Fourth Law of the Interface: Interfaces evolve
By: Carlos A. Scolari
Tags: Interfaces, Evolution, Ecology, Design, Technology

Charles Darwin never employed the concepts of /evolution/ or /ecosystem/ in his most important and revolutionary text: On the Origin of Species (1859[1975]). However, he set the foundations for an integrated theory of evolution and wrote many pages about species, variety, diversity, extinction, and natural selection. Biological species undergo mutations — changes in their genetic material — caused by copying errors during cell division, exposure to radiation, chemical mutagens, viruses, or generated by the organism itself. In recent years human manipulation of genetic material has also contributed to this process. Mutation is an essential source of variation, which is the emergence of a new individual in an ecosystem.

Darwin realized that ecosystem populations can’t expand indefinitely because the resources are limited. Then, the new individuals must compete for survival with the old ones. If the mutation assists the organism in continuing to exist, the individual will adapt to the environment and reproduce; if not, it will be eliminated by natural selection. Most mutations are deleterious; evolution progresses through the few individuals that have favorable mutations. When a species generates a new different branch, biologists talk about a bifurcation or forking process.

Darwin’s theory integrated into the same picture the emergence of new species by variation and the destruction of non-adapted species. The basic principle behind this process — also known as the ‘Darwin machine’ — can be reduced to two words: natural selection, the key concept of the Darwinist approach.

Evolution of technology

If the Galapagos Islands ecosystem attracted Charles Darwin’s attention to the diversity of life and the emergence of new living forms, Karl Marx — who had read, cited and much appreciated Darwin’s contributions — was surprised by the production of more than five hundred different models of hammers in Birmingham (Marx, 1990). Unfortunately, he did not live long enough to witness the explosion of technological species in the 20th century. However, during the last decades, hundreds of researchers from different scientific fields have developed a Darwinian approach to technology evolution, for example George Basalla, author of the classic The Evolution of Technology (1988). Basalla considered that the human-made world contains a far greater variety of things than are required to meet our fundamental needs. This diversity of objects is the result of technological evolution.

Researchers like Basalla advocate the idea that innovation and diversity of technical objects have been present at all times and in all places where human culture has developed. Without variety and natural selection, the life on Earth would be composed of the same species as millions of years ago: a soup of microorganisms. By the same logic, without innovation and diversity the Homo sapiens would still use primitive silex tools and silicon digital machines would not have been created.

Techno-Cambrian explosions

Around 530 million years ago there was a sudden increase in new species on Earth, better known as the Cambrian explosion. The fossil record demonstrates a rapid –‘rapid’ in evolutionary terms, that is millions of years — diversification of organisms and an increased complexity of their organization (Gould, 1989). Although it is not easy to understand what happened 530 million years ago, we can analyze and reflect on modern techno- Cambrian explosions of new interfaces. Like in biological systems, at certain moments of the technological evolution there are bursts of new species that modify the configuration of the socio-technological network (Kauffman, 1995; Barabasi, 2010).

The evolution of technology offers many other case-stories of Cambrian explosions, like the sudden increase in aircraft models in the first two decades of the 20th century and after World War II, or the upsurge of hundreds of different smartphones and sneakers in the 21st century. Media have also gone through Cambrian explosions, for example the multiplication of radio stations in the 1920s, the increase in superheroes in comic books in the late 1930s and 1940s, the proliferation of television channels in the 1980s, or the boom of blogs and social media in the 2000s and mobile apps in the 2010s.

If variety, then selection

In the socio-technological network, variation and selection are indivisible processes: an increase in the technological diversity is usually followed by a selection process that puts things in order and establishes a new equilibrium. When an interface adapts to the socio-technological network, it is selected and chosen for replication. Or in other words: when users decide to adopt a technology – that is, they decide to join the interface and interact with the rest of the actors – at the same time they are discarding competing interfaces. Discarded interfaces may be condemned to extinction... or not (Sixth Law).

The famous Darwinian ‘struggle for survival’, like the rest of the eco-evolutionary metaphor, cannot be automatically applied to technology evolution. More than an individual struggle for survival, in the ecology of interfaces it is possible to identify a collective struggle where different actors -users, designers, producers, political institutions, economic groups, military hierarchies, consumer organizations, etc. – try to condition the development of a technology (Ziman, 2000).

Variation and the Long Tail

Digital technology facilitates the explosion of new species and, in certain cases, makes their survival easier. To record a song, write a text, take a photo, edit a video or develop an application has never been so simple. To distribute them has never been so easy. Millions of songs, texts, pictures, videos and mobile applications can be discovered, compared, bought and downloaded in an almost infinite number of online databases. In a brick-and-mortar economy the selection process condemned many goods and species to extinction. In the digital economy, the non-selected goods and species do not disappear: they survive in the long tail (Anderson, 2006).

From the perspective of the Laws of the Interface it could be said that the long tail is like an ecological reserve of cultural artifacts (texts, songs, photos, videos, applications) that have not reached the critical mass for surviving in the mass-market environment. If in the traditional market these species were condemned to extinction, in a networked environment they survive in their own digital niches and interact with a small but often devoted community of consumers. In this sense the long tail shrinks the mortality of cultural beings.