The tendency towards crafting has existed since the beginning of will to art. It is something, which presents what a designer is actually seeing and feeling through hands-on activity.

Obviously, each making process has individual parameters, hence every single doing needs certain aptitudes. The art of making hair ornaments in ancient times is one of the unique and forgotten crafting activities, which has influenced various grmodern designs such as jewelries, furniture, wall decorations and ornaments. Apart from this, the continuous tradition of wearing wreaths and their later transpositions into modern forms as crowns do not only symbolize specific meanings but they exist also as an important part of practical and religious life.

Golden crowns in ancient times did not only reflect the will of a woman’s grandioseness, diadems also manifested the authority and the power of politicians and emperors. Whilst their motives were used in funerary architecture and decorated building interiors and exteriors, wreaths and garlands were worn at weddings. Moreover, sculptures of ancient Greek and Roman Gods and Goddesses appear with wreaths, which are made of herbs dedicated to these Gods (Grašar & Nikolić, 2004).

The art of making a wreath depends on the pure observation of the principles, which form the arrangement of systems in nature. Rather than simply copying the outlook of leaves to provide ornaments, these observations helped wreath makers to understand the natural operations. Thus, craftsmen were able to idealize the systems in nature to create wreaths.

As an everlasting hands-on activity, along all kinds of crafting, the making of a golden wreath has lost its reputation and significance under the imperium of mass production. Modern people do not have the time and patience to spend hours for this long-acting forming activity. Consequently, many craftsmanship has unfortunately disappeared, even as some part of the activities could be automated to manufacture identical instances of a specific design. Craftsmen and design activists such as William Morris had foreseen and pointed out the danger long before.

Heritage is not only about physical artifacts, customs and traditions of a specific folk exist also as something essential to be transferred to future generations.  Cultural practices and rites as wreath making signify the position of herb cult and the cyclic wreath form in a conventional sense of collective consciousness.

Whilst many crafting facilities are about to vanish, there might be a solution to the problem of maintaining this kind of intangible heritage values through computation. The maintenance of the activity might be possible in the digital era through the usage of computers. As Carpo (2011) highlights, in the early modernity, mass production through emerging cultural technologies and new machines have made identical replications. These copies do not inherit originality, since they all represent the same idea and principle, therefore exactly the same design. Furthermore, the automated  production of such imitations extinguish the real idea and design approach behind objects. In our days, there is a potential which could sort out the problem. The rise of digital technologies has given an end to the power of identicality, which means eventually the end of notational limitations of industrial standardization.

This paper aims to investigate the ways in which the traditional processes of wreath making techniques could be incorporated with contemporary generative design processes in the realization of novel designs. Old crafts inherit precious knowledge, which could be represented, identified and enriched through computation.

In order to built a wreath, a geometric construction had to be planned by the craftsman. These geometric constructions needed strategically planning of all the elements, which were basically leaves, grasses, flowers or branches.These fundamental components differed also for each culture. As an example, according to specific meanings for each ancient civilization, leaf elements vary in forms of laurel, oaken, myrtle, olive, ivy & grapevine wreaths and other herbs and fruits. The selection depends on how each folk symbolizes these individual components.

In this study, we try to pick up the shape rules behind the object series inside ancient elements and their making processes. During crafting activities, designers comparatively use rules and while the creative process continues, different rules emerge. The geometrical forms of ancient wreaths depend on certain symmetrical principles, which we define as the regular repetition of a shape. We investigate how each element is coming together and how this formation is ensuring the wholeness of the hair ornaments with Stiny's (2006) shape grammar formalization.

The decomposition of the shape and making rules behind ancient wreaths is the first step to introduce this certain crafting technique as a possible programming language. A user friendly interface can open the way for the interaction between the human designer and digital craftsmen. Through the exploration of the shape rules behind ancient wreaths, we are planning to recall the crafting technique. In other words, we are aiming to encode and discover the computation in wreath making. Thus, apart from the maintenance of the activity, which may be applied to novel designs, and the transformation of knowledde in cultural heritage we are aiming to investigate the potential roles of computation in making activities.