The world of design is the world of artifacts which, based on the common definition of nature, is in front of that. The continuous diminishing of the facts and increment of artifacts have caused serious problems for the world and brought great responsibility to the designer. But in some ancient cultures, man-made products led to less inconsistency, and the root of this can be found in the artist-craftsman’s worldview. This article revisits the philosophy behind ancient Iranian handmade products such as metal works, tiles, and ceramics. Since in Iranian tradition, in addition to technical and aesthetic aspects, the special training on a worldview and an attitude towards the man's place in the universe in a master-disciple form of relation were also transmitted, artisans were able to perceive the symbolic and metaphoric language of nature and transfer it by using abstraction, which can be seen in the unity-oriented compositions, regrowing the motifs from each other like fractals, using calligraphy in design, and even in the particular way of signing the work. “Fotovatnameh” is of written examples of this “meta” perspective of Iranian traditional craftsmen that in this article has been studied to extract the "meta" properties of their works. To this aim, investigating their worldviews with a comparative description of contemporary philosophies and also studying their special language of abstraction have been considered.
The article was presented in the Ninth European Conference of Iranian Studies