How Formative Design and Coincidental Aesthetics Interrelate

Formative Design defines how a process unfolds. Coincidental Aesthetics defines what that process works on and why.
Taken together, they describe a single methodological cycle with two complementary orientations:

1. Formative Design provides the operative logic.

Its three entry points—movement, coordinate, chance—are not aesthetic categories but procedural attitudes.
They determine the mode in which perception, analysis, and transformation begin:

  • Movement frames the item dynamically.
  • Coordinate frames it structurally.
  • Chance Operation frames it through contingency.


In each case, the “formative” approach establishes the generative logic that governs how an object or phenomenon is explored and transformed.


2. Coincidental Aesthetics provides the cultural and functional framework.

Its four steps—objectification, deconstruction, formalisation, composition—are analytical and constructive operations directed at an existing piece of the environment.

Where Formative Design supplies the method of engagement, Coincidental Aesthetics supplies the horizon of reference.
One works on the internal logic of making; the other on the external logic of meaning.


3. Their relation: procedural method meets cultural function.

The two are interdependent:

  • The starting point chosen in Formative Design determines how the object is approached during objectification and deconstruction.
    (A movement-based student will perceive and analyse differently than one who begins from fixed coordinates.)

  • The steps of Coincidental Aesthetics give concrete direction and purpose to the abstract methodological stance established in Formative Design.
    (Formalisation and composition rely on the operative logic learned in Formative Design to become more than stylistic exercises.)

4. Integration: a single cycle with two axes.

If we describe the whole process geometrically:

  • Formative Design defines the axis of procedure (how one enters and navigates the material).

  • Coincidental Aesthetics defines the axis of transformation (how cultural function becomes form).

The design process emerges precisely in the crossing of these two axes.
The result is neither purely methodological nor purely analytical, but a practice in which method and cultural understanding co-produce the new object.