How does nature design objects? What are its elements of design? Does it follow an embedded algorithm—the building block of life? These questions, first explored in Strahinja Jovanović's master's thesis, find material form in Fussil Design Vases. The project is a translation: from digital cellular automata to physical clay, from the logic of growth to the texture of the handmade, from the virtual to the tangible.

The vases are generated by Fussils, a digital tool developed as part of the thesis. Fussils unifies and creates new cellular automata, drawing on Turing's reaction-diffusion systems, Conway's Game of Life, and the broader tradition of morphogenetic design. The name itself bridges past and future: fossus (excavated) and futurus (future)—suggesting forms that are at once unearthed and emergent, ancient and not-yet.

In the digital realm, Fussils produces dynamic 2D and 3D forms: cellular arrangements, tissue-like structures, patterns that pulse with the logic of growth. The designer controls parameters—cell size, diffusion rates, interaction rules—while the algorithm generates outcomes that are never fully predictable. It is a process of co-creation, where human intention meets computational emergence.

The vases represent the next step: returning these digital forms to the physical world. Using a 3D clay printer, Strahinja produced a series of vases in diverse sizes, colors, and textures. The printer, a tool of precision, becomes a collaborator in a process that also involves the unpredictability of clay, the variability of firing, the material's own agency. The result is an object that carries the trace of code and the warmth of the hand, the logic of algorithm and the texture of earth.

The forms themselves are varied. Some suggest biological structures—cells dividing, tissues forming, organisms taking shape. Others evoke geological processes—erosion, sedimentation, the slow work of time. Still others are abstract, existing somewhere between the organic and the architectural, the natural and the designed. Each vase is unique, a product of the parameters that generated it, the material that shaped it, the decisions that guided its making.

The project is situated within a broader inquiry: how can we shift from designing alongside nature to co-designing with it? This is not about mimicking natural forms, but about engaging with the processes that produce them—the algorithms that shape life, the rules that generate complexity from simplicity. Fussil Design Vases are artifacts of this engagement, objects that embody the possibility of a design practice that is symbiotic, adaptive, in dialogue with the natural world.

The urgency of this approach is underscored by the context of climate change and rapid technological transformation. If design is to respond to the challenges of our time, it must learn from the systems that have sustained life on this planet for billions of years. Fussil Design Vases propose one way forward: not nature as resource, but nature as model; not nature as object, but nature as process; not design against nature, but design with nature.

In the end, the vases are both objects and provocations. They are beautiful—their forms intricate, their textures varied, their presence quiet but insistent. But they are also arguments: for a design practice that is less about control and more about collaboration, less about imposition and more about emergence, less about the human and more about the more-than-human. They are fossils of a future we are only beginning to imagine.

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