One of our Research Challenges is ‘obtaining a working set of growth rules.’ To date the most striking research discovery and that which has informed our growth rules, has been understanding plant development.   Hormonal control of plant development, by the hormone auxin has allowed us to develop growth rules during organism development in the […]

In the early days when we were growing 2D structures and doing a few 3D plots not in the CAD domain, we investigated design growth under a static load. Principle The core algorithm followed this simple principle: Given a set of growth functions and design genes, for each shoot increase the diameter of the shoot […]

Examples of the existence and purpose of non-coding DNA in nature has been published in Not quite Design Genes. But how does it apply in the Blind Watchmaker? An example implementation of our use of non-coding DNA (ncDNA) is presented here. Within our system, we want to grow organisms with varying cross-sections in beams, e.g. […]

So far in the Design Gene research article series we have presented all the initial work in understanding genes, creating our own genes and growth mechanism, and previously how a phenotype evolves from a genotype. Now in Part 5, the last in the Design Gene series, we will explore the different phenotypes that emerge after […]

Previously in the Design Gene series we introduced how an organism is grown from the design genes themselves (see Part 3).  Here we will take a deeper look at how the the phenotype evolves from the genotype, i.e. how a viable structure is formed from the collection of genes inside a design seed. Phenotype Emergence […]

“By reimagining design as a series of elemental rules and growth mechanisms that react to stimuli and the environment, the design of complex systems could be simplified and unknowable behaviour could be used as a tool for innovation. Blind Watchmaker is investigating the theoretical aspects of this approach and the practical implications of using them […]