Style is one thing. Form following function is another. Realizing that it's possible to learn from both is where things get interesting.
A few decades ago cars adopted some fancy plumage to stand out from other cars. Some sported big grills; others sprouted fins. Hood ornaments jumped up from the front of these steel behemoths like wooden ship maidens leaning into the wind.
Not too many years after national oil shortages changed the automobile industry in the 1970s, fascinating things started to happen. For certain classes of cars, designs began to look more and more alike. By the end of the 20th century, a Honda Accord looked an awful lot like a Mazda 626, which looked an awful lot like a Toyota Camry. Now in the 21st-century, everything besides an SUV or pickup truck essentially looks like some form of rolling jellybean.
Clearly there are still aesthetic differentiators among the many types of cars on the road. Most of those differentiators are subtle, however. Shapes have become more similar rather than more distinct. The reason is due to the fact that the laws of aerodynamics apply universally; you can't customize physics. That urges certain design similarities forward unless something’s being designed to intentionally buck the trend. This phenomenon is called convergence and for creatives of various stripes, it's something to consider carefully.
To be clear, this goes further than simply following styles and trends. Convergence suggests that good solutions will make sense to a wide range of similar problems. They don't need to be the same problems to be affected by the same rules. Where cost-cutting solutions for one industry begin to appear, similar cost cutting solutions may appear in entirely different industries. Think of online shopping carts, for example: they’re ubiquitous. Or think of the development of supermarkets that allowed customers to select their own groceries from shelves, rather than have clerk pull items off shelves for customers. The first supermarket to do this was Piggly Wiggly in 1916. Other stores soon followed suit. Now every brick and mortar hardware store, drugstore, clothing store, or office supply store presents rows and rows of aisles, all catering to customers who would be shocked to see clerks scurrying around fulfilling lists of requests. The self-shopping solution works for all sorts of stores.
For innovators the lessons of convergence go beyond an intellectual object of curiosity. In fact, biological evolution suggests we might ponder what convergence teaches us in order to solve challenging innovation problems. If a person is trying to solve a technical or methodological challenge, one might look to the evolutionary environment in whatever domain they may happen to operate. Are there forces that reveal nuanced, adaptive skills or tools that point to solutions? Are there analogues in unrelated domains that suggests paths forward? Evolution automatically implies life sciences, but evolutionary pressures apply to all acts of invention.
Skeptics may scoff. In the infinite realm of creative works, it seems counter-intuitive to think that there’s a cosmic development map that might steer all boats forward into the wind. This would be a mistake. The thing to notice is not that there’s only one way forward, but that the wind…is made of air. That sounds obvious, of course, but the recognition that “it’s only air” means that it’s up to you to notice how things work. Rules of physics always apply; sails need to rigged appropriately to get where you want to go. The way to travel to distant, uncharted lands is to understand those rules intimately. But once you understand how it all works, you’re free to navigate wherever you want to go.
@michaelstarobin or facebook.com/1auglobalmedia