Design + Evolution = Eugenics:
Mimetological Analogies, Or
Why Is Design So Enamoured With Evolution?
Dr Cameron Tonkinwise
Director Design Studies, School of Design, University of Technology, Sydney
Abstract
Evolution is a way of explaining of what results from interrelated random processes, not the mechanism
that brings about those results. From the moment of this theory’s inception, the danger of extrapolating
from evolutionary descriptions to designerly prescriptions has been frequently demonstrated in violent
historical contexts. Whilst these moments are well known, they are perhaps being taken for granted
(because evolution is in principle incapable of learning from history, except as it manifests as a current
environmental pressure?) now that design researchers are once again beginning to explicitly embrace
notions of ‘guided evolution’.
It is useful therefore that recent design history scholarship is uncovering links between earlier
exhortations of evolution by design and actual eugenics experiments (see the work of Christina Codgell;
eg “The Futurama Recontextualised: Norman Bel Geddes’s Eugenic ‘World of Tomorrow’” America
Quarterly vol.52 no.2 (June 2000); “Products or Bodies: Streamline Design and Eugenics as Applied
Biology” Design Issues vol.19 no.1 (Winter 2003)). These politically dangerous moments begin to look
like a consistent tendency when one takes into account the first work at the convergence of design and
evolution, that of Ernst Haeckl — coiner of the term ‘ecology,’ vilified eugenicist, but also visual
researcher into natural evolutionary patterns, the latter still influential in foundation design curricula
since the Bauhaus (see Alain Findeli’s genealogies of the Bauhaus, particular “Moholy-Nagy’s Design
Pedagogy in Chicago (1937-46)” Design Issues vol.7 no.1 (Fall 1990)).
This paper supplements these particular reminders with a general account of why design continues to be
seduced by notions of evolution. Design is the quintessential constructivist discipline, consequently
forever endangered by relativism. To resist foundering, design dreams of wholistic systems that ‘autoshore-up’ the flow of its variable outcomes.
This is what Jacques Derrida (Dissemination [London: Athlone, 1983]), and after him, Philippe LacoueLabarthe, (Typography: Mimesis, Philosophy, Politics (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989])
has called a mimetology, an attempt to install a logic that limits the effusive productivity of mimesis to
mere reproduction or imitation. Derrida has shown why such constraints necessarily fail, and LacoueLabarthe, in his analyses of Heidegger’s Nazism, has shown the political dangers associated with these
doomed desires. Design’s renewed embracing of evolutionary systems must be mindful of these
analyses.
This paper is therefore interdisciplinary critical theory research, drawing on historiographical analyses
oriented by poststructural concepts. The hypotheses it generate will be tested against readings of a range
of current writings at the convergence of design philosophy and evolutionary systems thinking, from
meta-theorists like Erwin Lazlo to sustainable design advocates like David Orr.
Key words
Design, Darwinian Evolution, Guided Evolutionary Systems, Analogy, Mimetology
Introduction
This paper investigates the analogy ‘design as evolution’. It attempts to:
 Firstly, explicate aspects of the theory of evolution that complicate such an analogy
 Secondly, given the complexity of this analogy, understand why there is a desire to understand
design by way of a theory of evolution.
Analogies such as X is like Y can be useful forms of abductive research, explaining what is unknown,
or only tacitly known (X), in terms of what is known (Y). However, this requires that the known side of
the analogy remain stable. Part of this paper is about drawing out just some of the ways in which the
theory of evolution is far from stable. When evolution is taken in this less reductive way, without falsely
stabilising it, evolution does, I will argue, provide some new and important, and troubling,
understandings of design.
When evolution is taken only in a reductive way, the analogy tends to be less insightful. I will try to
demonstrate that this is because only the X-like aspects of Y are being taken up in the analogising; in
other words, only the most design-like misinterpretations of evolution are being used to try to
understand design. If this is not ‘begging the question’, then it is at best a type of reverse analogy,
explaining erroneously evolution by way of reductive, overly stabilised notions of what design is.
Though this ‘attempted stabilisation of design’ is exactly what I will assert is the real objective of the
analogizing.
In working through some of the complexities and mistakes that surround this analogy, I am not doing
anything significantly new. Others, even at this conference, with more thorough understandings of
evolution than mine, have already criticised and/or tightened the analogy.1 In the other part of the paper
therefore, the perspective shifts. The aim is to draw out insights about design from the fact that
designers and design thinkers are tempted by the reductivist evolution-design analogising. Why, if the
analogy is so fraught is it nonetheless thought to be productive? The analogy must be doing something
other than providing access to truthful insights about designing. It must have a perlocutionary force, an
ideological function, or so I will argue.
Before starting, we must try to deal with the blurred terminology involved in this analogy. Strangely,
both the terms ‘design’ and ‘evolution’ stretch across continua from very general everyday notions to
specialised profession or discipline specific concepts. ‘Design’ can refer to any planned activity or to
expert process of satisficing many and conflicting formal and functional requirements.2 ‘Evolution’ can
refer to any developmental process or to any of many contested accounts of the adaptational selection of
inherited variations in biological phenomena.3 To say that design is like evolution could therefore be to
say anything from ‘ideas develop, that is, progress through a series of modifications, in the course of the
design process’ to ‘planned activities to change the status quo are mutations whose success depends
upon their reproducibility in certain contextual conditions.’ In what follows, and in particular the first
part, I am concerned with the more technical notions of both design and evolution. However, in the
second part, I am trying to take into account these terms’ wider, more common usage. The argument
will be that what the analogy in its erroneously reductive form attempts to accomplish is precisely the
assurance that our plans are developmental, that all that we develop is part of a plan. This attempted
teleological assurance is, I will conclude, an axial dimension to designing. Designing is a process of
Most recently, see John Langrish “Darwinian Design: The Memetic Evolution of Design Ideas” Design Issues v20 n4 Autumn 2004. At this
conference, see the papers entitled, “Evolutionary Theories and Design Practices” and “Rewriting Design History from an Evolutionary
Perspective.”
2
Design is also complicated by being both a noun and verb. This is significant for this paper in that the design-evolution analogy is mostly
applied to the research of designs, of designed products, environments and communications in society, rather than research of designing, of
the design process. The former is best exemplified by Philip Steadman’s The Evolution of Designs [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1979] and George Basalla’s The Evolution of Technology [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988] . By contrast, in this paper I am
only referring to design in the verbal sense: the design process.
3
Evolution is also complicated by being both an adjectival noun (‘an evolution’, ‘a thing that is the outcome of evolutionary processes’) and
a verbal noun (‘the evolving,’ ‘the process that results in evolutionary outcomes’). This is significant for this paper in that evolution is an
abstractive way of explaining a situation, not a thing in itself. Evolution is what happens not a force powering what happens – though this is
exactly what is at issue.
1
making decisions by casting those decisions as fate. This means that designing is not at all like
evolution, but that designing does involve claiming to be like evolution.
Part One
Evolution = Anti-Design
The quickest way into what is at stake in this paper is to acknowledge that the theory of evolution was
designed to explain design features in natural things without recourse to design. Evolution explains how
things come to be what they are without the presence of designer. We all know that this is the primary
effect if not motivation of the theory of evolution every time we hear about creationists trying to censor
the teaching of evolution. What is less well accepted is that evolution also involves explaining things
without any notion of design. To accept the evolutionary account of how things come to be is to think
no longer about things as having design features, that is features that are defined by their function. I will
explain this shortly, but for now it suffices to recognize that from the superficial to the thorough level,
the theory of evolution is utterly opposed to the idea of design. It is therefore more than ironic, if not
plain strange, to try to analogise design through evolution. If the analogy contains truthful insights then
designing must contain or be the opposite of what we currently understand it to be. If the analogy does
not work, then something else must be motivating this near-absurd undertaking.
So let’s then explore some these less stable, more complex aspects of the theory of evolution that
directly attempt to avoid the idea of design.
Evolution theory is often reduced to four principles: mutability; inheritance; the struggle to survive in
particular populated environments; the survival of the fittest. The theory is then that:
1) The process of reproduction is not replication but instead frequently generates a significant number
of differences from the original.
2) These utterly random mutations are not one-offs but install themselves in all that is reproduced from
these mutants.
3) This repetition of difference occurs within populated environments that do not inherently or
comprehensively assist the reproduction of all living things, so theses populations and environments
differentially benefit the reproduction of some inheritable mutations over others.
4) Those mutations that persist over time are therefore those most appropriate for reproducing in those
settings.
Before delving deeper into the theory, the analogy with designing is already difficult to see in these
principles.
1 Sheer Randomness
With reference to the first principle, few designers would admit that their process merely involves
random manipulations of existing designs. Most would declare that whilst creative, what results is
reasonable if not rational, or at least, exists within reasonably predictable solution fields.4 If designers
were only random generators of modifications, they would be difficult to contract commercially.
Interestingly, this less random idea of a ‘solution field’ is actually similar to more recent versions of this
first principle of evolution. It is highly improbable, even given the long time frames which Darwin was
the first to take seriously in relation to biology, that complex phenomena such as eyes are single
mutations. If they are multiple random mutations then they are even less probable. However, when
thought in relation to the other principles, the theory suggests that once some sort of optical mutation
has occurred, and survived, then the fact that those creatures are now organizing their existence around
a type of opticality makes further mutations in the optical domain both more likely and more likely to
survive. So eyes become more and more probable. This explanation of the evolution of eyes is rather
like the idea of ‘reverse saliences’ or ‘pathway dependencies’ in paradigmatic accounts of technological
4
See Bryan Lawson What Designers Know [Amsterdam: Architectural Press, 2004].
innovation: once a significant infrastructural innovation is implemented, technology research and
develop focuses on exploiting the potential of that new infrastructure, developing, diversifying and
specializing the offerings in that domain.5
Nevertheless the randomness of mutability is still paramount; increased probability of some
developmental path does not rule out the possibility that a mutation could end that path, or rather
displace it. This is particularly the case with the sort of complex creatures who have eyes for instance.
Any of their other features could become more critical to survival and mutations in those other areas
could halt the development of eyes. In the end, the outcome is there by sheer chance, and perpetually
open to chance eradication.
Whilst this might be true of the pragmatics of designing, it is not something that falls within the
definition of design as a teleological problem-solving activity, planning to bring into production a
certain type of outcome. Such uncontrollable finitude is not something designers would or could
valorize as part of their expertise.
2 Uncreative Plagiarism
Conversely, though designers must be able to promise to clients certain sorts of results within certain
time periods, as exemplars of the new creative class, they are loathe to promote anything like the second
principle of evolution, inheritance. To be seen to be reproducing anyone else’s design, even one’s own,
is not considered to be what this modernist profession is about. Design, at its best, is thought to be the
production of the new, the surprising ability to respond to situations in previously unconsidered ways.
As Karrie Jacobs notes, when you hire a (graphic) designer, the first thing that is going to happen is that
all (the communications) that currently exists is going into the waste bin to make way for the new.6
According to seminal figures like John Chris Jones and Chris Alexander, this is exactly what
differentiates design from craft, exactly what design claimed to be able to do in order to differentiate it
from craft.7 If craft was inherently conservative, making only occasional and minor modifications in the
process of primarily reproducing how things already were, design, by division of labour and the process
of visualization was able to make more radical transformations, not just to components but to whole
systems. The virtuality of sketching does not merely allow accelerated trial-and-error evolution, but
enables a self-consciousness that promotes approaching situations in novel ways, even when not
needed.8
On analysis it is apparent that design is less craftless than the stories of its origin suggest. Jan Michl for
example, in “On Seeing Design as Redesign” makes a strong case for the extent to which design is
fundamentally about reproducing existing ideas of what is to be designed.9 Running an argument
stronger than previous accounts of design’s hermeneutic circle,10 Michl suggest that it is not just that
precedent plays a contingently inspirational role in designing,11 but that designing is impossible, it
cannot commence or sustain itself, without an Aristotlean category, if not a Platonic ideal of what is
being designed. So if the analogue of the species in design is the concept of some thing, rather than the
features of particular things, then design does appear to have a principle of inheritance. And again this is
more attuned to more recent accounts of evolution that attempt to explain the existence of sterile
individuals for example by reference to the co-operative survival of genetic lines rather than the survival
of individual genes. Evenso, reaction to Michl’s article, anticipated and experienced,12 suggests that
See Thomas Hughes “The Evolution of Large Technical Systems” in Bijker, W., Hughes, T. and T.Pinch eds The Social Construction of
Technology [Cambdrige: MIT Press, 1987].
6
Karrie Jacobs “Disposability, Graphic Design, Style and Waste” in Bierut, M. et al eds Looking Closer: Critical Writings on Graphic
Design [New York: Allworth Press, 1994
7
John Chris Jones Design Methods [New York: Van Nostrand, 1992] and Christopher Alexander Notes on a Synthesis of Form [Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1969].
8
On sketching see in particular Bryan Lawson What Designers Know op cit.
9
“On Seeing Design as Redesign” was republished in Design Addict http://www.designaddict.com/essais/michl.html.
10
See Richard Coyne & Adrian Snodgrass “Is designing hermeneutical?” Architectural Theory Review vol.2, no.1 (1997).
5
See Bryan Lawson “Schemata, Gambits and Precedent: Some Factors in Design Expertise” in Design Studies vol.25 no.5 (2004).
As Michl notes he expects in his essay, the ideas met resistance in the Design Addict Forum:
http://www.designaddict.com/design_addict/forums/index.cfm
11
12
here is an instance where the analogy with evolution reveals design to be the opposite of what design
intends to be.
3 Delselecting Designing
Perhaps the third principle is the least resistant to analogizing with design. Designing, as that which
seeks change, is clearly a struggle against the current environment and its growing populations of preexisting stuff. If what design accomplishes is the introduction of things that have not previously existed,
then the contexts into which they are introduced may or may not be supportive of those new things.
These environments will therefore exert pressures on those new things and differentially benefit the
survival of some rather than others. However, this idea of a ‘struggle’, whilst the most commonly
perceived aspect of evolution, is probably its least unique. All actions involve some sort of effort, and
some actions are always easier to accomplish than others. What is distinctive about this aspect of
evolution is the idea of selection, the fact that these competitive environmental forces kill particular
mutations.
To this extent, there is a first crucial difference between design and evolution. Design is, as was
indicated previously by way of Jones and Alexander, at the least a form of virtual trial and error.
Designing selects without actually putting options out there to be killed before they can reproduce
successfully. This foresight into what will survive before it is produced is perhaps the essence of design,
and since this is prescience is exactly what evolution cannot have, exactly what it aims to provide an
account without, we are returned to the fundamental contradiction between design and evolution with
which this first part of this paper began. There is a corollary though that will prove significant for the
second part of this paper. If designing involves predetermining what a coming situation requires, this
also means that some possibilities might be terminated prematurely; they may be judged to be
inappropriate without empirical proof. Presumably, not doing this, not excluding ideas that would work,
is as much the expertise of design as knowing before realization which ideas will work. Nevertheless,
this risk, that good ideas will never be tried, is exactly why design is an inexact science, a phronesic
judgement into what is promising rather than a guarranteed best solution.13
There is perhaps an analogue in evolutionary theory for this aspect of design, again in more recent
versions of the theory. It is clear that mutations must not only compete against external environments
and populations, but also internal forces. Only certain mutations will be possible given a particular
genetic code for example, and amongst those mutations, some will ‘never see the light of day’ because
of their incompatibility with other life supporting components of the entity being mutated. In these
cases, mutations are deselected by internal environments. A more straightforward analogue in design
would be the management of concurrent engineering, but one can imagine that if some design ideas that
just might work in certain parts of the world are left unexplored during the design process, this might
mean, by analogy, that they were incompatible with some factor internal to the designer or design team.
This might provide insight into the ‘internal’ conditions necessary for designing to occur at its best, that
is, in order for a design process not to gloss over better possibilities, but it does also open onto the not
uncommon factor of designers having a bad day. In the utter unconsciousness of evolution by random
mutation there is no such analogue. Within the constraints of internal factors, mutation can and will
apply any possibility to the external situation. In this system, what works is precisely not what is prejudged to be workable, which is why the system is more open to that which might work in previously
inconceivable ways. Design is powerful because its essence is foresight, but it is also limited insofar as
its foresight must depend upon particular measures or worldviews or intuitions.14 In the sociology of
technology terms raised earlier, expert designing is often constrained to path-dependent forms of
innovation, whereas as evolution’s ignorance opens it up every time, and without extra effort to radical
innovation, to innovations that change the rules and traditions about what works.
13
Carl Bereiter and Marlene Scardamalia characterize professional expertise in general, but exemplified by design, as the ability to judge
what is promising. See Surpassing Ourselves: An Inquiry into the Natureˆ of Expertise [New York: Open Court, 1993]. On phronesis see
Joseph Dunne Back to the Rough Ground: Practical Judgment and the Lure of Technique [Notre Dame: Uni of Notre Dame Press, 1997].
14
This is the prejudicial account of expertise developed by Hubert Dreyfus. See for example What Computers Still Can’t Do: A Critique of
Artificial Reason [Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992]
The second aspect of design that does not translate easily into environmental selection concerns the way
design is the design of environments. If designs are mutations, they are not just mutations that are then
placed in an environment to survive, but environment changing mutations. Designs are not merely
subject to environmental pressures because they can alter those pressures. This goes to the heart of the
matter. It is by design that we designing humans break from evolution.15 If an environmental pressure
threatens to deselect humans, design is invoked to relieve or deflect that pressure. We no longer live at
the mercy of the natural environment, but within built environments. If these become our ‘second
nature’s they only do to the extent that this artificial nature cannot be as selective a pressure as
primordial nature; in knowing how this unnatural nature works, it is exponentially more available for
depressurizing alteration.16 Recent evolutionary theory has begun to take account of ecologies where
both inhabitants and habitats co-evolve, but these can never compare to the scale of changes to
environments that design makes possible. Design’s role as the primary agent decoupling humans from
nature is only be belittled by reanalogising design with evolution by natural selection.
4 Adept Misfits
Of most significance for this paper are the troubles that face design analogies with the 4th summative
principle. It is well-known that the fittest means that which fits best, not that which is the strongest. Yet,
one only has to look around the clutter of our houses and the size of our landfills to realize that design is
not good at delivering that which best fits our modern environments. The volume of poor quality stuff
about us, nearly all in some or many ways difficult to use, inefficient and or ineffective, attests either to
insufficient selective forces being applied to design or the ability of design’s output to ‘survive’17
without sufficient creative adaptation. Despite what designers claim — or as will be argued before, what
designing needs to claim to take place — what is put out by them is far from optimum.
Again, alterations to a superficial reading of the theory of evolution do provide better analogues of
design. For, it is now admitted that evolution does not deliver the fittest, but merely one possibility of
surviving. Four mechanisms can cause this.
The first is what is known as drift. These are mutations that do not make a difference to survivability
but for this very reason can proliferate in certain conditions, altering a population without being
‘selected.’ Drift can even lead to maladaptations over time. To this extent, drift might explain the
amount of bad design around us, that is, the fact that designers can design things poorly but not so
poorly that they are liabilities.
The second is sexual selection. Since reproduction in most species requires sexual reproduction, those
that can attract a mate will reproduce more. According to conventional accounts of evolution, mate
selection should be based on identifiers of healthiness. But as with all signifiers, there is no guarantee of
a direct connection with the desired referent, so mates can have attractors without necessarily being in
fact the best suited to survival, as peacocks attest. Clearly, this situation is very like that of design, the
styling profession able to make the dysfunctional desirable, like the tail fins on American cars in the
’50s that signified speed in contradiction to their slowing weight.18 If anything, design seems better than
evolution at using sexual selection to develop the entirely unsustainable.
The third is co-evolution. There are members of species who either cannot reproduce, as mentioned
above, or whole species who are entirely dependent upon another species to reproduce. In these
situations, the unfit survives because it plays a role in a wider survival strategy. Again, this sort of
justification can be used for much bad design; that is to say, much bad design is carried by the
reproduction of a system within which it merely plays one role.
15
For a polemically Kantian account of what this means for being ethical humans see Luc Ferry The New Ecological Order Chicago: Uni of
Chicago Press, 1996.
16
For an account of what it means for designing when materials are no longer constraints but variables, see Ezio Manzini The Material of
Invention [Milan: Arcadia, 1986].
17
For the analogy to work, survival must mean active existence, not just enduring unused in a cupboard.
18
On this see Jean Baudrillard’s seminal essay “Design and Environment” in For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign [St Louis:
Telos, 1981]. The example comes from Baudrillard’s The System of Objects [New York: Zone, 1996].
In each of these examples, design is reduced to its worst by the analogue with evolution, rather than
explaining how it is able to access what is best for certain situations.
The fourth way in which evolution can generate and sustain unfit adaptations does however access a
nobler possibility, if only there were an analogue for it in design. It hearkens back to the final point
made in relation to the third principle, the fact that certain mutations make possible alterations to the
environment. Less fit entities can survive if they are more adept; it is not that they are well-adapted, but
that they are adaptable, or able to adapt things to their needs. This is related to the co-evolutions just
mentioned, but what I am referring to in short is intelligence. Evolution can and perhaps has resulted in
intelligence, but it is important to see this is a kind aberrant outcome for evolution. The result is
Empimetheus’ version of a human, the creature who is the last on the list to receive an attribute from the
gods, and who, when there are none left to give out, will clearly cease to exist if Empimetheus’ brother,
Prometheus, cannot steal fire from the gods for the humans so that they can make prosthetic attributes.19
Humans are not fit to survive, but through a kind of demonic hubris that is design, do survive, in spite of
evolution.
But what then is the equivalent in design of the evolution of intelligent adaptability. Designing does
involve investing intelligence into things,20 but to date designing has not managed to do what evolution
presumably has, which is to make things that can make things, to make up things that can make up for
their inadequacies by making other things. Despite the dreams and fears of automated technologies,
artificial intelligence, genetic engineering and nanoscale manufacturing, human designing seems still far
from any analogue of what evolution achieved, by sheer chance, in the human.
______________________
There are then many obstacles to the analogy between design and evolution. And when more recent
versions of evolutionary theory do offer isomorphisms with design, they tend to reveal design to be
what designers would most wish to deny that design is. Either design is rendered impracticable,
impossible to practice in any professional sense, or it is rendered impractical, delivering unprofessional
outcomes. Why then does the analogy ‘survive’?
Part 2
Functional Character
To explain the persistence of the analogy, we need to explore two further complications in the theory of
evolution; the character problem and the functional attribution problem. We need to understand that the
relation between evolution and design extends deeper, that the theory of evolution keeps finding design
well within itself, and so must keep struggling to kill off these traces of design, but in so doing
generates what can be superficially perceived to be strong attractors for design.
Formal Limits
With some of the co-evolutionary situations mentioned so far, it becomes difficult to discern at what
level the struggle to reproduce is occurring. What is it that we should say is surviving as a result of
evolution? This is what is known as the ‘character problem’, that is, the question about where the
boundary should be set for evolutionary entities.21 The problem is syntagmatic as well as paradigmatic;
not just where in an ecology of co- and even inter-dependent entities at any one time should the dividing
line fall, but also when, in the process of mutation has a species in the process of struggling to survive
become another species (and so in a certain sense failed to survive as that species)?22 These
This is Bernard Stiegler’s version of the Ancient Greek myth: see Technics and Time: The Fault of Empimetheus [Stanford: Stanford Uni
Press, 1998]
20
See Bruno Latour’s work, for example, “Where are the Missing Masses?” in Bijker, W. and J. Law, eds Shaping Technology/Building
Society: Studies in Sociotechnical Change [Cambridge: MIT Press. 1992].
21
Gunter Wagner ed The Character Concept in Evolutionary Biology [San Diego: Academic Press, 2001].
22
See Elizabeth Grosz The Nick of Time: Politics, evolution and the Untimely [Crows Nest: Allen & Unwin, 2004]: “The question of how to
represent or understand the origin of species is intimately bound up with the question of how to understand the identity, or unity of the object
19
epistemological difficulties are not just academic, since they are further complicated by exactly the sort
of teleologies that my language here is forced into – ie a rhetoric of entities struggling to preserve their
ambiguous identities. The character problem is a formalist one, an issue of categorizing properly, but
also one motivated by what biology asserts are the most primal forces sustaining life. In other words, at
the centre of evolution is a politics of design, of the identity of things, their characteristic look, and of
the intentionality of those things, their motivating dynamism.
Reverse Engineering
Evolution is strange in that it can be read as explaining what something is for by explaining where it
came from;23 explaining how some feature evolved through selective adaptation implies what it now
does to aid the survival of some creature. This use of evolutionary theory aligns it with design, for
designing involves bringing functional things into being; in other words, whereas the user only cares
about what something does and is ignorant of how that thing got there, the designer must be the one
who can think together what something is for and how to get that thing there. Evolution in this sense
can be a type of reverse engineering.
Think of the famous example of the increased prevalence of darker coloured peppered moths during the
industrial revolution.24 The standard evolutionary account is that air pollution sooted the tree trunks
exposing lighter coloured moths to predation and thereby selecting more melanised variants. On this
account, the function of the darker of wings, the adaptational accomplishment of evolutionary
processes, is camouflage. However, this hypothesis faces a number of complications. Later studies have
found that this species of moth tended to reside on the less polluted underside of branches rather than
the trunks. This opens up numerous possibilities. It could mean that the prevalence of darker moths was
itself a mistaken observation. It could mean that darkening was drift and not selection. Further, the
hypothesis depends upon an assumption about how birds hunt for moths (sighting stationary moths). So
finally, the survival of the darkened moths might have derived from other features or behaviours or
couplings of these moths, in which case the function of the darkened wings might be quite distinct from
camouflage, perhaps the opposite as might be the case in sexual selection.
This example is merely illustrative of the fact that evolutionary features cannot and should not be
directly translated into design features. Since evolution is the tolerable pairing of a random feature with
a situation, our ability to reverse engineer to the purpose of a feature must remain speculative. With
respect to evolution, no feature can confidently be said to allow a creature to do a certain activity other
than perhaps, but sometimes not even then, contribute to its general survival in a particular complex of
environmental and population factors that we observers may not have fully comprehended.25
____________________
In both these situations, there is an observational constructivism that renders evolutionary theory a very
unstable foundation for an analogy. And in both cases, what is at issue is the relation of form and
function. Evolution does not constitute an ontological foundation for function, but rather returns it to its
of biological and historical investigation. This is amongst the most complex and underdiscussed elements of Darwinism, the point where
Darwin’s own account uncannily anticipates Derridean difference.” (pp20-21) “Origin is a consequence of human, or rather, scientific
taxonomy, a function of language. Origin is a nominal question. What constitutes an origin depends on what we call a species, where we
(arbitrarily or with particular purposes in mind) decide to draw the line between one group and another that resembles it, preexists it, or
abides in close proximity with it. What we call a species depends on certain affinities and resemblances, as well as on differences and
incompatibilities between different groups.” (p23)
23
This is quite Aristotlean in that arché in Ancient Greek philosophy refers both to origin and original motivation: Heidegger defines it as
“the origin and ordering of [physical beings’] movedness.” “On the Essence and Concept of Physis” in Pathmarks [Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1998], 190.
24
The following example and discussion paraphrase Tim Lewens Organisms and Artifacts: Design in Nature and Elsewhere [Cambridge:
MIT Press, 2004].
25
This is similar to the epistemology involved in Humberto Maturana and Francesco Varela’s autopoiesis. The latter’s work on the nervours
system is a good example, demonstrating that the nervous system cannot be thought to involve external inputs, since its structure only allows
it to receive certain inputs, meaning that in all rigour it is only ever reacting to itself. See the chapter titled “Dispensability of Teleonomy” in
their Autopoiesis and Cognition [Dordrecht: D.Reidel Publishing Co., 1972]
existence as a subjective, or at best intersubjective, attribution.26 Function is utterly observer dependent,
even, or especially, in evolutionary theory.
Yet evolution, as summarized too quickly, as a theory of nature, is the naturalization of functional
forms. It is perceived to be the theory that finally explains the ultimate purpose of features; it seems to
manage to objectively identify what things are in terms of how they came to do what they do. This
mistaken metaphysics would be, and is, very tempting for designers negotiating complex and competing
domains of decision.
Historial Forms
In a typically well-argued paper, Jan Michl explicates this temptation by critically reviewing the way
the modernist slogan ‘form follows function’ mistakenly bases itself in evolutionary theory.27 The latter,
Michl shows, is best characterized as ‘function follows form;’ in other words, mutations in form appear
first and then natural selection finds them to be functional or not.28 Given this error, Michl goes on to
explore what is meant by ‘form follows function’ if it does not meaning within the discourse of
evolution. He suggests that it probably means ‘form follows intended purpose’, the latter being highly
subjective.29 But since this would undermine the status and role of design in society, the slogan must
have more force than meaning. Rather than a constative, the phrase is a performative attempting to
make ‘form follow ultimate purpose.’30 The cry is ideologically interpellative, casting designers as
historial heroes.31
Given that some of the key not-yet-stable issues involved in evolutionary theory concern an ability to
read the function of forms, and given that this is exactly the complexity that is avoided by reducing
natural selection to ideas of fitness, this is I suggest the core of the appeal of analogizing design in terms
of evolution. If designers can no longer justify what they design by reference to a discredited
modernism, evolution is an even stronger substitute.
Formal Eugenics
To this extent, it is useful to recall the strangeness of design appealing to evolution. Apart from the
sheer theoretical contradiction of doing this, there is also a too-well-known practical danger in doing
this. Thinking that evolution is like designing has enabled many to think that evolution can be assisted if
not completed by design.
Now everybody is aware of the danger of eugenics from the many historical moments when Social
Darwinism has resulted in mass murder.32 Yet, despite the unnerving frequency of attempted eugenic
“The important thing to see at this point is that functions are never intrinsic to the physics of any phenomenon but are assigned from
outside by conscious observers and users. Functions, in short, are never intrinsic but are always observer relative.” John Searle quoted by
Peter Kroes in “Technical Functions as Dispositions: A Critical Review” Techné vol.5 no.3 (Spring 2001):
http://scholar.lib.vt.edu/ejournals/SPT/v5n3/kroes.html. On this see the Dual Nature project in general:
http://www.dualnature.tudelft.nl/index.htm.
27
“Form Follows What? The Modernist Notion of Function as a Carte Blanche” now available at:
http://www.geocities.com/Athens/2360/jm-eng.fff-hai.html
28
“If architects and designers were to take seriously the modernist exhortation to follow principles found in nature, the mechanism of natural
selection would then suggest, paradoxically, the opposite of what the modernists propounded: not that designers should start from ‘function’
and arrive at the only possible formal solution pertaining to such function, but rather that they should start from forms at hand and see how
any of them could be used, whether unchanged or redesigned, to solve the particular task.” Michl “Form Follows What?” S3 para 2.
29
“Could a slogan such as ‘form follows intended purpose’ have ever become a battle cry? Could anybody have ever bothered to disagree
with such a goal? The main problem, however, is that if choose to understand the dictum this way, its most intriguing dimension – namely its
promise of objective forms, forms independent of both the user’s and the designer’s aesthetic preferences – will disappear.” ibid S4 para 6.
30
“Indeed, the key to the functionalist notion of function seems to be finding that the notion does not refer to any commonsense concept at
all, and that it is a denizen of a separate reality… a functionalist design metaphysics.” Ibid S5 para 1. ““I contend then that the functionalist
claim that function exists prior to form is logically consistent only when the notion of function is understood as an ‘objective purpose’ or
‘objective demand’ imputed either to God, to Nature or to History, ie to an other-than-human or ‘Higher Intelligence’.” Ibid S5 para 9.
31
“The vision of objective forms was enticing to the designer… making him a vehicle of the Zeitgeist… abolish[ing] his previous status of
an expert servant ministering to sometimes refined but mostly pedestrian demands of users.” Ibid S6 para 3.
32
While writing this text I uncannily received a spam for the following text: Harun Yahya The Disasters Darwinism Brought to Humanity
[no publication details]. The publicity explains that the book shows that the materialism of Darwinism lead to tyrannical fascism and
communism and that the only path of resistance is the Qur’an:
http://65.214.51.146/makale/tanitimlar/ingilizce/disasters_16_02_duzeltilmis.html
26
programs, the boredom caused by raising this spectre suggests that it lies only in the ‘high impact, low
likelihood’ quadrant of risk assessments. Designers (but more often advocates of social paradigm
change who appropriate the rhetoric of design) can therefore apparently engage in evolution analogies
without any concern of being complicit in eugenics.
I raise the issue of eugenics not to be alarmist — though I will shortly try to demonstrate that the link
between designing and actual eugenicism is frequent enough not to be merely contingent — but to
argue that eugenics is more designerly than is often recognised. To this extent, it replicates what Michl
has described in relation to functionalism, providing further insight into the key ‘functional form’
problematic in design-evolution analogising.
Two things differentiate eugenics from other forms of murder. The first is that the choice of victim is
typically aesthetic. Persons are pre-judged to be adaptational misfits according to identificatory marks:
their look, or the look of their behaviour, or the look of their gene pattern is interpreted as a marker of
their dysfunctionality. The targets are not those who misperform, but those judged to look like they
might not perform in a predicted environment. Eugenics is a based on a kind of visual literacy, an
ability to discern the best form for the coming situation.
Secondly, eugenics to the eugenicist is not murder. Since the theory holds that those (de)selected have
no future, that they are evolutionary dead-ends, their murder is recast as euthanasia. Killing the alreadydead is naturalized as the accelerated realization of fate. In other words, once the victims are identified,
the choice involved is annulled: there is no choice; those who look like that show themselves to be the
ones who will die (off) anyway. Further, eugenics not only disguises utterly contingent political
decisions as natural, that is, inevitable and therefore insignificant, but becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy
as only those who look right do survive, apparently proving thereby that they were (the) right (ones).
Eugenics is a kind of ‘prediction after the fact’ whose finished products declare themselves to be best
solution by dint of fact that they are only solutions to survive.
I am exaggerating the analogy here, but hopefully not too much to glimpse the similarity between
eugenics and certain models of designing, particularly those that promote design as a type of visual
intelligence able to discern what is most appropriate for the whole as it fatefully unfolds.33 That this is
not mere speculation is suggested by some striking examples throughout the history of design.
Ernst von Haeckel was an early enthusiast for evolution who coined the term ‘ecology’ to describe the
interdependence of creature and niche environment.34 Haeckel was also a leading monist, ironically
finding the romantic liberation espoused by his teachers (Goethe, Schelling) in evolution’s
materialism.35 Haeckel is most remembered today for being an advocate of eugenics, mostly because his
work was revived by the National Socialists to justify their own programs. What is less well-known
outside of evolutionary circles is that Haeckel’s evolutionary monism was profoundly formalistic.
Haeckel developed the now discredited claim that ‘ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny’ by examining the
what fetuses looked like as they developed: the slogan refers to the claim that creatures appear to move
through their evolutionary history on the way to becoming their present mature form. In this same vein,
Haeckel was a prolific documentor of the ‘patterns of nature’ creating textbooks that were seminal for
the pedagogy of the Bauhaus, particularly the Chicago curricula,36 and are still published as inspirations
for designers.37 In Haeckel then, we have the explicit convergence of an aesthetic formalism and a
eugenic evolutionism in a way that instantiates what evolution through a design optic attempts to
naturalise: in evolution theory, chance forms so acquire the patina of necessity that an ‘ought’ appears
to be derivable from an ‘is’ whereby evolution is accelerated to its incorrectly predicted final form.
Alain Findeli’s sophisticated neo-Bauhausian rhetoric runs close to these arguments. See “Rethinking Design Education for the 21 st
Century’ Theoretical, Methodological and Ethical Discussion” Design Issues vol.17 no.1 (Winter 2001)
34
The following paraphrases Anna Bramwell’s Ecology in the Twentieth Century: A History [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989.
35
See Chapter 7 of David Depew and Bruce Weber Darwinism Evolving: Systems Dynamics and the Genealogy of Natural Selection
[Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997]
36
See Alain Findeli’s history of the Chicago Bauhaus: “The methodological and Philosophical Foundations of Moholy-Nagy's Design
Pedagogy in Chicago (1937-1946)” Design Issues Vol.7, No. 1 (Fall 1990).
37
Art forms of Nature: The Prints of Ernst Heackel [Prestel: 1998].
33
If Haeckel fuelled the European origins of institutional design, Norman bel Geddes played this role in
America. One of the four horseman of streamlining38 — that hyperbolisation of ‘form follows function’
— and certainly the most ‘visionary’ of the four, Geddes it is now revealed was also an active advocate
of eugenics.39 For Geddes, streamlining was not merely a formal style, but a functional politics that
sought to remove all those who appeared to slow down evolution.
In these cases, eugenics is not tangential to design but axial to their design philosophy. It is the hinge
that both naturalizes and realizes their politics. This level of integration throws suspicion on more
current calls for evolution by design, particular those informed by a certain aesthetic sensibility. When
Erwin Laszlo for example, as one amongst many promoting ‘design by nature,’40 argues that our whole
evolutionary system is reaching a bifurcation point, and rather than following the rules of evolution
which would suggest increased random diversity, demands a decision for assisting evolution in a
particular direction, one suspects that despite the rhetoric of pluralism a particular lifestyle is being
promoted within an depoliticizing framework.41 It is then not unexpected that monistic metaphysics
would accompany this concealed political design, such as the affirmation that art is an appropriate
sensitizer to the wholism of contemporary science.42
Mimetological Projects
I would like to conclude by suggesting that what is happening with the design-evolution analogy is
precisely an analogy. This is not an identity. There is a difference between design and evolution that
allows design to be both evolutionary and more than evolutionary, or as I have argued, less then
evolutionary. This kind of relation can be characterized as a type of ‘mimetology’.
In many ways, imitation is cultural equivalent of natural evolution, the repetition with difference by
which cultures alter.43 Imitation at first seems like the simplest and most prosaic activity: X imitates Y.
However, on reflection there is much complexity involved. When X imitates Y, X is looking at how Y
appears, and projecting (or reverse engineering) how Y is making itself appear as it does; X then
translates this outside-in ‘vision’ into an inside-out ‘action.’44 In theory, X is not imitating Y, but
imitating what Y is imitating in order to be Y. The epistemological difficulties of imitating such a
model successfully suggest that imitation can become a highly relativist form of constructivism. This
creative play within imitation is however what stops such imitations being mere copies. Conversely,
their still being imitations stops them being mere uncontrolled free play. The ambivalent attempt to
make imitation be both more than instrumental repetition, and less than ‘anything goes’ is called
mimetology by post-Derridean philosophers.45 Analogies, precisely because of the space between what
is being compared, leave the way open for being mimetological.
At the heart of evolution is the uncanny situation in which an utterly random mechanism manages to
generate profoundly functional outcomes. To accept this machinic account of evolution as an analogue
of design would be to replace designers by automated random manipulators of existing designs. Design,
See Tony Fry’s chapter on streamlining in A New Design Philosophy: An Introduction to Defuturing [Sydney: UNSW Press, 1999].
Revealing the link between the streamlinists and the American eugenics movement was Christina Codgell’s doctoral research project:
“The Futurama Recontextualised: Norman Bel Geddes’s Eugenic ‘World of Tomorrow’” America Quarterly Vol.52 No.2 (June 2000);
“Products or Bodies: Streamline Design and Eugenics as Applied Biology” Design Issues Vol.19 No.1 (Winter 2003).
40
See for example the “Slow Knowledge” chapter in David Orr’s The Nature of Design [New York: Oxford Uni Press, 2002] or “The
Evolution of the Design Species” chapter in David Wann’s Deep Design [Washington: Island Press, 1996].
41
The Choice: Evolution or Extinction New York: Putnam, 1994.
42
“Genuine works of art and literature socialize people into their community and give insight into the relations that bind them to each other
and to the cosmos. They give perceptible form to humankind’s perennial intuitions of the oneness of life and nature.” Ervin Laszlo
Macroshift: Navigating the Transformation to a Sustainable World [San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler, 2001], p190.
43
I do not have the space to negotiate the theory of memes. See Susan Blackmore “Imitation and the Definition of a Meme” Journal of
Memetics Vol.2 (1998): http://jom-emit.cfpm.org/1998/vol2/blackmore_s.html
44
"The features of the performance to be reproduced are not given with the demonstration. The baby [or designer or professional or learner in
general] selects and integrates in its own performance what it takes to be essential in the things it sees the mother do. Or perhaps we ought to
say, there is already in its perception of its mother's [or teacher's or coach's] action a construction of the essential and inessential things,
which it then translates into its performance." Donald Schon Educating the Reflective Practitioner [San Francisco: Jossey-Boss, 1987] p108.
45
I am here following the work of Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe Typography: Mimesis, Philosophy, Politics [Cambridge: Harvard Uni Press,
1989]. According to Heideggerian readings of mimetology, the original mimesis is that of physis by techne. Technology completes nature
without exceeding nature. This starts to indicate how mimetology lies at the foundation of the design-evolution relation. See LacoueLabarthe’s Heidegger Art & Politics: The Fiction of the Political [Oxford: Blackwell, 1990].
38
39
as a human activity demands to be more than that. But the danger with being more than a machine is
that there is no programmatic control. Without control design becomes that which can make anything
come to be, and not just come to be, but come to be needed and necessary. So to limit this second
danger, design must analogise itself to evolution; it must imitate without imitating evolution; or imitate
what evolution is mechanistically imitating. Design is a mythical version of evolution where functions
have necessary forms, where the beautiful is not merely subjective but accesses what is universally
right. This is mimetological desire that appears to underwrites even the most unconsidered use of the
word evolve in relation to design: that design can change us without changing us utterly; that design can
plan our development and steer us toward its visions for us; visions that are not political but necessary.
______________________
Cameron Tonkinwise is Director of Design Studies at the School of Design, University of Technology,
Sydney, where is in charge of the Master of Design coursework program. Cameron is also Convenor of
the Society for Responsible Design, a not-for-profit think-tank that promotes design-led change toward
more sustainable lifestyles. Cameron is currently researching dematerialisation design, that is, the
design of service systems that satisfy needs in less materials intense ways. Cameron is also convening a
conference on Heidegger: Between Art and Design in 2006.
Email: cameron.tonkinwise@uts.edu.au, Web: www.dab.uts.edu.au/tonkinwise, www.changedesign.org