The first website had nothing to copy
In 1991, Tim Berners-Lee put the first website online. There was no audience, no design convention, no template, no theory of how a web page should work. Nobody had opinions about navigation, because navigation did not exist yet.
He had only the problem itself: how do people find information stored on different computers?
Everything that came afterwards — the layouts, the rules, the best practices, the arguments — was built on top of that one question. Most of it is inherited habit, and only some of it is genuinely required.
Every field has an original problem underneath it. The practices that grew on top are much younger, and much more negotiable, than they look.
Source: A short history of the web — CERN
Why can't I see it now?
In 1943, Edwin Land was photographing his three-year-old daughter on holiday in New Mexico. She asked why she could not see the picture straight away.
It was a child's question, in the sense that nobody trained in photography would have asked it — the answer was obvious to anyone who understood developing, chemicals, darkrooms and time.
What Land did with the question mattered more than the question itself. He did not ask how to make darkroom processing faster. He asked whether the darkroom could be put inside the camera. He later said he worked out most of what would become instant photography during a walk that same afternoon.
Polaroid demonstrated the first instant camera five years later.
The question was only naive if you already knew why it could not be done. She did not, so she asked.
Source: Land instant photography — American Chemical Society
Five days to fix the shopping cart
In 1999, ABC's Nightline set the design firm IDEO a public challenge: redesign the supermarket shopping trolley, on camera, in five days.
The trolley had barely changed in fifty years. The obvious approach was to start with the object — make it lighter, wider, easier to steer. IDEO started somewhere else. They went out and watched what shoppers were actually doing: managing children, protecting eggs, abandoning the trolley to fetch one item, getting everything to the car.
What came back was not a better basket on wheels. It was a frame with removable baskets, a child seat that worked, and a scanner — a rethink of what the trolley was for, which only became visible once they stopped looking at the trolley.
For fifty years the trolley had been improved as an object. Nobody had asked what it was for.
Source: The Deep Dive, ABC Nightline 1999
Two outsiders look at card payments
In 2009, Jim McKelvey lost a sale. He made glass, a customer wanted to buy a piece, and he had no way to take a card payment. He mentioned it to his friend Jack Dorsey.
Neither of them came from the payments industry, which turned out to matter. When they looked at how accepting a card worked — merchant accounts, credit checks, multi-page applications, a dedicated terminal that had to be leased — none of it seemed necessary to them. Not because they had a better idea, but because they had never been taught that this was simply how it was done.
Square shipped a card reader small enough to sit in a pocket and plug into a headphone jack.
Everyone inside the industry could see the same rules. Only people from outside it found them strange.
Source: How Square challenged every assumption — Jim McKelvey
The Tuesday the engineers went slow
By 2015 most of Facebook's users were outside North America, many of them on 2G connections where a single page could take minutes to load. The engineers building the product were in California on some of the fastest internet in the world.
They could not bring those users into the building. So they did the reverse: every Tuesday morning, employees could opt in to have their own connection throttled to 2G for an hour.
An hour was enough. The engineering director described it as a test of patience, and said parts of the product simply felt broken at that speed. Things that had seemed fine on the office network were plainly unusable.
They could not put the stranger in the room, so they put the room into the stranger's conditions.
Source: The story behind 2G Tuesdays — Facebook Engineering
The person outside the bathroom door
Old Spice was a men's body wash. The obvious audience was the man who would use it.
When Wieden+Kennedy looked at who actually bought the product, more than half the purchases in the category were being made by women. The user and the buyer were not the same person, and every advert in the category had been speaking only to the first one.
So the 2010 campaign stopped addressing the man in the shower and addressed the woman standing outside it — while he watched. Hello, ladies. It became one of the most-watched advertising campaigns of its era.
The user was never the only person who mattered. They were just the only one anyone had thought to picture.
Source: Old Spice, Smell Like a Man, Man — Wieden+Kennedy
Seventy-five years of leaded petrol
In 1921, Thomas Midgley found that adding tetraethyl lead to petrol stopped engines knocking. Lead was already known to be poisonous.
Within months, workers at the plants producing it were suffering severe lead poisoning. Several died. Midgley himself was hospitalised, and at a press conference held to reassure the public he washed his hands in the substance and inhaled its fumes to demonstrate it was safe.
Leaded petrol was sold for another seventy-five years. The last country banned it in 2021. The lead released in that period is still in the soil.
People inside a decision rarely see it the way people outside it later will. The useful question is which of today's confident decisions will read like this one.
Source: Leaded petrol is gone — BBC News
A machine that could compose music
In 1843 Ada Lovelace translated a French paper describing Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine, a calculating machine that existed only as drawings. She added seven notes of her own. They ran about three times longer than the paper she was translating.
Babbage had designed a machine for numbers. In her notes, Lovelace described something else. If the relationships inside music could be written as symbols, she wrote, the engine "might compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music of any degree of complexity or extent."
She was looking at mechanical drawings of brass wheels and punched cards. The machine was never built in her lifetime. She died in 1852, aged thirty-six. General-purpose computers arrived about a century later, and did all of it.
Everyone else saw a calculator, because a calculator was what the drawings showed. She was looking at the same drawings from much further away.
Source: Ada Lovelace and the Analytical Engine — Bodleian Library, Oxford