The awkward relationship between old and new first hit me while watching the film, Children of Men. Like many sci-fi flicks, we're given a glimpse of the near future, an advanced society with new computing devices and government ID retina scanners. But unlike most other films I've seen, this bright but distopian future is burdened with the past — newspaper boxes on the street corner, crappy coffee cup lids, coiled phone cables. And that's when it started to hit me: the stuff I hate will always exist. Our physical environment has a legacy that works more like evolution than intelligent design. 

This realization made me anxious. Can I be optimistic about a future that's potentially just as problematic as things are now? Is it worth designing new and better things if we can never replace it all? Is a design utopia even possible? — This last question may seem like an obvious delusion, but in the backs of most designers' minds, we actually do believe this is possible.

Orthodoxy Takes One on the Chin

There are other moments I've had since the film that have pushed me further into this dialog with myself. But the one that eliminated my angst was the Mike Tyson v. John Alderson fight rebroadcast at 3AM on ESPN. Watching this tall, lanky coal miner from West Virginia step confidently into the ring against Tyson must have been like the first time a Neanderthal came face-to-face with Homo Erectus — by the way, learning that these two human species co-existed and procreated was also an unsettling challenge to the idea of clear progress.

The bout surprisingly lasted two full rounds, during which the boxing world witnessed the immediate evolution of their sport. Alderson's "why-I-oughta" stance (technically called "orthodox") looked comical compared to the surgical power of Tyson. And Tyson showed no hesitation toward the legacy of such a useless paradigm. He lowered his shoulder, shot quick to the ribs and uppercut so hard he split Alderson's defense in two.

Knowing how quickly sports adapt to a new convention is encouraging for the design field.  But what I learned from the Tyson fight wasn't about leap-frogging or dominating the competition. It was about how you deliver something new to the world. The new is most visible when it's departure from the old is dramatized.

There were countless other fighters during Tyson's time that were serious competition for him. They weren't all John Aldersons. But it's against Alderson that you see the message being clearly delivered: boxing is changing forever. In a dozen more fights, Tyson is suddenly going ten rounds with decent fighters. But by then, Tyson is the only fighter in town worth talking about. His eventual domination of the sport — its tone, style and expectations — are just a matter of time. Boxing re-formed itself in Tyson's image.

Raining on Parades

The contrast necessary for a new design to truly feel like a departure also works against iterative improvement. An umbrella, for example, is so iconic and rooted into our common experience, that most attempts at re-designing the umbrella feel gimmicky, or not worth the effort to replace an existing one. Until someone utilizes a new technology or designs a radically different tool for staying dry, the umbrella will likely never be replaced. It'll remain part of our orthodoxy, or design legacy.

I still feel like a design utopia is a worthy goal, but I'm comfortable knowing that it won't happen all at once. Or at all, ever. But I can help create new focal points. Like Tyson, some design wins might shift a major part of the world in a new direction, but most likely they will be smaller advances toward a greater good. These smaller wins will be forced to exist in a messy, dystopian world, but now I know that it's this contrast between the old and new that makes design so powerful and visible in our daily lives.

I think it'd be interesting to catalog some of the major departures in design that affect our mundane, domestic lives. I'll update this post as I seek them out, but I'd like to see your own in the comments.