Patterns of nature: Bio-systemic design thinking in meeting sustainability challenges of an increasingly complex world

This present work weaves a thread between natural patterns and their systemic applications in architecture, urbanism and landscape design. To that end, computational approaches have greatly assisted the study of dynamic parameters describing natural phenomena, and in physical space design as input/output algorithmic operations bringing together data and expertise. Apart from its direct applications, computation signifies a concept about soft data management that was developed well before computers were introduced into practice. An interest in malleable patterns guiding design during late modernism was suggestive of alternative methods responding to socioecological aims. Patterns were no longer rigid geometric references imposed upon a scheme, but ones supporting complexity, mutation and evolution as in a bio-systemic context. These earlier endeavours may set the intellectual framing of recent advancements in computing, promoting architectural thinking as a comprehensive model of cross-scientific action in analogy with nature's synergistic functions. •Complexity is a performative quality of the development patterns of the constructed world.•Nature's matter/energy processes set a reference upon which to ground decisions about design.•Nature prompts its systemic “technologies” to start, develop, decay and spark new ones.•Space design is about energies, forces and flows causing adjustments of the soft pattern system.•A design scheme is a protocol of systemic actions among all participating agents.