Field Deformation

Ever since I restructured designcoding, I’m still sorting through the trash folder. All 580 posts published on the blog have been reviewed, and their files have been uploaded as open source. The mysterious trash folder, where I couldn’t even tell where things belonged, is shrinking fast. While checking this folder yesterday, I found a video. This is probably a simple tutorial I prepared about 10 years ago for the parametric modeling elective course (probably related to this 2012 post). The notion of the “Point Attractor” is critical for those trying to design with Grasshopper, enabling them to make their designs adaptive. In this simple tutorial, I demonstrate a well-known point-based pattern deformation. There are some neat interventions, such as ReMap and Sort. You can see that Rhino 5.0 was being used in the video. Thinking that this definition might still be educational for beginners learning Grasshopper today, I wanted to upload it. I don’t have the definition file on hand, so I’m only uploading the video.

On this occasion, I wanted to touch upon the “attractor” issue that also came up in my graduate class the other day. I also use the terms “point attractor” and “curve attractor” frequently on this blog and in my lectures. On the other hand, pattern deformations were used in Basic Design education even before the era of coding and computer-aided design (e.g., at the Ulm School and by William Huff). However, this term “attractor” is actually somewhat misleading. Because what happens in such deformation algorithms is essentially built on a “field” deforming a structure. If this field is driven by Euclidean distance, it becomes what we simply call an attractor. Architects and designers, I suppose, care more about the charging points of the field itself (even doing it with a curve is essentially just placing points along the curve) rather than the field itself. The invisible charging points themselves, which nonetheless affect and provoke the system, somehow become a source of excitement for us.

I looked into the origin of the word a bit: The word “attractor” is derived from the Latin verb attrahere, formed by the combination of ad- (toward) and trahere (to pull, drag), meaning “that which draws toward itself” or “something that pulls.” Starting from the 17th century, it began to be used in the literature of physics and magnetism to describe magnets and gravity. Its meaning in physics is quite different. In physics, mathematical chaos theory, and dynamical systems, an attractor is a set of states toward which a system tends to evolve over time, thereby stabilizing the system. Therefore, there can be a metaphorical confusion. For this reason, although the term attractor is not entirely wrong in the context of what is being done, I think we need to get used to using “field” instead.