Hi,

This is my first post to the forum. I'm new to Processing but I'm already impressed by its abilities.

I'm a graduate student in the Design & Technology program at Parsons School of Design in New York and one of my main areas of interests is visualization of complex systems. My graduate thesis involves a visualization based on the philosophy of Deep Ecology and Gaia Hypothesis. As part of my project I'm looking at developing an interactive 'plant' system - an abstraction of real living systems.

This is where Processing comes into the picture. I'm looking at developing this interactive plant model and would be very grateful if someone could point me in the right direction - precedents, books, anything. What would be the best way to go about developing this model?

I'm currently leafing through the 'Algorithmic Beauty of Plants' (using L-systems) but don't want to dive in headfirst unless someone endorses that it's the best way to go.

Any sort of help or suggestions are welcome.

A great work of Roberto S. Ferrero:
A sketchbook of L-systems.
And his software LS SketchBook
Please, give me news about your work!

Nach.

At a more abstract level cellular autonoma works may be a useful level as they deal with emerging systems. Wolfram  makes quite a lot of analogies in his book but am unsure weather he deals with directly with biological analogies (from memory his training was as a mathematical physicist).

I would have thought that cellular autonoma is quite an easy way to play around with this field as solving the Naiver-Stokes equations is quite intensive. If you hunt around these boards (and the alpha ones) there are a few topics on cellular autonoma.

There is also Context Free Design Grammar(CFDG) which may be of interest as a package to play with growth etc.

Ian Stewart's Natures Numbers also gives quite a nice explanation of mathematical relationships to nature. It's not the most mathematical of works (i would guess high school level) but does give clear reasoning.