The slide elements from a talk on natural patterns that I gave at the 2012 London Permaculture Festival drawing on my reading of Tyler Volk's book Metapatterns. You can view the presentation here: http://youtu.be/I1nvL-fMJQk
The London "bubble diagram" drawn by Arthur Ling and D.K. Johnson in 1943 as part of the comprehensive 1943 ‘County of London Plan’ (“The Abercrombie Plan”).
“There are two aspects to patterning: the perception of the pattern that already exists and how these function, and the imposition of pattern on sites in order to achieve some specific ends.” — Bill Mollison, The Permaculture Designers’ Manual, p. 95
Shape – Form - Morphology
Perhaps the primary pattern in space is the sphere.
The conceptual form of the atom is spherical. While the edges of the atom are indeterminate, modern scientific instruments support the idea of the basically spherical form. (But do we just see what we look for?).
Our Sun.
Our planet – the Blue Marble (photo from Apollo 17 mission).
A human egg cell.
Frog Spawn
A flower bud.
Pollen
Artichoke
Wasp Gall
Cacti
Skull (of Gandhi)
My Right Eye.
Testicles
Breasts
Buttocks
Human Immune system Blood cell
Ladybird
Giant Tortoise
Walnuts & Pistachios
The dome of St Paul’s Cathedral is mirrored by the dome tents of Occupy below.
Greenhouse at Freightliners City Farm.
Reconstruction in Kiev of one of 4small dwellings made of Mammoth tusks and bones. The first of which was found by a farmer in Mezhirich, Ukraine, in 1965 while he was digging in his cellar and archaeologists unearthed three more.They date from 19,280 - 11,700 BC.