The Origin of Design: Designing the future by understanding the past
Thinking about objects through time
Neil Degrasse Tyson tweeted a wonderfully concise message last night:
I like this tweet, because in it deGrasse uses the present as a design tool that can give us an ability to recognize ‘today’ as a tangible line segment between our past and our future. I would only argue, that, although in geometry a line segment is usually locked in by two vertical bars (resembling a prison), it also acts as a busy, bustling intersection that offers a view into both the past and the future.
An intersection joins two or more roads that allow us to choose either direction. The design process often focuses our attention on the road that leads into the future and sometimes neglects to draw our attention to what’s behind us. It’s pretty clear now that designed objects shape the manner in which people act, perceive and think. Although we spend our lives interacting with our physical and digital environments, thinking with and through objects and images, we rarely think about them or try to understand their co-evolution with nature and our worldviews.
Evolutionary biologists have been doing it for years — focusing on the past to design the future of genetics, agriculture, health; and to better understand the patterns of climate and species extinction. As a designer, I’d like to attempt the same and take a peek behind the curtain, into the very process which brought design into being, beyond the well known story of the Industrial Revolution. I will walk you through the evolution of human mind, from our natural to social intelligence, and how this process shaped us into the designers we are today.
The origin of design: Natural intelligence
No, design as we know it today, did not originate during the Industrial Revolution, although most design books focus specifically on that segment of the past. Present state of design is a much older expression of a multitude of historical contexts dating back 3.3 million years when an early East African hominid struck one stone against another to knock off a thin flake and used it as a tool. Today archaeologists debate whether it’s appropriate to use the word ‘design’ when describing the first tools. One camp of archaeologists identifies ‘conscious intention’ behind the shape of the tools, while others argue that the perceived shape of the tools of that period is simply the consequence of the manufacturing technique, rather than the product of human intention.
This morning I read a fascinating article about how a group of South American monkeys has rocked archaeologists’ assumptions about the origins of stone-tool making. Turns out wild bearded capuchin monkeys in Brazil break off sharp-edged stones that resemble stone tools made by our human evolutionary family. It’s the first observation of this hominid-like rock-fracturing ability in a nonhuman primate.
This basically means that early humans needed no special mental ability, no fully opposable thumbs and not even any idea of what they were doing to get started as toolmakers. All it may have taken was years of experience pounding rocks, as displayed by capuchins when cracking open nuts.
Just like capuchin monkeys, early hominids took volcanic pebbles and pounded them into tools that are often difficult to distinguish from naturally occurring rocks. Merlin Donald identified this period of human mental development as ‘episodic’ thinking process, consisting of short-term responses to the specific events and contexts at present. The ability to plan out a design came much later when ancient humans learned that if they struck one stone against another in a particular way, a thin flake could be knocked off which was sharp enough to pierce the hide of a dead animal. This marked a slow departure of early hominids from other primates and to this day allow us to ‘see’ the design before it’s brought into reality.
The Great Hominid escape from the nervous system: Technical intelligence
Michelangelo loved sculpting. Here’s what he said about his design process:
In every block of marble I see a statue as plain as though it stood before me, shaped and perfect in attitude and in action. I have only to hew away the rough walls that imprison the lovely apparition to reveal it to the other eyes as mine see it.
When Michelangelo looked at a piece of marble, he saw the statue already inside the marble. Then he just had to chip away anything that wasn’t the statue so we could see what he saw. He was not worried about chiseling the wrong thing. He knew exactly what to do.
This form of design intelligence developed gradually starting about 2.5 million years ago as early hominids learned to improve upon the shape of naturally occurring rocks with no clearly preconceived mental templates about the final shape. This marked a slow departure of early hominids from other primates for two reasons.
The first is that some of the stone tools were produced to manufacture other tools — such as flakes to sharpen a stick. And second, the early hominids needed to be able to ‘see’ the tool ‘inside’ a certain type of rough rock lying around, a change in mental capacity that was most evident in Upper Palaeolithic period.
The archaeologists Nicholas Toth and Kathy Schick of Indiana University spent many hours trying to teach a very bright bonobo by the name Kanzi to make stone tools. Kanzi managed it by hurling the stones against the concrete floor of his cage, which was more a set of random actions rather than a deliberate mental process we call design — a technique similar to early humans of Lower Palaeolithic period.
According to Merlin Donald, ‘even highly sophisticated animals, such as apes, cannot share ideas and thoughts. Every generation starts afresh because the old die with their wisdom sealed forever in their brains’. Ability to ‘see’ the tool ‘inside’ a rock and mimic manufacturing techniques of others was ‘The Great Hominid escape from the nervous system’, says Donald. The French literary analyst and cultural theorist René Girard viewed our capacity for imitation as the most important, yet least understood of all human abilities. In fact, many researchers believe that imitation contributed to a wide-scale neural reorganization of the brain, allowing for the co-evolution of more complex social, cultural, and representational abilities from earlier primates to humans.
Birth of specialization: Social intelligence
The hand-axe and scraper set of tools continued to evolve and standardize across Eurasia showing extraordinary degree of uniformity. V. Gordon Childe, an Australian archaeologist, pointed out that early humans needed some sort of image or blueprint of tools and a certain capacity for abstract thought to create standardized manufacturing techniques.
Beginning around 250,000 years ago early humans stopped relying on chance by striking a stone to produce a flake, and embraced their accumulated experiential knowledge about stone fracture dynamics (early physics) to be able to predict the shape of the tool they were producing. Still, most archaeologists agree that prior to about 60,000–40,000 years ago, archaic H. sapiens and H. neanderthalensis did not show symbolic behaviour and had a fairly limited capacity to plan ahead. In fact, there is no evidence at all of organized group activity — the earliest archaeological sites are just a jumble of tools and bones.
Everything changed when humans learned to control fire for protection against predators and food preparation and as a result developed first instance of organized societies and settlements around maintenance of elaborate hearths about 60,000 years ago. Olga Soffer of the University of Illinois also points out that ropes made of plant fibres were invented about the same time and helped humans construct sailing vessels with the aid of which they colonized Australia.
The shift to symbolic thought around 40,000 years ago — the Middle/Upper Palaeolithic transition — is the most exciting area of study for a designer. Mythological worldview and the creative explosion that came with it grew out of the three intelligences (natural, technical, and social) finally coming together to form the modern brain as we know it and gave birth to the famous cave paintings, Venus figurines, and multicoloured beads also used in burials as part of a primitive social distinctions and religious practices of the times. All these exhibited complex forms and communication styles that showcased acquired systematic knowledge of the natural world around humans (early biology) and recorded various forms of industrial processes such as mining, hunting, fishing, pigment processing and tool manufacturing as well as creative and cultural objects such as beads, pendants, perforated animal teeth and carved statuettes. Groups or classes of specialized tools beyond highly versatile handaxes and racloirs emerged with the rise of industrial and creative occupations in Upper Palaeolithic — burins used in engraving stone, adze for smoothing or carving wood in hand woodworking, various types of scrapers to work wood and to clean hides, and arrowheads used as projectile points for hunting and fishing.
Natural history intelligence when combined with technical and social abilities produced a cultural explosion that resulted in ‘tribal encyclopaedias’, as described by John Pfeiffer, as humans began to systematically study and describe the world around them through myths. Many animal bodies were painted in profile and their hooves were painted full on, which suggests that the top view of the hooves and side view of the animal were being memorized for later, or being used to instruct children — similar to technical drawings used in communicating the form and function of a design.
That’s also about the time when humans began burying their dead in graves with symbolic use of red ochre dyes. The very presence of grave goods, such as dyes and beads suggests that ancient people believed at least in the possibility of an afterlife, direct inspiration from supernatural agencies, and effectiveness of rituals in bringing about changes in the world. It’s curious how the latter two requirements are also used to describe creative and innovative thinking in the design process.
The Origin of Design
The link between three intelligences and human’s biological development was momentous and brought about a form of mythological culture with societal norms that reflected the growth of mimetic and symbolic thinking/behaving, mental templates and anticipation of future events based on past experiences — some of the most important cornerstones of design process. Early observation and classification of natural organisms and objects according to their usefulness gave rise to natural intelligence; imitation and manipulation of these objects and organisms allowed for the development of our technical prowess; and finally the desire to control natural objects (i.e. rocks), elements (i.e. fire, water) and processes (i.e. abiotic and biotic decomposition) for the purpose of survival fuelled creativity and symbolic thought.
This, in turn, gave rise to a mythological worldview in which elements of early religion, philosophy, science, and art interwove to create myths about the origins of universe, planets, humans and animals, various types of craft and social norms. Humans began to anthropomorphize nature and establish imaginary connections between various phenomena — behaviour we all exhibit even today.
These common myths laid the groundwork for human culture and allowed human communities to gradually increase in size: from villages to cities; from cities to nations; from nations to the digital global society we know today that allowed Neil Degrasse Tyson to deliver his thoughts related to time directly to you.
Did you find my ramblings interesting? Have your own thoughts on the evolution of design or would like me to expand on the topic? Leave a note here or reach out to me on Twitter.
