The organic lens

A lot of water has gone under the bridge since Lakoff and Johnson helped us see our lives riddled with metaphors in their well-known Metaphors We Live By. What was new about their proposal has to do with the historical context in which they made it: against the positivist program, which wanted to eliminate ambiguity, they put on the table an unanswerable mass of real examples in which metaphor, far from preventing us from understanding, was precisely our way of understanding.

Primarily on the basis of linguistic evidence, we have found that most of our ordinary conceptual system is metaphorical in nature. And we have found a way to begin to identify in detail just what the metaphors are that structure how we perceive, how we think, and what we do.

The oldest philosophical tradition, beginning with Plato, had already recognized metaphor as a form of understanding, which ties it naturally to Greek lyric poetry. And although Aristotle analyzes it mainly in his Rhetoric and his Poetics, he never stopped acknowledging that we live with metaphors: therefore, along the same lines as Lakoff and Johnson, that they too contribute to how we perceive, how we think and how we act.

The revival of metaphor brought with it an intense debate in the disciplines usually called social sciences. The Sokal affair was probably the event that most popularized this tension, demanding limits on the use of metaphors and analogies.

But earlier still, Philip Mirowski, with his classic More Heat than Light. Economics as Social Physics, Physics as Nature's Economics, had shown the intensive use of metaphors and analogies in the construction of neoclassical economics, putting utility where energy had been and building from there on the conceptual framework that nineteenth-century physics offered.

Indeed, at that moment I saw that the history of physics and the history of economics are so intimately connected that it might be considered scandalous.

Mirowski went as far as coining the term physics envy as the title of chapter 7, to explain the efforts of neoclassical economists trying to emulate the methods of their contemporary physicists, which was at the same time the training they themselves came from.

Working in digital product I have constantly turned, throughout my career, to metaphors and analogies drawn from biology, evolutionary theory and natural history. Of course I have not done it with a complete program, like the one that moved Mirowski's economists to found the bases of a discipline. But nor have I wanted to overdo it, falling into the jargon that consumes itself that Sokal denounced.

Even so, I think the organic lens performs the conceptual framework role that Lakoff and Johnson called for, helping to detach digital life from industrial life, where mechanistic metaphors and analogies made up that conceptual framework.

In my opinion, that organic framework is not only useful for thinking about digital product as a whole, from a holistic perspective; it is also very fertile when we project that lens onto specific aspects. I do not aim to be exhaustive here, but I think it is worth showing some examples of the use of that organic framework. With the intention of becoming aware of it and so being more responsible about its limits and its capabilities.

Christopher Alexander, in his classic Notes on the Synthesis of Form, defending his thesis about design as a good fit between form and its context, uses the biological reference as the first and most familiar one.

The biological ensemble made up of a natural organism and its physical environment is the most familiar: in this case we are used to describing the fit between the two as well-adaptedness.

And throughout his exposition he turns naturally to references that move within the same framework.

It says, roughly, that primitive forms are good as a result of a process of gradual adaptation — that over many centuries such forms have gradually been fitted to their cultures by an intermittent though persistent series of corrections.

Henry Petroski gave his popular book the significant title The Evolution of Useful Things, following a scheme similar to the one he had already used in The Pencil. A History of Design and Circumstance, where the historical journey is not a collection of anecdotes but the very expression of how the artifact is created.

Is the proliferation of made things, such as the seemingly endless line of serving pieces that complement a table service, merely a capitalist trick to sell consumers what they do not need? Or do artifacts multiply and diversify in an evolutionary way as naturally as do living organisms, each having its purpose in some wider scheme of things?

And George Basalla, in his well-known The Evolution of Technology, refers directly to Darwin's theory of evolution in order to compare the species discovered with the patents created, and concludes

then the technological can be said to have a diversity three times greater than the organic. The variety of made things is every bit as astonishing as that of living things. Consider the range that extends from stone tools to microchips, from waterwheels to spacecraft, from thumbtacks to skyscrapers. In 1867 Karl Marx was surprised to learn … that five hundred different kinds of hammers were produced in Birmingham, England, each one adapted to a specific function in industry or the crafts. What forces led to the proliferation of so many variations of this ancient and common tool? Or more generally, why are there so many different kinds of things?

Basalla speaks specifically about applying evolutionary theory, with a clear warning about the limits of that use. Even when theories have been proposed to explain the mechanisms by which artifacts are generated, the explanations have leaned on failure and the need for correction as the main engines. Christopher Alexander is a clear example of this, but David Pye, in his book The Nature and Art of Workmanship, is blunt as well.

The aircraft falls out of the sky or rams the earth full tilt and kills the people. It has to be tended like a new born babe. It drinks like a fish. Its life is measured in hours. Our dinner table ought to be variable in size and height, removable altogether, impervious to scratches, self-cleaning, and having no legs… Never do we achieve a satisfactory performance… Every thing we design and make is an improvisation, a lash-up, something inept and provisional.

Besides classics like these, it is easy to find everyday metaphors in books with a more technical focus and more modest ambitions. Michael T. Nygard, in Release It!, leans constantly on the metaphor of the organism, to draw attention to the need to design software with its deployment to production built in as one more element of that design.

The true birth of a system comes not on the day that design and development begins, or even when the project is conceived, but on the day it launches into production. This is a beginning, not an end. Over time, the system will grow and mature. It will gain new features. It will lose defects and perhaps gain some, too. It will become what it was meant to be, or, even better, it will become what it needs to be. Most of all, it must change. A system that cannot adapt to its environment is stillborn.

Patrick Kua, together with Rebecca Parsons and Neal Ford, has recently published Building Evolutionary Architectures, where references to the ecosystem are common

Many companies value long-term planning for resources and other strategic matters; companies obviously value predictability. However, because of the dynamic equilibrium of the software development ecosystem, predictability has expired.

as is the whole set of terms that could be placed under the umbrella of the organic framework, which even helps to understand better how widespread this kind of metaphor is

The terms continual, agile, and emergent all capture the notion of change over time, which is clearly a critical characteristic of an evolutionary architecture, but none of these terms explicitly capture any notion of how an architecture changes or what the desired end state architecture might be.

We prefer the word evolutionary over adaptable because we are interested in architectures that undergo fundamental evolutionary change, not ones that have been patched and adapted into increasingly incomprehensible accidental complexity.

Of course, if we widened our small analysis to include everything that is perceived, thought and done under the organic framework in the terrain of algorithms and artificial intelligence, the references would be overwhelming.

So it seems our digital life is grateful for organic metaphors and analogies, and specifically for those related to natural history and evolution. That is reason enough to study a little more of what those disciplines have to offer, and to make responsible use of them along the way.