Evolutionary Ideas

Although I can’t recall my order ever being placed in advance (I always seemed to order again at the counter!), the fact I had a coffee cup lid in my hand committed me to the transaction.

“Things are the way they are because they got that way,” always loses out to a narrative centred around deliberate, conscious intention and design.

I think this mixture of narrative bias and survivorship bias explains what we so often get wrong about most human progress. The process in reality involves much more experimentation and failure than we ever like to acknowledge in retrospect.

In this study, Johns Hopkins researchers tested the PullClean at a ward in Baltimore, finding that hand hygiene compliance increased from 25% to 77%. By making sanitation a defaulted and more automatic behaviour, instead of expecting people to go out of their way, their design builds the assumption – the default – that every time you open a door, y

How might we reinforce individual control, particularly when close to acting? How might we endorse an unexpected competing behaviour, reinforcing a desired one? How might we illustrate that the choice is theirs?

“We’re already successful enough to have resources to burn.”

From bumble bees to ballots, through unconscious evolution or designed intent, we’ve explored how bigger, clearer and more concrete is better.

variation and selection with a mechanism for rewarding success and weeding out failure, or eradicating it as quickly as possible, is a far better mechanism for the advancement and development of technologies than deliberate directed investment, based on certain possibly wrongheaded preconceptions.

To support the mechanisation of mail in the 1950s, the UK needed a postal coding system that could not only divide the country into small areas but also be read by a computer and understood by a postman, all the while allowing a maximum number of permutations. As easy as that.