Playing by the rules

Abstract

Despite reservations for the rule-based perspective of design with regards to creativity, the role and the potential of rules is instrumental in reflective design thinking. Rules enable sensible and functional conversations about the process. Working with (and mastering) a small rule set is common amongst artists as well. Escher developed rules based on the shape combinations in Majolica tiles to investigate regular plane divisions in his own work. Dwelling on a rule set allows for explorations in a rich design space that result in new series of works. Escher's published sketches show that throughout his artworks, keenness in seeing shape relations and an ability in manipulating simple shape rules leads to numerous artworks from the same tessellations. Through a visual and rule-based analysis of artistic tiling in Escher's work, the paper provides a computational perspective on analytical methods for design. © 2014, The Association for Computer-Aided Architectural Design Research in Asia (CAADRIA), Hong Kong.