Doodle pluralism

The conclusion of the Pluralism conference was great. I’ve spent a couple of packed days thinking about perspectives and cross-cutting ontologies, so now everything is an example. Take this doodle, which I drew on my notepad during one of the talks.

It is readily seen as consisting of two kinds of geometric forms. I’ve highlighted them in the second instance of the doodle: what we might call haystack shapes (orange) and spire shapes (yellow).

Seen in this way, it may seem mysterious how I was able to doodle it so neatly. The trick, which I picked up from a video that was circulating among my friends on Facebook a while ago, is not to draw haystacks or spires at all.

Instead, divide the area into triangles and maybe some quadrangles. Draw a line which starts from one corner and angles just slightly into the figure. At the end of that line, draw another line that angles just slightly in from the next edge. And so on.

I’ve marked the figures in my doodle here in this third instance.

A haystack shape results when two adjacent figures spiral in the same direction; a spire when they spiral in opposite directions.

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