Have you ever thought ? How did we come up with design process ? Is it a process invented by humans who were designer ? Or it is a great inspiration taken from the natures evolutionary process.
Evaluation has shaped the world that we know. Us along with all the living beings around us have evolved from microorganisms over billions of years through the process of genes being passed on from parent to offspring. Millions and millions of different organisms have evolved to adapt to the specific environments in which they exist.
Our ideas
Humans are the only species who actively create to drastically modify our environment. We have designed increasingly complex products and systems that shape the world around us, but from where did our ability to design come from ?
In 1979 Richard Dawkins coined the term meme to distinguish between a cultural and biological evolutionary process. Describing meme as " cultural replicators " ,the cultural equivalent of a gene or the cultural equivalent of DNA which is anything that's copies, anything that's imitated, anything that spreads around like a virus. As we think about this we consider the following question "have humans control the creation of solutions around us or do solutions subject humans to an evolutionary process that we call design."
To simplify this question and make it easier to understand can Steve jobs be given credit for the iPhone or has it evolved over time from its ancestor like the wheel, through the minds of thousands of designers.
Are designers nothing more than a medium in which the design process is naturally taking place ? does design follow an evolutionary process ? Let's take a look into the three components of evolution and how they relate to the design process.
1. Heredity
Do you look like your mom or have a sense of humor like your father ? That's because you inherited copies of their genes when you were born. In our mind we are constantly generating ideas. When we come up with these ideas we are inspired by what came before, both by concepts we create ourselves as well as existing ideas. The fact that ideas are shaped by what has come before is analogous to heredity and evolution.
It would be very difficult to invent something completely new without the world influencing you in some way. Let's imagine a design brief, where you have to design a new orange juicer. You are bound to use certain elements of existing juicers, because they have proven to be successful and those juicers most likely use examples from previous juicers. There is a good chance they all stretch back to some ancient human using a rock to extract liquid from fruits. Even revolutionary juicers such as the Mexican Albama reference pasta ideas like the lever or nutcracker
2. variation
In biology mutation is the process of producing variation in genes. The changes caused through mutation are random, in the sense that they have an unpredictable outcome on the fitness of an individual. Most changes will not benefit an organism or even be detrimental, but a few lucky times the change can benefit the organism in a specific way in its specific environment. An example of this process in nature is seen in some humans who appear to have developed a resistance to malaria. Scientists discovered that some individuals cells mutated giving birth to the G6PD gene, an abnormal shaped cell with the ability to fight against malaria.
Designers use what is called creativity tools to mutate existing ideas into new and inspiring forms. The scamper methods are a classic example of these tools. scamper stands for substitute, combine, adjust, modify, put, eliminate and reverse while scamper provides a nice acronym to remember some of the tools that can be used to mutate ideas. This approach is very natural during the ideation process. Let's go back to our juicer idea say you had a regular old juicer and you decided to eliminate the juice catcher why would you want to do this. You ask where would all the juice come wouldn't it make a huge mess on your counter ?
Well Phillips stark didn't think so and he came up with the classic design juicer called the Juicy Salif. Juicy Salif took the juicer design beyond the traditional realm of functionality by focusing on aesthetics.
3. Selection
Selection is the different survival rate of individuals based on their specific genetic material. All individuals are slightly different and these differences allow some to adapt and excel in their environments better than others through selection. Individuals with these favorable traits are able to better survive and pass on the genetic material to their offspring. For example over time giraffes have evolved longer and longer next which allowed them to eat the highest sleeps on the trees as there was less competition for these top leaves. Giraffes with this favorable trait were able to survive better and therefore pass on these traits to their offspring.
In a design process the designer is constantly evaluating ideas based on how well the design is adapted to the environment of use or context the designer chooses which ideas to move forwards with and which should be killed. Designers artificially attempt to stimulate the context in which a design will exist by developing criteria by which ideas can be evaluated and selected. A design will then face the ultimate selection test when it hits the market. Does the design properly work for the intended context ? let's go back to the example of the juicer once again for this example we look at the Juicera, an extremely expensive (400$) and over-designed juicer.
Let's try to imagine the design process that led to this idea. The designers tried to imagine the context of use and selected a design that best fits this context. They imagine the end user would appreciate wi-fi connectivity and that users were willing to pay lots of money for pre-packaged juice delivered by a subscription service. Ultimately this selection criteria did not match reality and the juicero went the way of the dinosaurs to extinction on the other hand the humble hand juicer is still sold around the world.
So we have shown that the design process closely follows an evolutionary process, but if evolution took millions of years to develop the species we see on earth today how is it that we as humans were able to develop such a diverse set of ideas products and systems in such a short amount of time. There are some key differences you could even say, improvements that design processes have over biological evolutionary process.
First, we as humans can draw on inspiration from completely different ideas making heredity not regulated to one specific species this allows for the variety of ideas to quickly permeate more so than evolution that is limited to the information in the specific species DNA.
Second, we can force mutation to occur rapidly by intentionally modifying ideas. Normally mutations occur randomly and at odd intervals.
Third, in nature, evolution follows trial and error. it implements all ideas and selects what survives or what is good for survival but we as designers have the advantage of concept evaluation before actually implementing and selecting the best suited design out of many concepts, saving time and energy. You could conceive naturally a thousand times and never get such a result.
In nature the environment plays a key role in the evolution of species. The organisms best adapted to the environment, survive in design. The context shapes whether a design survives or not we as designers need to be aware of this by keeping the context at the center of our process. "The design process is happening through you not by you." You as a designer are just a medium for ideas adapting to various contexts. This means that there is unlimited potential by mining the context humans continue to evolve biologically as well as culturally, and will continue to evolve into the future since the context is continuously changing.
So to imagine the built world that we have created through design there will always be improvements on a solution which is currently optimal. As we've shown the three conditions of biological evolution have analogs to be found in design therefore we must conclude that the nature of design falls in line with the process of evolution. We raise questions about "where the center of control lies in the design process ? can we invent revolutionary ideas ? or is everything an influence of the past ? are we as designers nothing more than a medium for adapting ideas to a context ? are we slaves to the existing world or do we have free will to create ?
Article by Parshva Mehta, Aidan Wyber, Michal Adar and Riel Bessai as a part of Design Theory and methodology