Are we doing design - or is design doing us?
Could design be a series of adaptive, flourishing processes that do not need our help, but will accept it with a certain quality of attention?
Stop trying to be creative is the catchy title of a fascinating article about an experiment in emergent design.
Essentially, researchers use an algorithm that generates multiple variations of simple graphics. Participants select one of these and the program then evolves some new variations of that. Participants select again, and so it continues. Remarkably over time, people end up with pictures of sophisticated images of things we can recognise from the real world.
Thing is, people choose only on gut feel, and they don’t know where their choices will lead, but they do lead somewhere. Look at the final results and you’d assume (at least before AI became so trendy) that someone must have designed them.
The philosopher Patricia Churchland (quoted in Roger Lewin’s book on complexity) studied neurobiology and observed:
Nature is not an intelligent engineer… It doesn’t start from scratch each time it wants to build a new system, but has to work with what’s already there… the result is a system no human engineer would ever design, but it is wonderfully powerful, energy efficient and computationally brilliant.
She paints a picture of the brain as a kind of brilliantly effective mess. Its many parallel processes don’t remotely conform to the popular notion of brain-as-computer.
And what may be true for our individual brains may also apply to communities of brains. Our conflicts and confusions may be part of a bigger, more impressive kind of intelligence. What we do together collectively is built not on some linear consensus, but emerges from our diversity.
From this perspective, what we call design is the serendipitous result of many thousands of choices, experiences, and conversations. If we take that view, what would change about the way we work?
Humans get attached to heroic narratives of rescuing and achievement. This often shows up as designing for someone else rather than with. Design thinking has been shown to unconsciously recycle white supremacy. Many alternatives to design thinking exist, but they easily fall into the same trap.
What might be possible beyond our tendency to bend people and things to our will? Can we instead participate in what’s already there?
Designers could become a little less like heroes and more like winemakers. Our role wouldn’t be pioneering a sexy new solution (a lust after the grape to disrupt all grapes) but positioning ourselves to notice and cooperate with nature - with less concern for who gets credit. What might be needed from us is more tending and pruning.
With our project on Unhurried Design, we want to explore the power of more social, understated human conversations as a field from which more satisfying design may emerge: an experiment in being more patient and curious about differences and disagreement, less judgemental about what is, and more open to life as it unfolds moment-by-moment.
We might be tapping into a weirder but richer intelligence.