Idealized Design

In 1951, a meeting began at Bell Labs when a vice president walked into a room full of engineers and started, “Gentlemen, the telephone system of the United States was destroyed last night.”

The resulting conversation is interesting and the video and narrative under "Additional Information" below has all those details. But here is the essence of that conversation:

1. If you could do whatever you wanted to do right now, what would you do to replace it?  
2. If you don’t know what you would do if you could do whatever you want; how could you possibly know what to do if you cannot do whatever you want?

We spend a lot of time redesigning systems which should be destroyed. Obviously, we all cannot all simply discard every existing system and start over.

But some of us can.

Additional Information:

• Idealized Design, Systems Thinking, and a Model for Outlier Innovation (video)
• Idealized Design: How Bell Labs Imagined — and Created — the Telephone System of the Future (narrative)