it’s nice to start developing form by playing with tool-driven qualities like curvature continuity. However the claim that this is fundamental to a ‘periodic table of form’ is highly superficial - there are many more qualities that need to be integrated into such a holistic framework.
The ones revering nature also have to realize - ‘nature’ also grows tumors. It just works blindly, finding whatever works to propagate species. It is rather crazy and aggressive, not what we want as people. Therefore Bauhaus/modernism, postmodernism, hypermodernism - the whole history of design, basically is there to not rely on where ‘nature’ takes us. And in the end we realize that we don’t need to survive, because we already have. So nature remains this dumb mechanism.
That said, forms in nature remain spectacular and people’s attempts to understand it go from one direction to another. But the simple point to what it comes down to is that: nature does whatever works. It is not so intelligent at all understanding that inherently, reality is complex and ‘multiparametrical’, and forms result from the ecology itself, and not some overarching principle. Except that species need to survive. I mean, that’s all nature is from a top-down perspective.
If you think, nature knows no circles and straight lines, do the actual research and you will find them. Because in some cases, in the possible landscape of form language, these are the optimal results to meet the situation. I have spent quite a bit of time doing this after hearing such reductionist claims about nature. Another claim was that nature does not know mechanisms that spin freely on an axis, like car wheels. Well, at least on a cellular level, turns out it does. So after thorough research, you come to find that reductionist claims aiming to supply a consoling way to understand nature in a certain way all fail. Nature is too complex for us to understand like that and knowing what we cannot know is true knowing. The human mind is limited and therefore not the penultimate device with which we should try to understand the world that we in fact, are already alive in, mind or not.
If we come to appreciate things that work in reality emerge from an enormous set of parameters and constraints, we come to terms with our futile attempts with trying to understand it by reductionist thought. Good design in Industry 4.0 will, like in nature, mostly be an emergent result of parametrical models taking into account requirements from many disciplines, rather than a superficial underlying idea constructed by design teams (like ‘it has to make people experience X’). I feel this shift from experience economy to knowledge economy to fragmented mosaic society to some weird and alien AI-driven society is sort of unavoidable, even if we don’t want it at this moment because we tend to resist change.
So yeah, if you want to design like nature, just do whatever works. You will find that that’s what you are already doing in most cases, being part of nature (which you may have forgotten). It is a bit ironic.