is artificial.

Hence, Laliaflia is not about designing products or concepts or systems. It's about designing anything. The categories of Product Design, Architecture, Media Design, Fashion Design or what ever the name is disappear under the term of Artefacts.
Thankfully Richard Farson verifies this phenomenon by saying

"Design is everything, Everything is design - we are all designers"

Interestingly when I developed the term Laliaflia, I had to define what kind of Artefacts are out there. I could find 7 principles that describe anything human made. Comparing human made Artefacts with Living Artefacts showed me similarities between Life and Design. But of course were our solutions insanely behind those found in the natural world. And sometimes they were even much more advanced in one aspect like the telephone system.

Recently I though about a possibility that the fork might be inspired by our arm. It wouldn't surprise me. Many inventions and solutions are subconscious abstractions of living phenomenon's and Laliaflia is the conscious way of life inspired design.

Understanding the meaning of Artefact and Design is the first step to understand what you can do with Laliaflia.

Design and Innovation for a better world

2009-05-12T19:01:00.000-07:00

The reason why I set up this blog is simply because there is more to share and develop around Laliaflia than most creatives can imagine. There is not a single project or idea that has ever reached the level of Laliaflia. And my observation on what's out there and what is still possible with Laliaflia is fascinating me every single time.

Most people who don't know about the depth of the vision of Laliaflia just say. "Hey, you just give them names and categorized them." And others "Hey, why should Mercedes use the fish as inspiration after they have extracted the form already."
Those who understand Laliaflia and it's elegance and incredible high potential know until today how advanced this concept is.

I have to say, eventhough there are many copies of ideas, this phenomenon still remains:

"You are always the only one who has gone the furthest within your vision or imagination. To make others follow you, you have to make it true."

So, this Blog will be an insight into what I have seen, abstracted and envisioned from the basic idea of Laliaflia. Many questions regarding the field of design, inspiration, and most importantly abstraction will be available to everyone, here.

This Blog is a digital diary, an interactive medium and an iterative instrument for the countless ideas I have created and will be continue to create to demonstrate the usefulness of this method.

I will also work out the simple but comprehensive database LA LIA FLIA for everyone as well.

Thank you for your interest.

Esayas

Like a lion!

2009-03-05T18:01:00.000-08:00

To get nutrition you have to tackle the source. You have to be where the source is. Face it no matter how big it is. The bigger the risk, the higher the return. The smaller the risk the smaller the return. The aim is not to take risks. The aim is to get something that you need. But be clear about what you need. The result determines your action at any cost. For your life.

The most important thing is: Your goal will lead you to initiation, to a decisive action. Your initiation to resolved action. And you have to hustle hard to get what you need. The event will lead to any result. Big small safe or risky outcomes.
Approach it like a lion, with determination and with all your power. You have to survive. You have to win and share.
You have to tackle what you can get.

The size of your goal equals your size. Go for the size that you need to feed yourself and others.
Even-though the target is 10 times bigger than you are, approach it together and you will see that the tackle was worth it. Go for it.

Sometimes you want to grow slowly and sometimes fast.

If you divide the task among others make sure to mention the result to those who have joined you.
Being alone is never an advantage, both in offense and defense. Make sure you are many in any situation.

Focus on the weakest part of your source, What is missing, What can be exploited. The weakest part of the system. What is it?
If you just tackle that, you will win the game.

Only when you got what you need you can chill. Not for long. To enjoy it.

To stay and become stronger you have to face the wild. If you are tough you actually need to face the tough. The unpredictable.

Remember you always have what it takes to get where you want to go. Make sure the basic never holds you back from the big achievement you are looking for.