The Evolutionary Design Process

Lately I have been very interested in the evolutionary process, and how it can be applied to creative media. The more I think about this, the more I am convinced that elements of evolution can be used to improve creative processes of various kinds.

Take the 'typical' design process, which might look something like this:

Here we start with a set of possible design solutions, illustrated as coloured blocks at the bottom of the diagram. There is a round of competition here, in which we generally choose two or three individuals from our population of solutions as the most fit. We then subject these individuals to another round of competition, resulting in one 'good' solution. Once we reach this point, there are typically a few rounds of 'optimization' in which our solution is tweaked into it's final form.

This process is generally good at finding a 'good fit' solution, but it is not well suited to finding a 'best fit' solution.  It is a survival of the fittest process; but it neglects to include two of the most important elements of evolution – namely mutation and repeated hybridization.

An Evolutionary Design Process (EDP), then, might look like this:

Here, we start with the same population of initial solutions, and we perform the same initial selection of our most fit individuals. However, rather than performing another selection on this small group, we instead perform a hybridization to create a new population of solutions. This process is repeated until we reach a solution that we are happy with. 

During every generation, we also include some possibility of mutation. Here, this is illustrated by the brown block that appears in the second generation. Mutation provides the opportunity to incorporate information that wasn't in our initial population into future generations. Ideally this mutation is stochastic – it should be a random, unpredictable change.

This process is far better suited than the standard one for finding the 'best fit' solution.

I am in the process of building an evolutionary composition tool, Variance, which I hope will assist people in incorporating some parts of the EDP into their own process. I will continue to share some of my thoughts on this as that product develops.