The world is rhythmic! She’s dancing around the sun and spinning around its own axis.

There is poetry in these cycles. In the ups and downs, the patterns and rhythmic occurrences of life - from the mundane to the special. Rhythms are at the core of life and the human experience.

We humans align to the rhythms of the world and of each other. We are melodies - sometimes synchronised sometimes chaotic, sometimes on a high note and others on a low rumble.

Besides the natural rhythms - societies, cultures and technology impose, demand and create their own rhythms. Often the environmental and the social are aligned. But sometimes they are not. Human inventiveness has no limits to create beauty - but also to destroy. Life and Death. Happiness and suffering. The human experience is as complex as it can be and natural rhythms ground us, centre us in this world and connect us to each other.

Design is the act of creative engagement with the world. And with each other.

Over the last decades design consciousness has been spreading like the life giving fungi in a healthy forest ground. Its multidisciplinary nature bridges different trees of knowledge and helps create a more connected world. Design also disrupts. It challenges tradition and assumptions, and design enamoured with itself and technological advances can cause disruption - desynchronisation of natural rhythms and vital social behaviour.

Rhythms awareness can help reframe design inquiry, which is the act of understanding and empathising with a problem, person or community. R+D tries to formulate a way of designing that looks at the underlying forces, pattern and rhythms that combine to create the human experience. R+D is diverse and open minded in its approach. Even though we all share the same planet and the same rhythmic influences, human individuality and ingenuity knows now boundaries. It might start with the rhythms of existence but enters to the core of the human individual and our shared experiences.

On the behavioural level the designer has the ability to observe, engage, interview and inquire about the rhythms.

To make rhythms actionable from a design perspective we can envision the routines and rituals that humans engage with as touch points of certain environmental, bodily, social and technological rhythms. This helps moving from the abstract realm of rhythms and timing into a more concrete level of human behaviour. On the behavioural level the designer has the ability to observe, engage, interview and inquire about the rhythms. This space of design opportunities opens itself up when routines and rituals are reframed as manifestations of larger conscious/subconscious and possibly hidden rhythms.

Rhythm awareness for rhythmic beings in a rhythmic world.

How much of us do we leave behind and lose while trying to fit into the frameworks of modern industrial life?

Modern technology and our built environments can mask the natural rhythms that are vital for our well being. How much of us do we leave behind and lose while trying to fit into the frameworks of modern industrial life? With ever more developed tools, environments and technologies, the human physical experience gets removed from its evolutionary roots and its alignment with the natural world surrounding us.

An R+D approach requires to look within to uncover design opportunities that arrive from the rhythms of existence.

But R+D is by no means a call to regress into some imagined “glory days”. Actually the opposite, its advocating technology and progress while still conserving the ancient elements and the evolutionary wisdom we carry deep within us. But with the difference that the technology and built progress stems from a place of honest understanding of human behavior and its rhythmic existence. An R+D approach requires to look within to uncover design opportunities that arrive from the rhythms of existence.

This enables designers to envision technological rhythms that work in synch with the natural ones and empower the individual rather than take advantage of them.