A quick search for “what comprises good design” returns many variations of Dieter Rams’ principles which, to the uninitiated, are: innovative, useful, aesthetic, unobtrusive, understandable, etc. Those words are what you’d expect to describe an Eames chair, for example, but no matter how hard you look, you might never find the word durable associated with Design.

But nature has another view completely. Lookto nature for good design and durable is at the top of the list. In fact, the main difference between good and bad design in nature is durability. Dinosaurs were cool but not durable (or at least not durable enough to withstand a giant meteor strike). Sharks and alligators, on the other hand, made it past that gauntlet. Very durable.

The bluntnosed sixgill shark is thought to be about 195 million years old. (Photo: NOAA Ocean Explorer/Wikimedia Commons)

Durable isn’t part of the ethos of Silicon Valley. One of the many cognitive dissonances of living here is the constant exposure to, and obsession with, what’s new and what’s next. On the plus side, being surrounded by “new” adds dynamism to daily life but it’s also true that if you always equate “new” with “better” it can lead you astray. The lure of the latest tech and funding rounds permeate the daily experience here, but science says our subconscious mind seems to favor longevity and utility over ephemera.

There’s a family down the block that sells used cars and they often have something notable parked in the driveway. Mostly it’s what you’d expect… a G-Wagon, a Cobra replica, sometimes it’s something less flashy. Recently a lightly used Tacoma was parked out front. It was in good shape, super clean, and then I noticed the sticker on the windshield…2013. Aside from the shock of realizing that 2013 is basically a 10-year-old truck, what struck me about this was how similar it is to the current model.

2013 and 2021 Tacomas

That isn’t a dig at Toyota. The opposite, in fact. The stylistic durability of the Tacoma says more about the rightness of the design than the ambitions of Toyota’s stylists. The fact that it hasn’t changed much and continues to be the standard for compact trucks is a testament to how good the original design was. It’s not that Toyota isn’t interested in changing the truck but that some designs are better off left alone (known as the farpotshket trap).

We see a broad range of designs in nature, some more fruitful than others. The dodo, for example, might have survived had it been more dubious of club-wielding sailors. But with trillions of iterations, nature can also arrive at perfection. Alligators have been sporting nearly the same form for 150 million years and have stayed essentially unchanged for the last 8 million. Meanwhile, sharks and nautiluses have survived every extinction event nature has concocted and have remained mostly unchanged for nearly half a billion years. That’s durability.

A nautilus fossil thought to be about 450 million years old

What can we learn from the shark and the nautilus that can be transposed to the automotive industry? What is the nature of this “rightness” that allowed these species to Frogger over every extinction challenge that nature could conjure?

For the Tacoma in particular, it seems like there are three factors that contribute to its durability. The first is causal cognition which is the propensity for our brains to draw a connection between an object and what it does. This is especially true for tools. The second is the Lindy Effect which says that the life expectancy of durable goods increases with how long that thing has lasted. And the third is Toyota’s approach to design which favors incremental change over radical redesigns.

To understand causal cognition, psychologists use fMRI to watch brain activity when people are shown images of tools. It turns out there is subconscious understanding of what certain tools do and are for, even if there is no lived experience with it. So when an infant sees a hammer, they know it is a tool for striking even if they have neither the experience, strength, nor skill to use it themselves.

Our brains in the presence of tools

Lindy is interesting in this context because it is generally used to describe the idea that a non-perishable good (like ideologies, religion, etc.) persist as long as they have persisted. As Nassim Taleb writes in Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder, “If a book has been in print for forty years, I can expect it to be in print for another forty years…This is an indicator of some robustness. The robustness of an item is proportional to its life!”