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Reading Response 1
Prelude and Chapter 1
Any book, including this one, in order to fit in a finite number of volumes, must leave out and simplify a tremendous quantity of information. Part of the artful design of a book is directing the reader's attention towards the information that is most relevant. At the risk of stating the obvious, I think this chapter's (and the book's) focus is exclusively on design that has humans as its creators and its audience. For instance, Principle 1.13 is "design is human," and principle 1.14 is "design is the art of humanizing technology."
As I was reading this chapter, I found myself thinking about another field of study I have spent a lot of time in--bioengineering and, more generally, biology. In particular, I love to learn about microbiology and the inner mechanics of cells. Cells, even when operating largely on their own, are really incredible little things. It's very difficult to discuss them, or even their parts, without imbuing them with agency or functionality. The most well-known component of the cell, the mitochondria, is best-known as "the powerhouse of the cell." More broadly, we find ourselves using analogies and metaphors that refer to machines all the time; we talk about ion pumps, ribosome factories, active sites, etc. We describe antibodies as tools that detect antigens, and more than describe them, we further engineer them to bind to different antigens than they would without human intervention.
I find it difficult to say that the only designed element of that is the human element. That is not to say that a divine creator is necessary, but rather that design may be possible without a designer, or more broadly, without intent.
One possible conclusion is that the designer of that microscopic machinery is the process of evolution itself, rather than any single person. Through this lens, there is still a designer that, if not human, can have human-like characteristics like intent and goals attributed to it. I think this is quite consistent with principle 1.15 in particular, "design not only from needs--but the values behind them." Evolution, as anyone who has taken a biology class will know, can be summarized by the phrase, "survival of the fittest." In this phrase, several latent values lie just beneath the surface. First, "fitness" as a concept refers to some organisms having greater reproductive ability than others. This on its own, however, would not be enough to specify the game of evolution. The second needed component of evolution is the competition for limited resources. If resources were unlimited, any object with any reproductive ability at all would be allowed to persist over time. However, there is a limited amount of matter and energy available to life on Earth, and the competition that limit fosters is crucial to the function of evolution as a process. Thus, the design of biology, if such a thing is possible, flows from the values of differential reproductive ability and competition for limited resources.
Admittedly, arguing over whether biology can be considered to be designed feels at least somewhat pedantic and theoretical, but I think it does have practical value--if we accept that things that lack design intent nonetheless can express design, we can look further out into the world around us for inspiration and critique. I am reminded of the aphorism originally penned by cybernetician Stafford Beer, "The purpose of a system is what it does." Being able to see beyond intention and understand systems as achieving goals of their own can allow us to both better express our own intentions and also to revise systems to better bring them in alignment with our values rather than those expressed emergently by those systems.