Formscapes

Here are the ways of seeing and understanding the world: mathematics, politics, economics, physics, philosophy, psychology… But underneath it all you have art. The art of making spaces, the art of making images, and most importantly, the art of making stories.

Jonathan Pageau, in his talk at Ralston College on the value of telling stories.

We sit at the onset of a new kind of origin story. Powerful AI, as Dario Amodei puts it, appears at the end of a transforming the way we understand reality and humanity’s place within it.

But what happens when the stories behind our tools are no longer ours? The thought of powerful AI creating its own origin story is daunting. Exploring that question led me to a thesis:

Origin stories are generative frameworks shaping not just our myths, but our creative traditions and the from which they proceed.

The obsolescence of the mantra “form follows function.” In a world where the barrier to entry for creating functional things has been lowered — a world where hyper-functionalism has reduced our visual landscape to “clean,” “simple,” and “intuitive” — form is function. Because form differentiates, speaking to us in a way function alone cannot. It is what carries meaning beyond utility, inviting us into stories we want to be part of. And that, more than anything, is what makes creativity deeply, unshakeably human.

Today I want to share the first fruit of this exploration: the first of a three-part essay. In this part — the persistence of creation stories in the modern world — we will try to understand what origin stories are, where they come from, why their format resonates so deeply with us, and where to find them today. It is the foundation for the two parts to come, where we will discuss how origin stories shaped Western design philosophies, and the role they play in the design of future interfaces.

Origin stories: what are they, and where do they come from?

Origin stories are narrative frameworks designed to explain the world and our place in it. Across time and place, they follow a recognizable structure. They define a primordial order and establish the first relationships between gods, humans, the human-made, and the natural world. As Claude Lévi-Strauss writes in The Raw and the Cooked, their purpose is to provide a logical model capable of overcoming a contradiction. For the child in all of us repeatedly asking why, they offer answers to life’s most important questions: Who am I? Where am I? And what am I supposed to do?

Different cultures have resolved these questions through . To each its own language; origin stories address the tension between the unknown and the known.

These systems of meaning are . Beyond entertainment, these stories mirror their ancient counterparts, helping humans and fictional characters alike orient themselves in their own worlds.

Cultures construct their origin stories out of the raw materials of lived experience. As the anthropologist Keith Basso observed, when we read of mountains, fires, bodies of water, and animals, we are interacting with a culture’s .

These foundational narratives provide the context for a culture’s . In some way, creation stories are a culture’s operating system, and myth is its software.

Origin stories operate like early . As Dan Sperber suggests, they distil the complexity of reality into symbolic forms, prioritizing essential patterns over granular detail — encoding the knowledge and wisdom of the world in formats small enough to recall and retell.

Storytelling is a vital skill. The coherent, sequential, causal structure of these stories multiplied our ancestors’ chances of survival by enabling planning and prediction, extending cognition beyond the .

As our cultures evolved, so did our stories. Oral traditions adapted through retellings, rituals, and eventually . In each case the core structure — origins, moral order, human purpose — persisted, while surface elements evolved to fit changing cultural contexts.

Every space, façade, product, or tool we encounter is the of these systems of meaning.

Ultimately, all outcomes of human creativity are interfaces for the stories we have invented, inherited, and adapted. Each visual language — sacred, civic, or commercial — is bound to a specific period and geography. Emerging from an ongoing dialogue between mind and matter, form and function, people and their tools, these interfaces shape our visual landscape and the way we move through it. They help us see what matters, the horizons worth chasing, and who we are. For as long as humans nurture the impulse to create lightful stories, the future is worth looking forward to.

Why their format resonates with us, and why they persist

Storytelling is coeval with mankind. As the first of all narrative forms, origin stories established what the narratologist Tzvetan Todorov identified as the foundational arc of all storytelling: a passage from equilibrium, through disruption, to a new and .

Joseph Campbell called this pattern the — a universal motif rooted in the mythic structures at the core of any heroic arc. Origin stories employ this motif of transformation on a cosmic scale: order proceeding from chaos, light from darkness, speech from silence. Even contemporary narratives that aim to make sense only in relation to the structure they critique. Postmodern forms still resonate precisely because of the reader’s expectation of context, transformation, and resolution.

The persistence of origin stories is not just narration; it is generation. It speaks to our innate ability to make meaning. Whenever we , we relive the original act of bringing order out of chaos. Thinking through making, as Heidegger puts it, becomes a process of discovering the world through deconstruction and reconstruction. Beyond their practical uses, the spaces, objects, products, and tools we create materialize our thoughts. They externalize our systems of meaning into forms — surfaces for interrogation, understanding, and evolution.

Design is not just problem-solving; it is .

We define our personal world through the things we consume. Consumption, in all its forms, has become a in itself. What we take in is not merely acquired or discarded; it is an act of participation. In consuming it we align ourselves with, or separate ourselves from, larger systems of meaning. Each interaction becomes an expression of identity, a way to connect with something greater than ourselves, and a means to find purpose.

This is how we resist the flattening uniformity of today’s visual landscape. Today’s spaces, façades, products, and tools are — they are windows onto the stories they carry. But the story being told today is increasingly one of functionalism, where “clean” and “simple” are the commonplace virtues. To resist that flattening we must invest in the generative loop between creation stories and the forms they engender — moving beyond the modernist mantra that form follows function, and recognizing instead that form is function. Because form differentiates, and speaks to us in ways pure utility cannot. It is what people buy into; it invites us into stories we want to be part of. And that, more than anything, is what makes creativity deeply, unshakeably human.

Humans in a non-human world

So when AI begins to generate its own creation stories, what visual landscape should we expect to inhabit? If powerful AI can operate independently, acting on synthetic data that shares no cultural grounding with us, we have to ask: what kind of world is it building, and what is the human place in it? This is the existential design question of our time. As authorship shifts from human hands to machine agents, we must grow more attuned to the narratives embedded in our tools and the values encoded in our systems. Origin stories haven’t vanished — they are changing mediums. They now live in code, and in pieces of software. And unless we remain conscious stewards of these evolving myths, we risk inhabiting a world built by stories that were never truly ours.