The Constructal Sessions, Part II: Freedom and Design

My last conversation with Adrian Bejan ended on the notion that if design

in nature is a universal principle of the material world, then freedom is the
key variable that determines how efficiently designs can evolve over time.
Bejan grew up in Communist Romania, so he knows first hand what
happens when human social systems are prevented from flowing
by ideology.

Bejan's new book, Design in Nature (Doubleday 2012, with J.P. Zane), is an

introduction to a new way of looking at the physics of everything—from the
formation of river basins, to the locomotion of land animals, to the design
of computer chips—that he has named the Constructal Law.

The growing body of Constructal Theory, which follow from the law, resolve
many of the cultural debates of the 20th cantury. Bejan is showing that one
need not resort to randomness (and their corollaries meaninglessness and
nihilism) in order to remove the science of evolution from the aesthetic grip
of religion. There is a unifying design in nature, asserts Bejan—but that fact
requires no deity or other supernatural agent.

By placing design in a central place in our understanding of the world

around us, and in defining nature and society as sets of interrelated flow
systems, Bejan has created (or recognized) a new job description: the flow
worker. If we expand our notion of what designers do to include the
iterative improvement of any system over time, we realize that, on some
level, we are all designers, all flow workers.

With that in mind, I decided to probe the issue a bit more with Bejan and
begin to identify the method he uses to address the improvement of flow
systems both as an engineer and as an educator.

Interview with Adrian Bejan, J.A. Jones Distinguished Professor of

Mechanical Engineering, Duke University

Conducted via email, March 10 17, 2012

Q: You say "Freedom is good for design," can you elaborate on that idea
more?

A: Freedom is the most fundamental property of nature. Freedom means

the ability of a flow configuration to change, to morph, to spread and to
retreat. It is the natural property that makes all design possible.
The natural tendency expressed by the Constructal Law (toward easier flow,
and greater access to inputs over time) is visible everywhere because all
natural flow systems possess freedom. Without freedom to change, design
and evolution cannot happen.

With freedom, a natural flow system evolves with progressively greater flow
performance. Freedom is the sine qua non condition for improvements
over time. Freedom is good for design.

We are all familiar with how freedom empowers design, but we take this
truth for granted. We do not think about it… until freedom vanishes. To
make a drawing look better, we change it, we color it, and we replace it.
None of this would be possible without the freedom to change the drawing.

More freedom means to be able to change more features of the flow design.
Engineering and civilization are all about this. We can make a fluid flow
more easily through a pipe if we have the freedom to enlarge the pipe
diameter. We can facilitate the flow even more if—in addition—we have the
freedom to shorten the pipe.

Freedom can be measured. The design features that can be changed are
called degrees of freedom. The pipe diameter and length are 2 degrees of
freedom. The width, length and surface type of a road are 3 degrees of
freedom. Power plants, cities, businesses and governments have many
more. In this direction toward “more” degrees of freedom, our imagination,
creativity, ingenuity—and affluence—blossom.

Freedom is not appreciated precisely because it is everywhere. Just like

gravity was before Galilei’s law made it a fundamental notion in physics.
Today, the Constructal Law makes freedom and its fruits (design, evolution,
performance) fundamental notions in physics.

Q: But what about "bad" design, where does that come from?

A: All design is imperfect. This is a good thing, because it leaves the road
wide open for discovering better flowing designs tomorrow. Imagine a
world in which nothing could change because it is already perfect: no
change means no life—a flow system that is not alive.

"Bad" design is a thought that emerges in retrospect. This thought is trivial,

because of the dynamic (evolutionary) nature of design: yesterday's design
appears to be weaker that today's.

A human design extension such as the wheel with wooden spokes may
strike us as "bad" today, because of the modern evolution of wheel
technology. Yet, in the 1700s and 1800s, the wheel with wooden spokes was
a great facilitator of human movement over the landscape in comparison
with the solid wooden wheel of antiquity.

The river basin serves as inanimate metaphor for the bad-design-in-

retrospect phenomenon. The river channel with a tree log fallen across it
may strike us as "bad". Yet, the river water will remove the obstacle and
make the river basin even better. What appears as "bad" today serves as an
opportunity for better design and evolution tomorrow. Even when the tree
log fell in, the river design had been perfected relative to what it had been
decades earlier.

The animate metaphor for bad-design-in-retrospect is animal movement.

Running animals move animal mass on land more efficiently than
swimming animals move in water. Fliers move animal mass more
efficiently than runners and swimmers. These designs of animal mass
vehicles occurred in the time sequence predicted by the Constructal Law—
swimmers thenrunners and then fliers—not the other way around.

Swimming was a perfected design before the emergence of runners, and

running was perfected before the emergence of fliers. The old design of
locomotion looked "bad" in retrospect, from the vantage point of the new.
Yet, the new did not displace the old. The new and the old together move a
lot more animal mass than just the old alone alone. This is the time arrow
of the Constructal Law.

Q: But when it comes to design by humans, don't we have the ability to

make "bad" designs and convince ourselves that they are good? Doesn't
our self-consciousness make us uniquely suited to talking ourselves into
bad, unnatural solutions that would never, otherwise occur in nature?

A: Manmade designs are natural, because on the whole they happen in the

direction of facilitating and enhancing our movement on the landscape.
This is the bird's eye view, broadly speaking, the "big history" that is
captured by the Constructal Law.

Not every individual detail agrees at every moment with the broad view—
think of the tree log that falls across the brook and slows it. The effect is
local and short lived. The constructal urge is what happens immediately,
which is that the river basin marshals all its waters to remove the tree log,
or to carve a path around it.

Q: So, manmade designs behave like natural flow systems if you have a
long enough timeframe, but the puzzling thing for us as humans is the
persistence of bad designs, of intractable configurations that limit the
freedom to improve flow. What explains, for instance, the persistence of
the North Korean regime, when its neighbor to the south enjoys a
standard of living ten times as high?

A: Your example with North versus South Korea is very appropriate. When
we fly at night from Tokyo to Seoul, we see the lights below. Over Korea, an
explosion of light (power) in the South is in sharp contrast with the total
darkness over the North. Why? Because power means movement, and the
rigid system (communism) strangles all its flows. We see the same night
contrast between the lights of Florida and the darkness of Cuba.

Six decades of strangulation are far too long for the three generations
sentenced to die at the bottom of the rain barrel. Yet, this is just one frame
—a blip—in the movie of design evolution of civilization in big history. Like
the tree log effect, the rigid designs of North Korea and Cuba are short
lived. Dictators and their enablers better pay attention to this Constructal
Law prediction—it is physics, not opinion!

Before 1989, the lights of Western Europe burned in sharp contrast with
the dark of Eastern Europe. Today, the sea of lights has invaded the dark
swamp and set it in motion—vascularizing it with freely morphing designs.
This is the future of all the swamps, and the "tree logs" that stand in the
way will be removed or bypassed.

Q: If any flow system can be improved over time (given freedom), do you
have a standard series of steps or procedures you use to analyze the
degrees of freedom that are available in a given design configuration and
identify where improvements can be made?

A: Yes, and in fact I teach the philosophy of this very topic with Prof. Sylvie
Lorente in the textbook Design with Constructal Theory (Wiley, 2008) and
in the course with the same name at Duke University and other leading
universities all over the world. The best introduction to the method is
in Design in Nature, in particular, chapters 1-5.

Here is a brief sequence of steps toward Constructal Design:

1. Define Your System: Identify clearly and unambiguously

what constitutes your "system", i.e. the region in space, or the
amount of mass that is the subject of your thinking, analysis
and design.
2. Identify the Flows: Make sure your system has the freedom
to change, and that you understand "what flows" within it, i.e.
why your system is a "flow system."
3. Start Simple: Allow only one feature of your system to change
at first. This endows your system with one degree of freedom.
Study if and how changes to this feature increase the flow
 access of the currents that inhabit your system. Incorporate the
first feature with which you found that your system performs
best into your design (be alert, this is not the end!)
4. Add a Degree of Freedom: Allow a second feature to change
freely. As you investigate this second degree of freedom, you
will find another best feature, and adopt it. With this second
feature in place, go back to step 3 and refine that first feature to
work with the second.
5. And Another...: Allow a third feature to vary freely, find the
best variant of this feature, and then go back and repeat steps 3
and 4, i.e refine the preceding two features.
6. And so on: This is a construction process with no end, except
the finite time of the investigator.

In the evolution of technology, this sequence happens naturally, but slowly,

in haphazard bursts of individual creativity. Usually, one step (one degree
of freedom) represents a single invention, such as Traian Vuia's air-tube
tires on the first airplanes, one century ago. With the method of Constructal
Design, I think entire companies and industries can fast forward the design
evolution of their technologies and reduce trial and error.

Nature behaves in the same way, imperceptibly, all the time, and on a much
broader range of degrees of freedom. This is why with the Constructal Law
we have been able to predict (with eyes closed) the designs of inanimate
flow systems (e.g. river basins, turbulence, snow flakes) and animate flow
systems (e.g. lungs, vegetation, animal locomotion). And we can use this
method to investigate and innovate social, political and technological
systems as well.

We will continue with the theme of the relationship between flow systems
in our next installment.

Jjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjj

The constructal law is the law of physics that accounts for the phenomenon of
evolution (configuration, form, design) throughout nature, inanimate flow systems
and animate systems together.
The constructal law was stated by Adrian Bejan, 
Oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo

It is the thought that flow architecture comes from a principle of maximization of flow access, in
time, and in flow configuration that are free to morph.

8888888888888888888888888888888888888888

According to the constructal theory, the principle that generates geometric

structure or the principle of design, called constructal principle, states that
the acquisition of geometry is the mechanism by which the system meets its
objectives under the existing constraints (e.g., availability of space, volume,
coast, etc). Systems are not purposeless—they have objectives, functions to
fulfil. Objectives and constraints, together with physics laws, are fingers of
the same hand that give shape to the final system. Therefore, the geometry
of the system is free to evolve and the resulting configuration is the one that
ensures that the global performance is maximized. In this paper, an optimal
design for improving performance of three solar energy-based systems for
buildings is presented.

7777777777777777777777777777
Constructal theory is the view that (i) the generation of images of design (pattern, rhythm) in nature
is a phenomenon of physics and (ii) this phenomenon is covered by a principle (the constructal law):
‘for a finite-size flow system to persist in time (to live) it must evolve such that it provides greater
and greater access to the currents that flow through it’. This law is about the necessity of design to
occur, and about the time direction of the phenomenon: the tape of the design evolution ‘movie’
runs such that existing configurations are replaced by globally easier flowing configurations. The
constructal law has two useful sides: the prediction of natural phenomena and the strategic
engineering of novel architectures, based on the constructal law, i.e. not by mimicking nature. We
show that the emergence of scaling laws in inanimate (geophysical) flow systems is the same
phenomenon as the emergence of allometric laws in animate (biological) flow systems. Examples are
lung design, animal locomotion, vegetation, river basins, turbulent flow structure, self-lubrication
and natural multi-scale porous media. This article outlines the place of the constructal law as a self-
standing law in physics, which covers all the ad hoc (and contradictory) statements of optimality
such as minimum entropy generation, maximum entropy generation, minimum flow resistance,
maximum flow resistance, minimum time, minimum weight, uniform maximum stresses and
characteristic organ sizes. Nature is configured to flow and move as a conglomerate of ‘engine and
brake’ designs.