On design.
In response to A walk in the woods can make you a better designer on Signal vs. Noise.
"What you’ll experience are ridiculously good designs." Jason Fried echoes what I have said a million times. The best designer in the whole wide world is God, and we should learn from Him. "Inspiration can be in everything that you look at, but with an understanding that the design that we see around us in nature is not only not accidental, but very much purposefully created for us by the one who created us, that inspiration comes to life in new and fantastic ways!" to quote my About page.
But wait! Jason doesn't mention God at all. He attributes the design to something else, and that is Evolution. Let's look at the definition of design:
Design is the planning that lays the basis for the making of every object or system. (Wikipedia)
to create, fashion, execute, or construct according to plan (Merriam-Webster)
So we can say design is the product of planning by someone or something. So the question then is, can Evolution design? Evolution is a force powered by natural selection, according to Darwin. Mutations happen that may or may not make something favorable in nature. So all advances in Evolution are accidental decisions, not purposefully thought out, advanced because they just happen to make something more survivable. Evolution cannot plan. Things come about and continue by happenstance. So no, Evolution cannot design. What you are looking at in nature is an accident, according to Evolution. A happy accident in most cases, but an accident nevertheless.
It is great that a designer like Jason Fried is inspired by nature, as all designers should be, but his understanding of Evolution as a designer is faulty. He could leave Photoshop open for a million years but a layout would never make itself. You may laugh at that idea, and I do to. We don't expect it to work that way, so why do we expect nature to work that way?