This is the cover illustration of the book, Rube Goldberg's Inventions!, was which compiled by Maynard Frank Wolfe from the Rube Goldberg Archives. The illustration depicts Professor Butts and the Self-Operating Napkin. (from Wikipedia)
I’m lucky, I guess, if you are the type that believes in luck, that I’m a designer. Meaning, that’s what I do for a living, a decently-compensated living at that. I’m privileged enough to get paid to think about, plan, and execute solutions for abstract ideas. Ideas that take the form of problems. Most of those ideas consist of arguments for why you should chose a particular brand or service. That’s a practice that can be fairly manipulative; therefore, that’s where the money’s at. Other more esoteric problems I might work on may be how one visualizes the abstract concept of an internet search, or to give reasons as to why that handle is a particular shade of red. These problems that are a bit more benign, and therefore less lucrative. And yet we are plagued by some pressing problems in need of solutions, like global climate change or the energy crisis, well ,no one is getting paid to work on these (I speak in hyperbole, of course). These social and environmental issues have yet to be completely solved by design, but that doesn’t mean design hasn’t offered some solutions, piecemeal, and for a long time.
I look for what needs to be done. After all, that’s how the universe designs itself.
-R. Buckminster Fuller
During the era of the Model-T, R. Buckminster Fuller witnessed burgeoning industrialization and foresaw how our demand for resources might be unsustainable. A problem, at that time, that wasn’t a problem. He didn’t think industrialization was bad, on the contrary, the machine-age inspired him to create solutions for housing and transportation. His Dymaxion house concept was to be efficiently and cost effectively assembled in a factory. “It is said that Mr. Ford’s new model, if but one car had been built, would have cost $43,000,000. Reproduction of that first unit cost $500, or approximately twenty-two cents per pound for completely harnessed synthetic mechanically coordinated materialism. There is no reason to believe that a dwelling should cost more.” His house was also to be delivered on site by lighter-than-air vehicles that bypassed rigid and inefficient transportation infrastructure. Arriving on location the vehicle would drop an atomic bomb creating a giant crater in which the stem of the house would be gently placed into position. His thinking was not correct on everything, but Mr. Fuller asked big questions, often before others were asking them, and then answered those questions with design solutions. He was too smart and forward thinking. Nobody listened to him.
There is one big question out there that design has purportedly provided an answer for. I am referring to Michael Behe’s idea of irreducible complexity, his evidence for an Intelligent Designer. I’m not going to go into details here because any self-respecting skeptic is aware of this ID argument. I am going to argue that use of the word “design” by ID proponents is willfully disingenuous. Behe likes to use a mousetrap analogy to describe his position. To him a mousetrap is suitable for a single purpose and is irreducibly complex, and is thus designed. Kenneth Miller, every skeptic’s favorite Roman-Catholic, turned his mousetrap into a tie clip showing that the parts that make up the mousetrap are functional in a context other than to catch a mouse, and that Behe’s theory doesn’t hold water.
I would like to offer up another analogy for complex biological systems, one that could, and undoubtedly has, incorporated a mouse trap: Rube Goldburg Machines. These machines, RGM’s if you will, are usually able to execute their purpose regardless of how complex, inefficient, and inelegant that execution is. RGM’s are created by assembling existing objects into something that will ultimately have a completely different purpose than the individual objects originally held. Complex bio-mechanical systems that Behe purports as being formed by a designer, bacterial flagellum or an eyeball, appear to me, a designer, as something cobbled together through time, with no knowledge of what the final product should be or how it should function, in the manner of an RGM. Kinda like evolution. Mr. Behe, does not appear to be that smart, but people are listening to him
Charles Eames and his wife Ray are luminaries in the sphere of design. The tangible type of design, furniture, architecture, exhibitions and films. If you have ever sat in one of their mid-century modern classics, you know what I mean. In 1968 the Eames created one of most powerful descriptions of the known universe. Referencing the acknowledged scale of the universe at the time, they produced The Powers of 10. It’s one of the most elegant and to the point examples of what design can do, in this case, describe the unfathomable scale of the known universe, in less than 10 minutes.
Design is a plan for arranging elements in such a way as best to accomplish a particular purpose.
— Charles Eames
Notice the word “best” in that last quote. What Behe describes as design is by far not the best way to accomplish what is intended. Created, maybe in the case of ID, but not designed.
Few designers know that we have a stake in skepticism because few of us have yet to realize that the term for what we do, design, has been hijacked by the ID movement. It also seems to me that the misuse of the word design suggests that those using it have no idea what role or impact design has in our society, or even what it means. We’ll just have to add it to the long list of quantifiable things they have no idea about