Daniel Dennett’s cranes vs skyhooks is a thinking tool for incremental improvement and iterative design. In construction, smaller cranes are used to build larger cranes, which in turn build complicated structures. This is analogous to evolutionary processes, where complexity is achieved incrementally out of seemingly simple components. Complicated designs can be traced backwards to simpler designs in the past. Skyhooks, on the other hand, attempt to explain things in the world without referring to an incremental pathway, such as magic and intelligent design.
Dennett explains that cranes do lifting in design space, which roughly means that cranes are the mechanisms by which designs improve. Design space is the set of all design parameters within a particular domain. For example in biology, design space could include frog legs, human ears, hummingbird wings etc. In this case, the crane, or series of cranes, is evolution by natural selection. In industrial design the design space might be the allowed materials, weight and shape of a new product. Note that there doesn’t need to be an actual designer, so the design space of the universe might include things like, in the words of Maria Popova, the “the rings of Saturn, …, each idea Einstein ever had, …, the whiskers of Montaigne’s cat”.
How does this affect our thinking and innovation process at Shrunk? Technology innovation may resemble magic or skyhooks at first, however it more likely resulted from many small incremental improvements. Therefore we try to imagine the incremental path between our ideas and working solutions - does such an incremental path exist? - which steps already exist and which must be invented? By practising frequent software releases and showing our work to anyone who will listen, we overcome the fear of shipping. We love experimentation and prototypes, and while sometimes (often) these fail, the process always informs the next design.
Cross-posted from the Shrunk Labs blog: https://shrunk.ai/blog/f/cranes-skyhooks-and-iterative-design