Universal Principles of Design, Revised and Updated

Self-Similarity

A property in which a form is made up of parts similar to the whole or to one another.

Many forms in nature exhibit self-similarity, and as a result it is commonly held to be an intrinsically aesthetic property. Natural forms tend to exhibit self-similarity at many different levels of scale, whereas human-created forms generally do not. For example, an aerial view of a coastline reveals the same basic edge pattern, whether standing at the waters edge or viewed from low-Earth orbit. Although varying levels of detail are seen, the same pattern emerges—the detail is simply a mosaic of smaller wholes.1

Naturally occurring self-similarity is usually the result of a basic algorithmic process called recursion. Recursion occurs when a ...