In his paper “Memes and the Exploitation of Imagination”, philosopher Daniel Dennett (1990) states that “evolution occurs whenever the following conditions exist”:
1. variation: a continuing abundance of different elements
2. heredity or replication: the elements have the capacity to create copies or replicas of themselves
3. differential “fitness”: the number of copies of an element that are created in a given time varies, depending on interactions between the features of that element (whatever it is that makes it different from other elements) and features of the environment in which it persists.
According to memetics, all elements of human culture, including designs, are subject to evolutionary processes and Dennett’s definition, free from biological terms such as ‘DNA’, ‘protein’, ‘organism’, is valid for all the ongoing cultural evolution around us. The replicating units in biological evolution are genes and Richard Dawkins (1976) offers the term meme for the replicating unit of cultural evolution:
Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches. Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation. If a scientist hears, or reads about, a good idea, he passed it on to his colleagues and students. He mentions it in his articles and his lectures. If the idea catches on, it can be said to propagate itself, spreading from brain to brain. As my colleague N.K. Humphrey neatly summed up an earlier draft of this chapter: `… memes should be regarded as living structures, not just metaphorically but technically. When you plant a fertile meme in my mind you literally parasitize my brain, turning it into a vehicle for the meme’s propagation in just the way that a virus may parasitize the genetic mechanism of a host cell. And this isn’t just a way of talking – the meme for, say, “belief in life after death” is actually realized physically, millions of times over, as a structure in the nervous systems of individual men the world over.’ (p. 192)
Quite independently from the question whether human culture really is the product of these replicating bits of information, evolution is being technically used today in various design problems. Instead of trying to solve the problem all in their heads, people set up an environment of replicating solutions, let them mutate randomly and select the fit ones. By repeating this process, they get better and better design solutions. Evolutionary algorithms are successfully used in fields as diverse as engineering, art, biology, economics, marketing, genetics, operations research, robotics, social sciences, physics, politics and chemistry.
Evolution is the way to get good design, both biological and cultural, without any conscious, teleological design decisions. But what does it mean anyway to make a decision (while making graphic design, for example) and who in the first place does it? Research in cognitive science suggests that there does not exist a central decision-maker in the brain where all the input comes together and is magically transformed into output. The brain is a parallel processor without a boss and we are not “godlike creators of ideas, manipulating and controlling them as our whim dictates, and judging them from an independent, Olympian standpoint” (Dennett, 1990). Dennett (1991) claims that the way our minds work can be explained by a Pandemonium model (of language, in this case) in which:
a torrent of verbal products emerging from thousands of word-making demons in temporary coalitions could exhibit a unity, the unity of an evolving best-fit interpretation, that makes them appear as if they were the executed intentions of a [inner] Conceptualizer.
According to this theory of mind, the decisions that we make are the products of super fast evolutionary processes going on in our minds and they do not require an ‘inner Conceptualizer’ or ‘Central Meaner’ (pp. 227-252). Blackmore (1999, p. 210) also argues that a brain is rather a battleground of millions of memes coming from imitation, communication and education, without an independent conscious entity in control. Similarly, I suggest that the brain of a graphic designer works as a battleground of visual memes replicating, mutating and being selected within the environment (which is the brain itself) consisting of other memes coming from design education and from exposure to other visual designs. Paula Scher’s words describing her way of designing illustrates my model:
I have a pile of stuff in my brain, a pile of stuff from all the books I’ve read and all the movies I’ve seen. Every piece of artwork I’ve ever looked at. Every conversation that’s inspired me, every piece of street art I’ve seen along the way. Anything I’ve purchased, rejected, loved, hated. It’s all in there. It’s all on one side of the brain. And on the other side of the brain is a specific brief that comes from my understanding of the project and says, okay, this solution is made up of A, B, C, and D. And if you pull the handle on the slot machine, they sort of run around in a circle and what you hope is that those three cherries line up, and the cash comes out. (…) I allow the subconscious part of my brain to work. That’s the accumulation of my whole life. That is what’s going on in the other side of my brain, trying to align with this very logical brief. And I’m allowing that to flow freely, so that the cherries can line up in the slot machine. (Millman, 2007, pp. 45-46)
In the light of everything discussed above, I have elaborated an evolutionary approach to visual design, based on replication, random variation and selection. What I try to model in this project is the creative process going on in the brain of a designer. I believe that examining the model and the different lineages of solutions that it generates under different selection criteria would tell us valuable things about graphic design as well as human creativity and memetic theory. I also hope that it will offer us a new practical tool for designing.
References
Blackmore, S. (1999). The Meme Machine. New York: Oxford University Press.
Dawkins, R. (1976). The Selfish Gene. New York: Oxford University Press.
Dennett, D. (1990). Memes and the exploitation of imagination. Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 48, 127-35. Retrieved January 22, 2009, from http://ase.tufts.edu/cogstud/papers/memeimag.htm
Dennett, D. (1991). Consciousness Explained. New York: Penguin Books Ltd.
Evolutionary algorithm. (n.d.) In Wikipedia. Retrieved January 22, 2009, from http://en.wikipedia.org/
Millman, D. (2007). How to Think Like a Great Graphic Designer. New York: Allworth Press.
The background theory and implications are discussed in detail in my thesis.