The world is rhythmic! She’s dancing around the sun and spinning around its own axis.
There is poetry in these cycles. In the ups and downs, the patterns and rhythmic occurrences of life - from the mundane to the special. Rhythms are at the core of life and the human experience.
We humans align to the rhythms of the world and of each other. We are melodies - sometimes synchronised sometimes chaotic, sometimes on a high note and others on a low rumble.
Besides the natural rhythms - societies, cultures and technology impose, demand and create their own rhythms. Often the environmental and the social are aligned. But sometimes they are not. Human inventiveness has no limits to create beauty - but also to destroy. Life and Death. Happiness and suffering. The human experience is as complex as it can be and natural rhythms ground us, centre us in this world and connect us to each other.
Rhythms+Design is the work undertaken at the Graduate School and SDCT at the University of Texas at Austin. R+D tries to be a system inquiry and a method of designing that allows designers to incorporate rhythms into their design work and use rhythms of our body, societies and nature to highlight design opportunities for a modern and technological world.