Design + Evolution = Eugenics: Mimetological Analogies, Or Why Is Design So Enamoured With Evolution? Dr Cameron Tonkinwise Director Design Studies, School of Design, University of Technology, Sydney Abstract Evolution explains how random processes result in what nevertheless appear to be functional entities in certain environments. From the moment of this theory’s inception, the danger of extrapolating from evolutionary descriptions to designerly prescriptions has been frequently demonstrated in violent historical contexts. Whilst these moments are well known, they are perhaps being taken for granted (because evolution is in principle incapable of learning from history, except as it manifests as a current environmental pressure?) now that design researchers are once again beginning to explicitly embrace notions of ‘guided evolution’. It is useful therefore that recent design history scholarship is uncovering links between earlier exhortations of evolution by design and actual eugenics experiments (see the work of Christina Codgell; eg “The Futurama Recontextualised: Norman Bel Geddes’s Eugenic ‘World of Tomorrow’” America Quarterly vol.52 no.2 (June 2000); “Products or Bodies: Streamline Design and Eugenics as Applied Biology” Design Issues vol.19 no.1 (Winter 2003)). These politically dangerous moments begin to look like a consistent tendency when one takes into account the first work at the convergence of design and evolution, that of Ernst Haeckl — coiner of the term ‘ecology,’ vilified eugenicist, but also visual researcher into natural evolutionary patterns, the latter still influential in foundation design curricula since the Bauhaus (see Alain Findeli’s genealogies of the Bauhaus, particular “Moholy- Nagy’s Design Pedagogy in Chicago (1937-46)” Design Issues vol.7 no.1 (Fall 1990)). This paper supplements these particular reminders with a general account of why design continues to be seduced by notions of evolution. Design is the quintessential constructivist discipline, consequently forever endangered by relativism. To resist