The sea designs the boat

I enjoyed listening to Tom Chatfield’s talk at Thinking Digital this year. I can call him Tom as we met when I went to buy his book ‘Wise Animals’. He even wrote a nice inscription on the inside cover. I always come away from Thinking Digital with books as I feel duty bound, even though I know that some speakers are getting paid. Buying books is something that I do.

The subtitle of the book is ‘How technology has made us what we are’ and that did it for me. I am fascinated by evolution, not just of living things but also the things that they create. The phone in my pocket is a great example of how things evolve, slowly and suddenly from my first Nokia brick to the now out of date Samsung. Evolution is all around us.

That is why I was most interested when I read how it is the sea that designs the boat. That can’t be. A boat’s design takes meticulous planning and hours of effort to get it to float, let alone be seaworthy and of practical use. Yet that is the point that Tom was making. What we see floating on the water and what we have in our pockets are the product not only of successful design but also of unsuccessful design.

The sea floor is littered with ships that failed to stay afloat. These were the unsuccessful designs that never made it. The occasional one, such as the Vasa or the Mary Rose goes on to have a second life as a museum piece yet most rot over time to be lost both physically and in thought. The successful ships are those that are plying their trade. The sea has weeded out the failures and designed the successful.

The same goes for our phones. Earlier models go to be recycled if we are lucky or end up as landfill. Newer iterations replace older versions in a never ending drive to sell us more. Here it is the prevailing market that has decided which versions are going to be the winners and losers. The market has designed the phone.

What struck me though is, if this is the case, then everything we see around us is there because everything else has failed. Our lives are not dominated and steered by success but rather by the lack of failure. The products we buy, the house we live in, the job we do and perhaps even the company we keep are all determined by choices, conscious or not, to discard others.

If Tom is right and the sea designs the boat, then perhaps the wand really does choose the wizard.