First!

A piece I wrote for the 4th issue of Bones Magazine: http://www.bonesmagazine.co.uk/?page_id=479


What came first, the chicken or the egg? This question has, over eras and centuries and epochs, scrambled the brains of many. How can one thing be without the other thing being first?

You could argue that the egg came first, because other animals, like dinosaurs, had been laying eggs long before chickens existed. There must have been one egg, laid way back in prehistory by some now extinct animal, which gestated the universe’s first ever chicken. Mummy bird/lizard hybrid was expecting to see baby bird/lizard hybrid staring back at her and instead she got a feathery surprise, like a genetic Nestle Kinder toy.

But if you’re a purist and insist on the egg being entirely chicken in its origin in the first instance, then the answer is that the chicken came first – it emerged from its hybrid Kinder surprise shell as the universe’s first ever chicken and in all the excitement squeezed out the universe’s first ever bona fide egg.

Either way, it’s pretty hard to fathom unless you see it for the red herring that it is. That is to say: the origin of their existence isn’t the question, their existence is the answer. Forget looking at it as a 3 dimensional question: the chicken, the egg, the winner. You need to throw a fourth dimension into the mix – Why either at all?

The most perfect designs, whether in art, engineering, nature, are those that solve a problem. Before the egg, before the chicken, there was the nascent need-state requiring that both should exist in the first place; from then it was only a matter of arriving at a solution by way of a piece of design so perfect that it has lasted thousands of years. Thanks, nature!

It is this process which has provided the template for inspired conceptions throughout the ages. Would we have had high heels without the insecurity of short monarchs? Would we have arrived at a point where Alvar Aalto designed his famous cantilevered chair without first the ancient problem of sore buttocks? Would we have had the Coca Cola bottle without a landscape of soft drink container mediocrity? Would we have had the ipod without first the irritation of fiddly buttons?

Problems are the genesis of all invention and with that, the point of inception for almost all great designs. No one thing ever exists purely in and of itself only. Even the most self-indulgent, ostensibly useless works of art are a response to their creators’ own internal needs for recognition and expression.

That’s why, when striving to find an answer, you have to first look beyond the question to the problem that gave birth to it. Only by continuing to find solutions do we keep evolving. Never stop asking questions and never stop seeking answers because the day all problems are solved will be the day that marks the death of creativity. Conundrums like the chicken and the egg are important because arguing over what came first will give rise to what comes next.