ABSTRACT
‘Patterns are everywhere’, the designer George Nelson wrote in 1977, ‘they emerge in the eyepiece of an electron microscope and get recorded by cameras in satellites’ (Nelson 1977, 144). Nelson’s gloss on patterns came in the middle of a book called How to See: Visual Adventures in a World God Never Made, which was literally intended as a kind of public service manual to sensitize laypeople (as opposed to professional designers) to the world around them. That world was one in which natural and cultural forces had been thoroughly shaped, mapped, and visualized by a technologically extended humanity immersed in an unprecedented environment. This environment emerged alongside new conceptions of design that, no longer attached to the shaping of singular objects, could address itself to the totality of environmental systems. In what follows, I will elucidate the technological, epistemological, and aesthetic conditions that animated design’s engagement with environment. We can see these passages from the optical to the operative, the micro to the macro, and the exterior to the interior in some of the first descriptions of environmental patterning by modernist epigones such as Erwin Anton Gutkind, György Kepes, the so-called Harvard Philomorphs, Gregory Bateson, and Buckminster Fuller, all of whom sought a new kind of understanding of human action and thought in the world.
