EL DISEÑO BASADO EN ANALOGÍAS EN LA OBRA DE LEONARDO DA VINCI

Abstract

According to French philosopher and sociologist Edgar Morin, so-called analog thinking is one of the types of thinking that provides the best creative results. Starting from the abstraction and analysis of existing elements, with similar forms or known parts, and through the application of a similarity relation, new designs or creations of machines, artifacts or artificial products are generated. Leonardo Da Vinci is one of the designers who most successfully used this type of thinking, and in a totally intentional manner, as the phrase written in his Notebook notes: "Nature is the best teacher", as a source to apply creativity to design with analog solutions. Outstanding examples are those presented in Manuscript H of the Institute of France, where emulating a human arm, generates an artificial mechanism for its automaton or "Mechanical Knight" of 1495, or the Codex of Madrid I, where it expresses an analogy between the wing of a bat and a mechanism for one of its flying machines. This work studies some of the main designs of Leonardo Da Vinci and analyzes the contribution of the design technique based on analogies to the solutions proposed by Leonardo.