Digital Materiality and the Emergence of an Evolutionary Science of the Artificial

An important consequence of pervasive digitalization of artifacts (tools, representations, and forms of organizing) is that man-made objects become generative due to the unique materiality of digital technology. As result, even though they are still being designed, digital artifacts evolve once they are designed, often in surprising ways even to those who design them. We are at the cusp of a new type of an artificial world that is inundated with digital artifacts that are continuously evolving and changing. As biology emerged as an evolutionary science of nature two centuries ago, we need a new discipline that is focused on the evolution of artifacts, particularly digital artifacts. The field of Information Systems should move into to fill the intellectual vacuum created by the pervasive diffusion of digital artifacts and become an evolutionary science of artifacts. I used two of my recent empirical studies as a way of sketching out what might emerge as a basis of an evolutionary science of the artificial. Through these examples, I demonstrate how the basic ideas of genetics and evolutionary biology can be used as an effective mechanism to study the evolution of digital artifacts. An evolutionary exploration of materiality highlights the inherent tension between the rich material reality and the simple abstract generative rules that give birth to seemingly idiosyncratic locales.