We are now in a position to draw a few conclusions from this examination of designer fallacies. First, in spite of language concerning designer capacity in textbooks - recognizably there in engineering, architecture, and other design textbooks - I am attempting to show that the design situation is considerably more complex and less transparent than it is usually taken to be. Both the designer-materiality relation, and the artifact-user relations are complex and multistable. While it is clear that a new technology, when put to use, produces changes in practices - all of the examples show that - these practices are not of any simple ‘deterministic’ pattern. The results are indeterminate but definite, but also multiple and diverse. Moreover, both intended results and unintended results are unpredictable in any simple way, and yet results are produced. And, finally, what emerges from this examination looks much more like an inter-relational interpretation of a human-technology-uses model in which the human, material, and practices all undergo dynamic changes. If this is the case, then there are also implications for designer education. One of these is that the design process must be seen to be fallibilistic and contingent. Some worry that this recognition may be demotivating - but it could also be a call for a more cooperative, mutually co-critical approach as well.
I am also implicitly suggesting that the re-descriptions which have arisen out of the past several decades of work in the history and philosophy of science, the new sociologies of science, and cultural and science studies, which undertake careful case studies of developments in technologies, give hints of the complexities suggested.39
References
DeLanda, M., 1991, War in the Age of Intelligent Machines, Swerve Editions, Zone Press, New York, pp. 12-14.
Kittler, F., 1990, The mechanized philosopher, in: Looking after Nietzsche, L. A. Rickels, ed., SUNY Press, Albany, NY.
Latour, B., 1987, Science in Action, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA.
Nyre, L., 2003, Fidelity Matters: Sound Media and Realism in the 20th Century, Doctoral Dissertation, Department of Media Studies, University of Bergen, Volda University College, Norway.
Pickering, A., 1995, The Mangle of Practice: Time, Agency, and Science, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, p. 102.
Tenner, E., 1996, Why things Bite Back: Technology and the Revenge of Unintended Consequences, Alfred Knopf, New York.
Toffler, A., 1970, Future Shock, Bantam, New York.
White, Jr., L., 1971, Cultural climates and technological advance in the Middle Ages, Viator 2:171-201.
Winner, L., 1986, Do artifacts have politics?, in: The Whale and the Reactor, L. Winner, ed., University of Chicago Press, Chicago, pp. 19-39.
Technological Design as an Evolutionary Process
Philip Brey
The evolution of technical artifacts is often seen as radically different from the evolution of biological species. Technical artifacts are normally understood to result from the purposive intelligence of designers whereas biological species and organisms are held to have resulted from evolution by natural selection. But could it be that technology, too, is really the outcome of evolutionary processes rather than intelligent design? Recent decades have seen the emergence of evolutionary theories of technology, which use concepts and principles drawn from evolutionary biology to describe and explain processes of technological innovation and technological change. In this chapter, I will focus on three prominent theories, by George Basalla, Joel Mokyr and Robert Aunger, and I will investigate to what extent these theories present a truly evolutionary account of technological innovation and change. In the end, I aim to analyze how these theories construe technological design: as a blind evolutionary process, a purposive activity of designers, or a mixture of both.
1 Design and Evolution
Before evolutionary theory presented an alternative viewpoint, it was almost universally believed that biological organisms are creations of an intelligent maker - a God. For centuries, this belief played a central role in a major type of argument for the existence of a God, the Argument from Design. Arguments from Design come in different forms but all revolve around the belief that there must be a God or Intelligent Creator because organisms in nature are too complex and sophisticated to have occurred randomly or naturally.
The most famous Argument from Design is the Watch Argument presented by theologian William Paley in 1802. Paley’s argument starts with the premise that living organisms and organs have the same kind of complexity and purposiveness as designed artifacts. An eye, for example, is an intricate organ for vision in precisely the same way that a telescope is an intricate artifact for assisting vision. Paley next
P. Brey, University of Twente
P. E. Vermaas et al. (eds.), Philosophy and Design. © Springer 2008
argues that if one finds complex artifacts like a telescope or watch on the ground, one would not believe for a moment that it was the product of natural forces, but rather believe that it must have had a maker. But, Paley argues, since human organs and organisms have the same kind of complexity and purposiveness as such human-made artifacts, it is only plausible to assume that they, too, must have had a designer, or maker, who intentionally created them and gave them a functionality or use.
In his famous exposition of the theory of evolution, The Blind Watchmaker, Richard Dawkins explains that the theory of evolution by natural selection provides a compelling alternative to Paley’s account. The complexity and functionality found in living beings, Dawkins argues, can be explained as the outcome of a long process in which less complex organic systems gain complexity and functionality in a series of steps involving small variations and selection of the fittest (best-adapted) systems. Dawkins concludes that an explanation of organic life requires no appeal to a creator or designer, but only to blind processes of natural selection. Natural selection, he claims, is completely different from purposive design since it “has no purpose in mind. It has no vision, no foresight, no sight at all. It does not plan for the future. It has no vision, no foresight, no sight at all. If it can be said to play the role of watchmaker in nature, it is the blind watchmaker.” (Dawkins, 1986, 5). The theory of evolution is now well-established in science, and the Argument from Design has become discredited as a result, although it is still used in religious theories of biological life, as in creationism, creation science, and more recently, the theory of Intelligent Design (Dembsky, 1999).
As a result of the new scientific orthodoxy, the origins of organisms and of artifacts are nowadays seen as radically different: blind natural selection versus the purposive, forward-looking, and intelligent activity of designers. In this chapter, I will question whether this radical difference in origins can be sustained. I will not do this by revisiting the Argument from Design, but by questioning whether designed artifacts are best explained as resulting from purposive design rather than evolutionary processes. Recent decades have seen the emergence of evolutionary theories of technology, which use concepts and principles drawn from evolutionary biology to describe and explain processes of technological innovation and technological change (see Ziman (2000) for an overview). In what follows, I aim to investigate to what extent these theories present a truly evolutionary account of technological innovation and change and to analyze how they construe technological design: as a blind evolutionary process, a purposive activity of designers, or a little bit of both.
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Reproduced - with slight changes - with permission of Palgrave Macmillan from Ihde, D., 2006, The designers fallacy and technological imagination, in: