Symmetry in nature and design
I just listened to the podcast of In Our Time from a couple of weeks ago which was on the subject of symmetry.
One of the contributors mentioned that there is a theory that symmetry is particularly attractive and important to us. We find symmetrical faces more attractive for instance, because it seems to denote some kind of meaning and specialness. It is thought that we may be genetically programmed to see symmetry because if, in the chaos of the jungle, you see something with reflectional symmetry then it is probably an animal and therefore either you can eat it or it can eat you. The bumblebee has very bad vision but it is very sensitive to objects with symmetry - possibly why flowers are so symmetrical - to attract the bees.
I guess there has been plenty of work studying symmetry in art and beauty but I wonder whether symmetry is (or could) be used in design to indicate "interestingness" or importance. Could we use assymmetry and symmetry to distinguish betweeen different kinds of information on a page, the background or common elements as the assymmetrical "jungle" and information which we want to stand out as the symmetrical "animals"?
Posts
2 comments:
It's now the 17th, but I still count these waking hours as the 16th and this is by far the most interesting thing I've read today.
Interestingly (pun intended), the word 'Symmetry' isn't used anywhere in Flickr's patent of 'Interestingness ranking of media objects', despite - it would appear - being the primary algorithmic motivation behind the search results it delivers.
In a world where the semantic web is about separating style and content, we can approach interestingness from the point of view of both of these:-
Can our applications of the future be smart enough to extract the interesting information from a page of marked-up HTML?
And can they, in future, extrapolate the interesting content from a page from its presentation layer alone (and the symmetry graphically designed therein) - as people do every day when figuring out what to read in their newspaper?
I hadn't connected this with Flickr's interestingness - interesting! Presumably using something like microformats or, as you say, full semantic webbiness it would be relatively easy to extract the interesting bits. But not everyone's going to do that, or do it correctly, so using the layout is a great idea. Not just using the heading tags but actually parsing the visual design somehow. Cool.
Post a Comment