And when we think this way it encourages us to be top-down, to be predictive, to believe we can imagine a complete system. And yet, you know as I've tried to describe too often, we can't. And I think complexity requires us to think more like this guy, Charles Darwin, because he encourages us to think about things like constant evolution, bottom-up and emergent change, and things never being finished, and the notion of unpredictability at the large scale, even if we understand things at the small scale.

So, I'm kind of encouraged by the idea that as designers we need to start emulating Charles Darwin a little bit more and stop emulating Sir Isaac Newton. Not that they're not both still very important historical figures, of course. But I think we might think differently about the way we design.

So what might some of the principles of a more Darwinian approach, and a more evolutionary-based or biologically-based approach to design, what might they be? What might be some of the things that we might we might think about now. Now, these are just suggestions; this is where my…this is not a very sort of tight thesis at this point, so you may disagree with some of these, or may well be able to think of better principles than I have. But this is my starting list anyway.

This is one of them. It’s a very simple one, this this notion that we should give up on the idea of designing objects and think about designing behaviours; behaviours are inherently complex but they're also…they're about the interrelationship between us as people, and the objects that exist in the world, our world around us.

[00:03:10]

And, of course many of the things that we're designing today are actually nested behaviours, complex systems. But I think it's one trying to illustrate the difference between designing an object and designing a behaviour. So this is an object. It's actually a label that you will notice and see on trains in Europe.

And it's a vain attempt to encourage the male of the species to create less mess in the toilets. And it doesn't do anything to actually change the behaviour, it's simply, it's an instruction, right. It doesn't work very well. Any of you who have been into a toilet on a train in Europe will know very well it doesn't work very well.

And now, about 25 years ago the guy who managed the airport in Amsterdam, the International Airport in Amsterdam Schiphol, had another idea, a much better idea; and this was his idea. Now about half the audience, well depending on our sort of split here will know what this is. The other half will have no idea, no clue what I'm talking about. So the guys in the room know very well what this. So this is a…well, you all know it’s a fly. But this fly…what he realized was if he printed this fly on the urinal in just the right spot, you give the guy something to aim at. And when you give him something to aim at, he actually does a remarkably good job of aiming at it and it reduces the mess in urinals by up to 80 per cent.

This is designing a behaviour. This is a piece of design that actually changes the behaviour of people, and does it in a rather successful way. It's a very simple notion of designer behaviour, although I think it's done a lot for the world. I think it's actually pretty good. And we could do with doing much more, many more things like this. Anyhow, so design behaviour is not objects.

[5.18 minutes]

This video was filmed at the Rotman School on December 7, 2011.