1. Nature and Power

Designs (images with meaning) are everywhere, around us and inside us. Best known are the tree shaped flow structures of the river basins, human lungs, lightning, vascular tissue, urban traffic, snowflakes, river deltas, global air traffic, and vegetation. Other images go unnoticed, such as the round cross sections of ducts, blood vessels, pulmonary airways, galleries of earthworms, and the “pipes” carved by rainwater in wet soil and the hill slopes of the smallest rivulets of the river basin. Technologies employ round ducts, and for a good reason: they offer greater access to what flows, greater than in the absence of round cross sections. Less known are the rhythms of nature, the designs that represent organization in time, not in space. In most places, the flows that sweep areas and volumes flow in two distinct ways. In the river basin, the water first flows as seepage in the hill slopes (by diffusion), and later as streams in river channels. The first way is slow and short distance, while the second is fast and long distance. All flow systems in nature are driven by power, or work done per unit time. Work entails movement, deformation, morphing, and change. Humans “live” because they are driven by power derived from food and fuel and engines. All flowing architectures evolve with freedom in a discernible time direction, toward progressively greater access and more effective ways to flow over time, like the rivers and the animals.