Modern Technology Is Being Designed to Spread Its Genes

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The trend started in the 90s, back when Japan's bullet train was fresh out of beta and was terrorizing neighbourhoods with shockwaves of sound every time it came out of a tunnel. The front end of the train needed a bigger redesign than Machine Gun Kelly's career after the Eminem diss—fortunately, the lead designer had a voyeurism habit. An avian kink. That is to say, he was a bird watcher.

And so it started the trend of stealing nature's design ideas.

If you looked at nature's creative process and thought it has the level of planning and prudence of a Saturday game night at Charlie Sheen's condo you'd be right—but here's the thing: we humans have budgets, regulations and electioneering to abide by. Nature has but one benchmark when designing life, and that is how fast can it wet the willy and spawn some heir before becoming somebody else's lunch.

And it works wonders.

Give anything with a pulse a couple million years and the unrelenting determination to get laid and you'd receive enough design variety to keep David Attenborough on the payroll for 70 years and counting.

Take for example:

• Some fireflies light up their Cupid's warehouse to attract mates. That's like having a ramp marshall on your butt hand-signalling that something pointy should be landing there.

• Not content with having conquered the skies, the kingfisher bird puts food on the table by dive-bombing into the water to catch unsuspecting fish. Never forget that the ability to provide a diet rich in omega-3 fatty acids is considered sexy.

• The art of innuendo is hard to pull off underwater, but no soft-bodied mollusc has a better workaround than squids with their colour-changing skin. It's like insinuating yourself by painting a rainbow atop your crotch. Really romantic, aesthetically speaking.

But what does this have to do with designing technology?

The trick is to take those adaptive features that animals use for weird kinky sex and put a business model on top. Fireflies inspired the LED, the kingfisher bird solved the bullet train problem, and you bet there's a fair share of side-hustlers pooling all their beer money to fund an MVP camouflage system based on the colour-changing skin tech of squids. Because that's rule nº34 of business: if you ship anything remotely useful to warfare, don't waste your time on a Shark Tank pitch and go directly to your Pentagon meeting appointment.

So, should everything be designed after nature? Not necessarily.

I mean, look at planes. The first engineers tried to design them based on actual birds and that idea—pun very much intended—didn't fly. Heavier bodies need greater speed to stay aloft and not even Ryanair would have the balls to sell coach tickets with a bird's rib cage worth of legroom. It is thanks to the Wright brothers launching themselves into the heavens with no insurance coverage and fewer security measures than a Jackass sequel that we can now have airborne champagne and newfound hate for crying babies.

Still, there is a lot of stuff to be learned from it.

The most important is perhaps the ability of ecosystems to reuse everything. Especially poo. Poo fertilizes the ground. Then mushrooms eat the ground. The mice eat the mushrooms. And then the mice become hawk's poo. If you have trouble grasping the loop, picture Rafiki singing The Circle of Crap. Meanwhile, no one wants to eat or reuse our uranium waste and CO2 emissions. They all rather eat shit.

Hard to argue with this: Not to be pedantic but when I need 8 attempts and a cortisol spike to plug a USB port, when I develop deep-rooted commitment issues because of the lack of an un-select button in an elevator, and when 10,000 years of civilization is not enough to come up with a dustpan that clears off that last trail of dirt, I have to wonder: who's the brain fart talent greenlighting all of these dumbass ideas? Some technology is honestly worse designed than Pompeii's volcanic countermeasures.

So, technically...

Modern technology is being designed to spread its genes. The trick is to take the variety of features that made life so efficient at making bacon and repurpose them to fix our modern-day problems. Thing is, we forget that every piece of tech surrounding us is full of conscious design choices—except maybe the names of Ikea furniture which I'm sure are worked out from a spoonful of letter soup + a pinch of obscure punctuation marks my keyboard isn't able to input—so when we look for inspiration, is there a better place than the tried-and-tested designs nature perfected over millions of years of bow chick a wow wow? I don’t think so.

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