September 24, 2026 Spring 2026
The class kept returning to one question in wider and wider forms: who authored the rules you're inside, and what happens when you can see them?
That distinction ran under all five weeks. A corporate design system exists to close the gap between intention and output. It's built for consistency, an assembly line making the same thing reliably again and again. The visual systems this class is about run the other way. You set a few conditions in motion and watch them evolve, sometimes into things you didn't predict. One asks how to make something again. The other asks what a process can reveal. We spent the class on the second.
Defining visual systems — week 1: systems + sensibilities.
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A slide split down the middle by blocky, pixel-stepped shapes in teal and pale grey. Top right reads "Corporate design systems / ask how to just make something again"; lower left reads "Visual systems / ask what a process can reveal," each label set on the opposite color block.At first, the rules were ours to make. On a shared digital canvas in the first session, eighteen people invented a rule set in real time and watched it start responding to itself.
Within minutes the communal drawing was no longer just a drawing. It was a small society negotiating what was allowed, watching the rules reshape what could happen next. We looked at how a fixed instruction can still produce a different result every time it's carried out, and at geometric marks that recurred across 30,000 years of European cave walls with no committee ever deciding on them. Some rules we explicitly write, while other rules emerge through a state of shared conditions.
Repetition is what makes a rule visible in the first place. A single fern frond tells you nothing, but the same branching move repeated at every scale becomes the whole plant, the same way it becomes lightning finding its path or the arteries branching inside you right now. We started there because it pushes back on the assumption that intricate designs need complicated instructions. They need one good rule and the willingness to repeat it.
Repetition also carries knowledge across generations. In a Ba-ila settlement in Zambia, the whole village is a ring of rings of rings, the same nested form from the single house up to the entire community, and the recursion isn't decoration. It's how the culture encodes a relationship of care at every scale. We spent time with references like this from traditions none of us belong to, always naming that a translation into a word like "fractal" is useful and is also, at times, flattening.
la chacana (the andean cross) — week 2: modes of repetition
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A red stepped cross with a white circle at its center sits on a pale grey background; a red arrow on the left marks "IDEAL" upward and "REAL" downward through a central line. Its four corners each name a triad — Three Andean Worlds (before life, life, after life), Three Andean Animals (condor or eagle, puma, serpent), Three Human Values (work well, learn from everything, respect and love everyone), and Three Work Systems (Ayni, Minga, Mita).Then the material turned inward. The things you already track without meaning to, a mood, a route home, who you text back first, are a kind of rule set you didn't know you'd written. Students tracked something from their own lives and ran straight into how much the tracking left out. Getting the data was never the hard part. The hard part was deciding what was worth noticing, and sitting with everything a number leaves out.
taxonomy of personal data — week 3: mapping the personal
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A black slide titled "taxonomy of personal data" in black on an orange highlight. Three categories run down the right in white: Body (heart rate, menstrual cycles, medication logs, sleep patterns, vivid dreams), Behavior (anxiety spirals, the route you take home, the IG account you check but don't follow, what you reach for first in the morning), and Relational (eye contact across a week, silences in a conversation, who touched you, who you thought about and didn't text).And then the rules stopped being ours at all. External data arrives already assembled by someone else: a weather feed, a tide chart, an archive of eclipse photographs. Someone chose the instrument, the sampling interval, the units, long before it reached you. The work isn't to take it as neutral fact. It's to steward someone else's partial frame: notice what's in it, notice what's left out, decide what your own system does inside it.
People have done exactly this for a very long time. A Marshall Islands stick chart, coconut fronds tied around shells, is a body of ocean-swell knowledge you hold in your hands and read with your fingers, data and instrument and map at once. That was the week the class left the screen, and students started reaching toward sound, motion, sculpture, print, whatever form their system actually wanted.
We'd started the class inside the biggest system we all live in and forget was built: language, a set of rules for what can be said, none of which we wrote. The whole class was about moving in different materials. Learning to see the systems you're already standing in, and to build new ways of translating from inside them.
In the last week, students showed what that looks like made. Some of it in code, some in sound, some in objects and print. Some were finished. Many were fragments: a working sketch with a clear reason to exist, a notebook of attempts with one thing in it the maker was proud of. Finished never meant polished here. It meant you could say what you made and what decisions were inside it.
Articulable but not always resolved.
heather corcoran — "changing seasons," a generative photo collage grouped across months and years, annotated by temperature. locating oneself through plants and the seasons.
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A two-by-two grid of photo collages, each layering many overlapping snapshots of one season — green spring foliage and white blossoms, an orange autumn canopy against blue sky, pink azaleas on a lawn, and bare trees over tall dried grasses. White temperature readings run along the bottom of each panel, ranging from 57.2° to 67.0°
Liam Houlihan — flowerphabet: a cryptic 9-segment visual language that depicts an abridged 23-character English alphabet distilled from the simple sketch of a flower
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A bright yellow split screen. On the left, a loose pencil sketch of a five-petaled flower; on the right, a line of cryptic looping script above a green panel showing the same flower with one petal darkened, labeled "frame count = 2" and "binary = 1."
Nicolle Bustos — recreating synura algae colonies
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A screenshot of the p5.js code editor. The left pane shows JavaScript defining a "Colony" system; the right pane renders soft, blurred clusters of muted purple, red, and pale green dots scattered across a near-white canvas, each forming a loose spherical colony.
Stefan Nicolaou — real-time greenhouse sensor data rendered as ASCII, with plant/human bodily analogies (covers both his images)
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image 1 (ASCII): Three panels side by side: a color photo of a broad-leaved banana plant in a greenhouse; the same plant redrawn in green ASCII characters on white; and that version in green on black, topped by a live sensor readout, "CO2:980 T:23.0 H:61.5 Lux:700.”
image 2 (analogies): A slide titled "Analogies (plant + human data)." On the left, line drawings of bare feet with root-like tendrils trailing from the heels; on the right, a grid of tree-branching diagrams. Text below asks whether we can relate to plant bodies through analogy — the digestive system likened to the branching of roots, the heartbeat to the electrical pulse in plants.