Feature Creep
I hope to have a series of posts on this topic. I am currently (when I wrote this, with a pen) sitting in a remarkably un-crowded (~35 people) Boeing 737 flying from Oakland, California to Chicago, Illinois.
Over the last several months I have been confronted by the issue of Feature Creep. For those who don’t know what this is – it is the “time-honored” process of adding more and more features to a product because Marketing (or some other group of decision makers) believes that these additions will add to the value/profitability and user experience.
Now, I have come lately to obsess about Feature Creep both because my own project is starting to head toward this cliff, as well as, my recent thinking about evolution. I feel that somewhere I will find the information/examples needed to meld these ideas together. For now though you have to suffer through my ramblings and working-out process via this blog.
Back to the plane…..
This is a good sized modern aircraft. It has all the comforts and safety features one would expect (alas no Wi-Fi though). How did this (the plane) get to be?
In my current position I attend numerous meetings to determine product specifications and review the design of products as well as to do strategic planning around future products. So, I am trying to imagine the countless meetings about every detail on this plane. Someone had to choose every material, color and contour of each piece. Form and function had to be recognized, but costs had to be constrained. At the same time marketplace pressures/innovations likely altered decisions that had already been made. This process occurred not just for big things like cabin configuration, engine choice or wiring design but down to every circuit board, the choice of wires, screw and bolt material.
It is likely that as Orville and Wilbur sat around their bicycle shop that they had lengthy conversations about what to build their first plane out of, however, their access to material was limited by money and knowledge of how to make material perform as they might wish. So they went with their “locally” available resources. Would your first choice have been to say that metal should fly? (I still have trouble with using metal to float.)
Anyway…Feature Creep.
From Orville and Wilbur we have moved to planes with seats – first for one person then two people then perhaps we added a cover over the seats – add another engine – how big can we make it? (800+ seats!!!)
In a bit over 100 years we went from a several-hundred-foot power-assisted glide to supersonic jets and planes that can carry over 800 people and all of their stuff.
Evolution has had 14 billion years.
Interestingly, of course, the civil aviation industry is a good example to put up against those who predict the exponential improvement of technology.
Yes we went from the Wright Brothers in 1903 to a supersonic airliner in the 1960s. But since then we have lost supersonic commercial aviation. We have got slower.
I think the iPhone is a good example of how feature creep hasa threshold effect. You start with a phone,and then you kludge all sorts of unrelated things onto it such as a camera and a music player, and it’s all a bit fiddly, but then comes a kind of phase change that’s related to the user interface. My iPhone is all these things as well as a games console, e-Reader, calculator, and even a musical instrument… but somehow it seems a seamless whole rather than a collection of parts. Craig, you have it right – what we need to appreciate is a sense of design. Now, relating that to the natural world is interesting, because living things are each greater than the sum of their parts, but no designer was involved (so sue me).
I wonder if creationists would describe nasal hair, the appendix and male nipples as feature creep?
They’d have to, wouldn’t they?
Matt and Henry,
I would argue that based on the recent thoughts on the utility of the appendix (repository for gut flora) and nasal hair as a gatekeeper against large particulate matter these are not Feature Creep. However, male nipples are more possibly a “legacy feature” – important/necessary at one point but after so many revisions it is no longer needed.
Aha! Naive Panselectionism by the back door! Where are Gould and Lewontin’s spandrels when you need them?
When manufacturing things by injection molding plastics, a little lump is left where the molten plastic was injected — you can see them on the lids and bottoms of plastic bottles, for example. They are known as “nipples”: they have no function, but simply exist as a result of the manufacturing process.
Yup. Spandrels, as I live and breathe.
Male nipples are there because they develop before our genitals do. So although we have some chromosomal determinism there, we’re not really male (or female) when our nipples come along. Dr Chris from the BBCs Dr Karl show told me that.
My spandrels are giving me some awful gyp today though.
Mike,
I agree that the fact that the male nipples are there, prior to puberty and beyond is likely due to the timing of sexual maturity.
Now, this could easily devolve into discussion of the variations in sex determination present in sexual reproduction (i.e genotype, temperature influence etc). However, I won’t belabor that now.
Craig, just to clarify, I meant they develop (differentiate) at the embryonic stage before our genitals do.
Leave boys alone for a few hours and they go straight from airplanes to nipples. In a very dry, technical way. Hmm.
Anyway, Craig – I don’t quite get how your post ties the development of airplanes and evolution together with feature creep? Are you saying that planes were only developed further because people added more and more stuff that wasn’t necessarily needed – which is how I understand feature creep, and how I think you define it in the first part? And if yes, how does that tie in with evolution?
Feature creep – journals’ online submission systems. When I joined Nature (in the dark days before the Internet, before email, before faxes and even before Henry), manuscripts moved through our system pretty smartish, using mail (including courier services). But we longed for electronic means to receive them, send to referees, receive comments, etc. Cue faxes, email, online systems – end result – the same or slower. Why? (1) lots more cyclical interactions between journal, authors and referees (i.e. more decision steps and more questions about the process and the decisions); and (2) the systems get more complex as they have more and more features added into them, eg “competing insterests” statements, subject keywords, funders’ depository mandates, etc.
Steffi,
Your question is exactly what I hope to explore through a series of posts. As I said I don’t know that there is a logical connection, I just feel that somewhere there maybe. Part of it is just trying to reconcile my new environment (industry) with my old (academia).