Sustainable development is “meeting the needs of current generations while sustaining the ability of future generations to meet their needs”. Similarly, sustainable design involves new methods and strategies for design and construction that put into consideration environmental and economic challenges of the age. New buildings are designed and constructed according to advanced methods and technologies, which minimize the environmental impact and reduce costs. They also provide a rural environment that is comfortable and safe on the environmental, economic, and social levels, which all interact.
A sustainable future for people and the environment is achievable through technologies that make major changes in the patterns of production. These changes require combating economic and social challenges, and a change in energy usage. To meet the increasing demand on energy and sustain climate within safe limits, we need to change the methods of energy production and eliminate the emissions of carbon and other harmful chemicals. Sustainable development cannot be achieved without making major changes in architectural design and construction, using natural biological material.
Today, architects and designers opt to build flexible and sustainable buildings using local natural materials. The field of sustainable biological materials revolves around using local renewable natural resources to produce innovative materials and bio-energy in a sustainable way. Bio-design is a mixture of science and engineering that can eliminate stress, enhance creativity and wellbeing, and speed-up recovery. As the world's population increases in urban areas, these elements have become more important.
Architects and designers must follow a biomimetic approach and learn from the obvious patterns in ecosystems. They need to have a new vision into nature that would inspire them with ideas for creative design. Continuous search and contemplation of the impressive patterns of nature's compositions, including diverse repetitive geometrical patterns, give depth to the design.
The world consists of beautiful natural and practical patterns that make beautiful and practical designs. If understood, they can be used to design and construct diverse, strong, flexible, and effective systems in terms of energy. A pattern is a clear systematic unit, repetitive or sequential, used to produce a repetitive design; creating a pattern requires a unit to repeat and a base to repeat it on.
As such, designers nowadays are trying to explore the physical and chemical reasons behind the amazing visual structures in the living and non-living world. A key pattern is the snowflake; this six-fold symmetry, however, seems to have an infinite set within it. Snowflakes are formed through a simple process: water vapor in humid air gets frozen, somehow forming a pattern of unbelievably beautiful details.
Even in the old ages, humans understood the strength and attraction of patterns. Natural patterns such as fractal and the Fibonacci sequence are suitable for every age and inclusive until today. Recurrent geometrical patterns repeat in different measurments and relieve stress. A study conducted in 2006 found that using fractals in architecture decreases fatigue; other researches found that recurrent geometrical patterns can decrease fatigue by up to 60%.
There is an increased need to make products “greener”. Renewable resources, such as wood and other biological material, offer a natural means to design and fabricate creative sustainable products for the future. Sustainable material and technologies inspire designers to create and treat renewable natural materials, mostly plant-based. Some of the patterns that have been recently discovered in architecture and interior design are made using computer, artificial intelligence, and biology. Architects have realized that patterns are not decorative elements, but are related to nature and what humans makes. Computer-Aided Design (CAD) and Computer-Aided Manufacturing (CAM) technologies allow patterns to include a wider set of constructional, programming, aesthetic, and physical impacts.
Patterns offer great potential to imitate and analyse fine details; they form a crucial part of the natural world. As humans, we aim to communicate with these patterns on the instinctive level. Using patterns in architecture and design—specially natural patterns like those of wood and bio-material—has an effective impact on people, making them happier and more productive. They also contribute to saving energy and maintaining a safe and sustainable environment.
References
architectmagazine.com
cnr.ncsu.edu
curiodyssey.org
sbio.vt.edu
seas.umich.edu
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