Those lines - what are they?

At CLYDE we love randomness, but we want control too so we look for ways to balance the two. This design looks fairly random at first but let's look closely. We can see something is happening at the bottom of those lines, and something is happening at the top too, and there's sort of an X shape going on. Why?

To make this design we started with a curved dish shape, like an upside-down salad bowl:

Next, we populated the surface of the bowl with about two hundred randomly placed points...

...and then added a second bowl that has been inverted:

With the 3D structure decided, we connect the points with straight lines. Each point on the lower bowl is connected with the point directly above it on the upper bowl.

Now if we remove the bowls and points and focus on the lines we can see one of our finished designs, Direct Connection. And we love it.

But let's finish with one more twist. If you've been reading our other stories in the Design Lab you know how much we appreciate randomness and chance. We like "what if" games, so what if all those points on the bottom dish weren't connected with the points directly above them, but instead were connected to other randomly selected points on the top bowl? You get something like this, our design Random Connection: 

We made both of these designs available because some people like their connections direct and others prefer random, and we're good with both. No matter which one you choose people are going to ask you about your shirt!