Well, sort of:

It struck me some time ago how much this common dental floss container resembles the shell of an 8-track tape. I’ve written occasionally about the design of consumer goods, and what the British retro-tech YouTuber Techmoan calls “design DNA.”

In trying to read a little more about this idea, I came across an article in the Wall Street Journal that talks at some length about this. It draws on the book The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves (a great subtitle) by science and economics writer Matt Ridley, who explains the explosion of related technologies thus: “Ideas started having sex.” A little bit like how audio tape cartridges and dental floss containers ended up using much of the same “design DNA.”

I believe in evolution, but I’ve always thought it was interesting that you could take things that obviously are created—like human technologies and products—and create a sort of evolutionary chart for them that would make them look as though they evolved from each other. In an important sense, they really did. This is one of those things that just changes how you look at really ordinary artifacts of the industrial age that we take for granted.

I’d like to revisit this, but this post is short, partly because yesterday’s was very long, and party because, ironically given yesterday’s topic, I came down with some kind of cold yesterday (not COVID, and feeling better today.)

Related Reading:

The Phylogeny of the Watch

Master of Tape

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