Self-­organized matter : design and primitive future of the eidetic categories

In his thesis Du mode d'existence des objets techniques (1958) Gilbert Simondon traces the most essential evolutionary path in relation to the design of “inorganic” artefacts: these products tend to become more and more “organic”.
Archaic machines are mono-functional mechanisms whose form is utterly determined by their main function; they are made of isolated parts and each one of them plays a single role in the functional cycle of these objects. Their organization is analytical and homogeneous, with a strong differentiation between the interior technical environment and the geographical surroundings.
On the other hand, advanced machines are organisms made of integrated parts, whose whole form is self-determined: they allow and integrate lots of different functions. Internal and geographical environments, in this case, are bound together and constitute a third kind of environment (milieu), which has been defined “hybrid (or techno-geographic) milieu”.
Simondon gives us many examples of it, showing how the evolution of technical objects relates not only to their technical nature, but also to their “aesthetic performance”, i.e. their ability to become mediators between man and environment.
The “techno-aesthetical” evolution described by Simondon is related to the conception of artefacts and it explains that this process can't be only viewed as the act of an individual demiurge who shapes a sort of inert matter. The making of these advanced technical objects involves the integration of different industrial and technological abilities, an open source know-how and, therefore, a very wide concept of authorship.
We can say that the matter itself tends to find the most metastable arrangement. Thus there is an evolution not only in the conception, but also in the categories that can be used to represent the form and aspect of an object.
Design methodologies – the cognitive current of thought represented by H. A. Simon in The sciences of the artificial (1969) and the figurative-computational current represented by Ch. Alexander in his Notes on the Synthesis of Form (1964) – do not deal so much with the development of new eidetic categories. Instead, the most important genealogy of these eidetic categories has been developed in the field of natural morphogenesis, especially following the tradition started with On Growth and Form by D'Arcy Thompson (1917), continued with the essay The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis by Alan Turing (1952) and culminated in the Esquisse d'une sémiophysique by René Thom (1988).
The case of Turing's morphogenetic model seems particularly appropriate to show two fundamental aspects about this issue:
1. the strategy he used to find out and describe the self-organized matter;
2. the spreading of this aesthetic model, especially through some of its recent uses in simulations of urban and decorative patterns (morphology of artificial).
The contribution that we propose is set in the context of semiotics of artefacts (Floch, Fontanille) and design (Beyaert-Geslin) and it suggests a new frame to examine the eidetic categories used in the analysis of the plastic level of visual artefacts.--------------------------- ----------------- Nella sua tesi Du mode d'existence des objets techniques (1958) Gilbert Simondon delinea la più essenziale delle linee evolutive nel design degli artefatti “inorganici”: questi tenderebbero verso uno statuto via via più “organico”. Le macchine primitive sono meccanismi monofunzionali la cui forma è completamente determinata dallo loro funzione principale; sono composti di parti isolate nello spazio ciascuna delle quali svolge una singola fase del ciclo funzionale. Questi oggetti tecnici hanno una configurazione analitica e omogenea, presentano una