Thursday, November 26, 2015

A Designers View of Nature

Greetings Scholars and Warriors!

I hope you have had a great Thanksgiving and that you are enjoying the weekend filled with family, shopping, and the beginnings of a crazy season full of holidays.

Today I want to do something a little different. I want to share some thoughts about designing lighting and the elements of design I see in creation/nature.

As a lighting designer I have to make sure a show comes together with a series of lights. I use truss and sometimes other pipes to hang lights and sometimes we use some of our cases to raise lights as well (if we don't want them on the floor but also do not want them very high). I choose specific lights for specific spots depending on what those lights do and how those lights will interact with the environment we want to create and what we need. Some of them are just white light. Some change colors and some will move, change colors and use metal plates called "gobos" to create different patterns in the light. The lights have power lines and signal lines run to them and I control them using a board that has had several features programmed into it by very smart computer programmers to create the looks and cues that I need. These features all come out of planned and finely tuned mathematics.

Now, let us look at creation. We live on a planet that circles a sun. The planet, and other planets, are held in orbit around a star by this force called gravity. In reality, we don't know a whole lot about gravity. We know that it works and that it has a huge affect on tides and how we move on our planet. I am not sure we know much else about it, though.

Found at: http://www.ducksters.com/science/ecosystems/oxygen_cycle.php

We also have a very excellent oxygen system and a very adequate water system (although admittedly we often don't use it well or share the resource well). Amazingly the oxygen cycle brings oxygen to us and carbon dioxide to plants in quite the perfect combination. The water that falls (after evaporating) provides another piece of the recipe for energy to all living creatures.

Finally, we have DNA. Such an awesome feature of our planet! It took decades to decode this linguistic code. Each strand sets up the traits of a creature with specific combinations. For black hair you need one combo and for green scales a very different set. It is amazingly specific. I am not sure if DNA is found elsewhere in the universe, but it is amazing on our planet.

Do you see the coloration I am making?

  Truss/Supports = Gravity
            Lights = Creatures/Plants
  Power/Signal Cords = Oxygen/Water
            Programmed Mathematics = DNA


Some say there is no evidence of design in nature. I say it is there. As someone who designs all the time I see the elements of design all over creation. I remember subbing for a biology teacher last year and showing an amazing episode of the Life series by the BBC which comes from a personal viewpoint of random existence. It showed all these very specific features of different insects and how particular the jobs of those traits and features are for the insects. I could not believe how specific it was. There are so many fingerprints I could see of a creator all over the insect kingdom!

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