Welcome to Design Shorts

Ep.02 : "Patterns at Play"

"Insane in the Chromatophores" - Take a squid, add a headphone jack, your iPhone and a video camera. Put all these pieces together and you’ve got a funky new kind of musical visualizer. Call it... the iSquid. The team over at Backyard Brains captured some amazing visuals of real-live squid chromatophores (or pigment-cells) as they vibed alongside Cypress Hill's, “Insane in the Brain”. Check out the fun clip, below:

In the natural world, many subtleties of communication are easily misunderstood and largely unrecognizable. But today, many of these behavioral patterns draw ties and provide clues towards serious problems; one of which being noise pollution. Boating and invasive exploration can easily abuse underwater environments, producing some dangerous results. This interference problem isn’t limited to habitats underwater. On land, bee populations have been struggling in recent years in part (or largely part - depending who you ask) due to cell phone usage. The signals have been proven to distract and disorient colonies. Bees are incredibly sensitive to frequencies and actually respond differently to incoming and outgoing calls. This proves distracting when they are flying back and forth from food sources and then attempt to relay those coordinates to others around the hive.

"Bee Dance (Waggle Dance)" - So now we know that squids prefer hip hop, but bees are maybe a bit more conservative. This next example is a kind of southern style hoe-down, judging by the round-and-round rotations and a “waggle dance” in between. Bees utilize the groundwork of their geometric hives to choreograph some very specific routines. Within a hive, a forager bee can communicate the location of a new food source, all of which is based on the specific angle of the waggle and the relation of that waggle towards the sun. See the video below:

I'm a sucker for patterns (I mean, my name is voronoi). Reading and mapping these visual cues can tell us so much about the creatures that create them. We should pay more attention to the patterns at play around us, especially when it comes to the natural environments we care about.

follow me @voronoi | design collective @hitheryon