Evolutionary Design Ecology
Recently I’ve been prompted to consider the role of evolutionary ecology frameworks in design process and strategy. Evolutionary ecology takes into account the evolutionary histories of organisms as a way to understand the ecological interactions that structure their abundance and distribution.
What prompted me was a job ad of all things. A People and Practices Research group was recently looking for individuals that (among other things):
“…are inspired to develop research or “design” programs that seek to understand people, practices and institutions and seek to use this understanding as a basis from which to map out new, disruptive opportunities for technological innovation.
Okay, so Intel is interested in disruptive technologies. That’s no surprise. I had a pretty good idea of the disruptive technologies concept, but I visited the wikipedia page for some (hopefully) new information. This distinct statement was among the overall description:
The concept shares many similarities with biological evolution.
Now, when the an analogy is drawn between technological change and evolutionary change, I tend to go to work. First off, I was struck by the possibilities of this statement much more than its potential factual nature (as it was no reference was given for the claim).
Two possibilities jumped out immediately. If disruptive technologies demonstrate evolutionary or ecological dynamics, biological models could be useful predictors. For example, disruptive technologies are those that overturn a dominant species of technology (see how I’ve already replace variety or kind with “species”). If we were to reconsider these patterns within an ecological model we might use the concept of carrying capacity to structure our thinking. When a population reaches carrying capacity it is said to have reached the point at which it has only enough resources (food, habitat, water, etc) to sustain its current population size. In mathematical terms, there is neither positive nor negative growth and the first derivative is 0.
Can we translate this in terms relevant for technology and design. Let’s say that instead of food, the resource in question is cognitive load. For some users the design of technology is inconsistent with the ways in which organisms have either developed or process information. Take my grandma for instance. She just wants to call her friends using the address book, but can get through the maze of menus on her cell phone to do that. In her case, the modes of information retrieval used by the designers aren’t accessible. Now if someone were to design a phone that, say, had a rotary interface, then perhaps she would use it. My point is that the complexity of the interface sometimes overshots the cognitive “carrying capacity” (see also: cognitive justice). What this means is that fewer and fewer people are likely to support or prefer that phone. In the meantime, the situation is ripe for a much simpler device (symbol-besed, for example) to increase in abundance and displace the previously dominant model. This is the point at which ecology leads to selection and, consequently, evolution.
Keep in mind that previous constraints often affect these changes. So in my grandma’s case, the fact that my grandfather worked for Michigan Bell for many years also impacts her decision to use an AT&T phone (AT&T came from what was once Michigan Bell). These kinds of constraints, may be “evolutionary” in quality (analogous to co-dependent genes, for example), and as such, not often considered among the range of interactions promoting the growth or decay of “populations” of “technologies.”
I suppose these is what made me start thinking about Evolutionary Design Ecology as a new framework for spanning disciplines. As far as I know, there has been no formal definition put forth in this area. However, I suspect great confusion to ensue anytime design and evolution are used concurrently.
So let me proceed by proposing my own, and I will follow with a brief survey of other attempts to help illustrate why my definition takes a greater range of interactions during the design process into account. Of course taking interactions into account is only one matter; organizing and arranging them is another matter altogether.
Let’s start with a definition of design ecology. Design ecology is concerned with the distribution and abundance of design concerns and how their distribution and abundance is affected by interactions with other concerns. I leave this notion of “concern” purposely vague, yet I have Bruno Latour’s proposition in mind when constructing this definition. For Latour:
A matter of concern is what happens to a matter of fact when you add to it its whole scenography, much like you would do by shifting your attention from the stage to the whole machinery of a theatre. [1]
As an aside, there’s a certain connection here that’s worth noting. Shifting one’s attention to from matters of fact to matters of concern is a way of resolving Gregory Bateson’s paradox of the Double Bind. In the context of design, this may translate, for example, to questions of usability versus cost.
We can add evolution to expand this definition of design ecology to include the histories of these concerns. The result is an evolutionary design ecology. Evolutionary design ecology creates the opportunity to recognize context dependence. In english, this means that teleology or purpose in design is constrained by its context. Thus, an a priori assumption that any particular design or process can be innovative due to it ecological relationships alone will miss at least one important consideration. Multiple ecological configurations exist, and for each, there exists a different complement of historical constraints. These constraints make one thing certain; what’s good today may not be good tomorrow.
…to be continued.
1. Bruno Latour. What is the style of matters of concern? Two lectures in empirical philosophy. April and May 2005 for the Spinoza Chair in Philosophy. www.bruno-latour.fr/articles/article/97-STYLE-MATTERS-CONCERN.pdf
