Talk:Coevolution

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Review: April 20, 2017. (Reviewed version).

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Coevolution in design

The sub-section 'In architecture' seems inappropriate; its examples are not of coevolution. Valeur's work for the Venice Biennale Danish pavilion, although entitled CO-EVOLUTION, does not include nor represent coevolutionary work, but rather a collaboration between Danish and Chinese architects, "sharing Danish building traditions with Chinese knowledge and technical skills". Similarly, the examples from Newcastle University School of Architecture are not of coevolution, but are about co-design or Participatory design in which architects work together with non-designer users or communities to create buildings/spaces.

However, in design research more broadly (including architectural design) since the 1990s there has been work drawing explicitly on the concept of coevolution to model the dynamic relationship between problem and solution over time within a design process. There is a brief sub-section on 'Co-evolution of problem and solution' within the Design thinking Wikipedia article.

I propose to re-title the 'In architecture' sub-section here as 'In design' and provide content to focus on this genuine use of the coevolution concept, and to edit the architecture content appropriately. Designergene (talk) 17:55, 22 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Not sure that both items aren't equally misapplied; your reasoning seems correct, and it applies to the whole section. Let's cut it now. Chiswick Chap (talk) 19:40, 22 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I agree that the architecture section did not relate to coevolution, but in design coevolution has been applied and accepted as a useful analogy, equally as relevant and appropriate as other fields included in the Outside biology section. Designergene (talk) 19:43, 23 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

You should not have edit-warred this back into the article without consensus, especially when this discussion was ongoing. It may be your view that it's "accepted", but the analogies here seem extremely weak. Your use of the WP:OTHERSTUFFEXISTS argument is not convincing (it never is, which is why there's a link for it). I've removed the item; I considered issuing you with a formal warning for disruptive editing, but I'll hold off for now. I can see, for example, how software and hardware can each be thought of as evolvable entities, and an architecture could be like one of those, but in what way can a problem be said to evolve? Are there any reliable secondary sources (i.e. not from architects making the primary assertion) that make that claim? Chiswick Chap (talk) 20:14, 23 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I had no intention of starting an 'edit war'. The 'In architecture' sub-section was clearly about collaboration rather than coevolution and I thought that it should be removed, but at first I only corrected/clarified it. I think that the sub-section on 'In design' that I added is appropriate within a section that reports where the concept of evolution has been applied 'Outside biology' 'to other fields by analogy'. Analogies can be 'near' or 'far' relative to the source domain, and so it seems reasonable to me to include the use of the concept of coevolution in design within that section. The sources I used are indeed "not from architects making the primary assertion"; they are from reputable academics working in the field of design research (across product and engineering and architecture design), analysing and modelling the processes that designers use in developing a solution to a given problem, and proposing that both 'solution' and 'problem' can change in that process in a manner analogical to coevolution. So they are reliable secondary sources, and I would like to reinstate the 'In design' sub-section. Designergene (talk) 18:06, 24 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I can see that you would like to, indeed. It is a matter of fact that you should not have reinserted while a discussion was in progress, that is by definition edit-warring as well as a breach of good faith with other discussants. Sources can be prima facie reliable, but if they are talking nonsense then we shouldn't use them. So I repeat, how can a problem evolve alongside a solution? If the problem keeps changing, it is unclear what is being solved; it is quite unclear what evolution of a problem could actually mean. Chiswick Chap (talk) 18:48, 24 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Given the lack of clarity in the proposed text, I've had a nose about, and I see that Mary Lou Maher and colleagues came up with the concept back in 1996.^[1] The paper states that the exploration of the problem space converts an ill-defined problem to a well-defined problem, i.e. the evolution is in the definition of the problem, it is not that the problem is changing (which would mean instability in the entire enterprise). Whether the analogy with evolution is good or poor, at least this makes engineering sense. The section should be worded around this paper's foundational definition as it makes no sense without it. Chiswick Chap (talk) 19:15, 24 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Since we now agree that something should be said on this, I've re-added the material to include the new source and edited the text slightly. Chiswick Chap (talk) 11:28, 25 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I'm glad we agree. But I don't think it's appropriate to link to the Systems development life cycle article/context, which is specifically about computer-based systems. Although Maher's work originated in computer modelling with genetic algorithms, it was not about the design of computer systems and she (and others) appplied the model in a range of design contexts, including structural engineering, architecture and product design. A more appropriate link might be Systems design, and the sub-section title would be better as 'In system development and design'. The opening sentence would then be: The concept of coevolution has been used by Mary Lou Maher and others to model the dynamic relationship between clarification of problem definition and development of a matching solution over time within a design process. Designergene (talk) 12:50, 26 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks, but I'm not sure I follow your drift. The systems development life-cycle applies to everything from railways to warships, by way of electronics and almost any other system one might think of; it's certainly not a synonym for software life-cycle. I note that the SDLC article mentions computer-based systems (i.e. hardware-with-software); that is a wide class of systems but not the same as software on its own. The mention is (vaguely) cited (bizarrely in the lead, and it's unclear how much of the paragraph is meant to be covered) to one article on information systems and one on software, so the scope there is decidedly unclear. I'm not rigidly opposed to systems design but I note that according to that article it covers only Physical design, Architecture design, and (bizarrely) Machine learning systems design, in which case it omits requirements discovery, analysis, testing, commissioning, and all later life-cycle stages including upgrade, so it feels like a fragment of the systems life-cycle to me. For another thing, the cyclic interaction between problem definition and system design can't be shoehorned into "system design", as that would leave out the problem definition side. Anyway, I've unlinked the SDLC article as too woolly to be worth linking. Chiswick Chap (talk) 13:31, 26 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Both inside and outside Wikipedia, 'system development' seems to be used only to refer to computer-based systems, rather than "everything". Maher and the others cited do not place their work within 'system development', but within domains of designing: engineering design, architectural design and product design. So to include their work within the sub-section 'In system development' and to say that their work is orientated "within a system development process" is misleading. Given the other sub-section topics and headings within the 'Outside biology' section, it would be appropriate to have a new sub-section headed 'In design' or 'In designing' to cover this work. Designergene (talk) 19:11, 28 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

So warships and railways are computer-based systems, obviously. Chiswick Chap (talk) 19:20, 28 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

My point was that 'system development' is a term primarily (exclusively, it seems) used with respect to computer-based systems. Designergene (talk) 19:34, 28 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Which is a class so wide it encompasses warships, railways, handheld devices of every kind, and so on, which is my point: almost everything deserving of the term "system", in fact. The word gets debased so a table is a writing support system, etc etc, but we definitely don't want to go there. Chiswick Chap (talk) 20:39, 28 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

References

^ Maher, Mary Lou, Josiah Poon, and Sylvie Boulanger. "Formalising design exploration as co-evolution: a combined gene approach." Advances in Formal Design Methods for CAD: Proceedings of the IFIP WG5. 2 Workshop on Formal Design Methods for Computer-Aided Design, June 1995. Boston, MA: Springer US, 1996.

Chiswick Chap (talk) 19:15, 24 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

[1] Maher, Mary Lou, Josiah Poon, and Sylvie Boulanger. "Formalising design exploration as co-evolution: a combined gene approach." Advances in Formal Design Methods for CAD: Proceedings of the IFIP WG5. 2 Workshop on Formal Design Methods for Computer-Aided Design, June 1995. Boston, MA: Springer US, 1996.

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