On Fri, Sep 11, 2015 at 11:50 AM, Klaus Krippendorff <
[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> the analogy to biological organisms is interesting. they evolve by
> mutational drifts and survive when the behavioral implications of these
> unanticipated changes are not non-viable. I have yet to see a technology
> that drifts into something that was not preconceived as a space of
> possibilities by their designer.
>
Lots of examples.
the telephone dramatically changed life styles and businesses.
It was conceived as a way of businesses to communicate, but nobody
recognized that this would allow sales offices to be anywhere in the
country, not just at the manufacturing site.
Similarly, social use of the phone was prohibited by early phone companies.
Yet gossip on shared phone lines became an important part of the social
fabric.
--
Twitter was a joke, even among the inventors. It's use to overthrow
dictators? Who would have known.
----
Over the years I've collected other examples but right now, I can't dredge
them out of my memory.
Of course, computers were designed to compute. That the might end up as
supporting social networks was unknown. Or for writing, creating music,
art, ...
The Arpanet-Darpa Net, Internet was conceived as a way of supporting
research, so people could share those expensive machines.
The notion that the most successful application ever invented would be
email was never conceived. The second most successful (I'm guessing here )
is word processing.
I was once scolded for writing papers on the computer at MIT by
the computer director at UC San Diego. It was a real waste of computational
resources he said: my being in San Diego, using a computer at MIT to write
my paper.
---
Designers are like gods in that we can control the evolution of our
offspring (our products). We can do Lamarckian evolution.
See the response Roberto Verganti and I made to a critique of our work on
incremental and radical evolution. We were accused of being creationists.
We loved that accusation: We pleaded guilty! Designers are creationists:
we create!
http://www.jnd.org/dn.mss/hill_climbing_in_rad.html
don
Don Norman
Prof. and Director, DesignLab, UC San Diego
[log in to unmask] designlab.ucsd.edu/ www.jnd.org <http://www.jnd.org/>
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