I tweet a lot these days, part because I want to get better and more comfortable sharing my ideas and interests, part because I really do enjoy the exercise of condensing my thoughts in less than 280 characters. Yesterday morning, I tweeted:
I was puzzled by the accuracy of that statement. Unfortunately, in order to fully understand and appreciate the accuracy, you need to understand what CoLab does, what is engineering design, what is survival of the fittest and what is natural selection. Instead of turning the tweet into a thread, I opted to write this small essay, introducing these 4 concepts in order to explain the similarities and differences. Let’s start with some defininition.
What is natural selection?
Natural selection is the process through which populations of living organisms adapt and change. Individuals in a population are naturally variable, meaning that they are all different in some ways. This variation means that some individuals have traits better suited to the environment than others. Individuals with adaptive traits — traits that give them some advantage — are more likely to survive and reproduce. These individuals then pass the adaptive traits on to their offspring. Over time, these advantageous traits become more common in the population. Through this process of natural selection, favorable traits are transmitted through generations.
What is survival of the fittest?
“Survival of the fittest” is a phrase that originated from Darwinian evolutionary theory as a way of describing mechanisms of natural selection. The biological concept of fitness is defined as reproductive success. Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection entailed three crucial elements: variation, reproduction, and heritability. Variations in the physical features of organisms that tend to benefit an individual (or a species) in the struggle for existence are preserved and passed on (or selected), because the individuals (or species) that have them tend to survive. The success or failure of a given variation is not known when it emerges; it is known only retrospectively, after organisms that possess it either grow and mature and pass it to their own offspring or fail to mature and reproduce.
What is engineering design?
Engineering design is the process used by engineers to identify and solve problems. An essential aspect of this process, relevant to us, is technical drawing (or drafting), the act and discipline of composing drawings that visually communicate how something functions or is constructed. The purpose is to convey all the information necessary for manufacturing a product or a part.
What are design reviews?
Design reviews are mechanisms by which engineering designs are evaluated for accuracy. As established processes in product development, they are formal check-point in the product development process and ensure designs are fit for purpose, ready for production and checked before further financial investment. Design reviews help to identify mistakes, highlights risks, any concerns or areas for optimisation and any further improvements to the design. A thorough design review saves time, reduces risks and shares responsibility across all stakeholders.
Biology and engineering have one thing in common: they both evolve through constant iterations. Survival of the Fittest is the mechanism powering natural selection, as mentioned above, to assure reproductive success. In engineering, the fittest designs are the ones that make it to production; hence the importance of the design review process. Unlike survival of the fittest, design reviews aren’t standardized process across teams. In fact, most teams (consciously or subconsciously) often end up creating their own review standards and requirements, which often create misalignment across teams and increase the costs of product development.
Here comes CoLab
At CoLab, we understood that engineering has come a long way since in the 1960s. The ways engineers think and design have evolved. To help teams follow the same standards review process, we created LEADR, which stands for Lean Engineering Agile Design Review, the framework behind our product.
LEADR is a modern design review framework that combines the principles of Lean Engineering with Agile Design while staying deeply connected to CAD & PLM so engineers can review their design in a standardized way across teams. Consequently, reduce mistakes and speed up product developments as the collaboration across team improves. Through LEADR, as engineers review designs with partners, manufacturers and all other stakeholders, only the fittest drawing survive. The fittest drawing is also ripe for production success as its ultimately make it to manufacturing and reach end users once it goes live in the market. Hence the tweet, CoLab is to engineering design what survival of the fittest is to natural selection — puzzling because it’s true.
May the fittest survive!
