The Design of a Goldfish

In this big assignment, which I’ve been working on over the course of the semester, I go over the imaginanry design history of a goldfish.

There are a couple of notes I’d like to make about this.

First, this is more of a “just so story” than anything else. I don’t think anyone reading this would actually think I believed that plants actually turned into fish to satisfy the emotional needs of humans. I’ve ignored everything I know about the origin of goldfish in order to anylize the design process in a way that takes it out of it’s familier context.

Second, I think it’s worth mentioning the fact that goldfish specifically actually were designed, in a sense, through breeding. The only difference between breeding and design is that in the evolution of an organism, chemical mutations to dna take the place of the random input generated by emotion in a design process. There is the same sense of making many iterations, and the same picking out from each generation those which most meet the criteria. I believe that someday we will breed buildings inside a computer instead of designing them.