This week I read “Slow Technology - Designing for Reflection” after seeing it referenced in another paper. “Slow Technology” was published over 20 years ago, but the concrete parts are still interesting:

We have experimented with displaying time structures in terms of various “clocks”, for example a clock inspired by Klein’s monochromes, where colours and time structures interpret certain properties of given information and a clock slowly displays time in terms of small changes in colour of a simple geometrical structure [28]. Inspired by the paintings of Mondrian (Fig. 4), we have experimented with mapping the dynamics of information structures onto the geometrics of Mondrian-like displays. We have also used techniques such as generative grammars and Lindenmayer systems (e.g. [31] and Fig. 5) to be able to map information to the complexity of a pattern or composition [28].

Lars Hallnäs and Johan Redström. 2001. Slow Technology – Designing for Reflection. Personal Ubiquitous Comput. 5, 3 (August 2001), 201–212. https://doi.org/10.1007/PL00000019

It’s the first I’ve heard of Lindenmayer systems. Formal grammars were my favorite part of the computer science curriculum, and I’ve used them often in my work (parsing, compilers for domain-specific languages, etc.).