The Concept

When originally looking at the sunflower, I found this photo on the website: http://www.maths.surrey.ac.uk/hosted-sites/R.Knott/Fibonacci/fibnat.html

and when observing the curves that have been pointed out in this image of the seeds on a sunflower I noticed that the diameter of the curves that are formed by the pattern of the seeds actually gets smaller as you look further into the middle of the circle (meaning that the curves get curvier as they get closer to the centre). Therefore the curves start off large on the outside and progress to getting smaller in the middle.

Therefore with my model I wanted to represent these curves in 3D somehow, and also wanted to represent the seeds. The curves created by the seeds are represented by the spiral in the middle of the model- the obviously starts off large on the outside and gets smaller as it gets further to the middle, just like on the seed bed. The circles on the outside of the spiral represent the seeds themselves (very literally) as they are the points that the spiral references for its form, just like on a sunflower. These spheres get smaller as the spiral gets closer to the end and this is a very specific part of the model's design because I wanted to show that the curves the sunflower seeds make get curvier as they get closer to the centre, therefore the diameter gets smaller, and in this 3D representation I used this diameter aspect on the spheres themselves.