Idealized Design

Definition

Idealized design asks planners to specify, in full detail, what they would replace the current system with today if they were free to design it from scratch — subject to only two constraints: it must be technologically feasible (no telepathy, but color fax and helicopters are fine) and operationally viable (it could actually survive if it existed). Every other constraint — economic, political, legal, cultural — is deliberately set aside during design. Because the designers' own knowledge is limited, the ideal is not a fixed utopia but an "ideal-seeking" system built to keep learning and improving itself: "an idealized state of affairs should be one in which its designers would be capable of both learning from their experience in it and adapting to changes."

In the Book

Chapter 2 lays out the method and argues that formulating problems around an ideal, rather than around removing today's deficiencies, surfaces the interactions between separate problems and turns isolated troubleshooting into holistic planning. Ackoff illustrates with a group idealizing the U.S. banking system: eliminating paper checks in favor of electronic transfer led step by step to the idea that banks could hold complete income/expenditure records, which led one participant to ask "wouldn't it make more sense to tax consumption than income?" — a redesign no one would have proposed by patching the existing system. He makes the same point about Mexico City transportation planners who rejected obviously more powerful interventions (a wider-vision car design, a changed workday, relocating government offices) as "not feasible" on political grounds, arguing that planning should be "the art of the impossible," not the art of the possible. Chapter 6 gives a full worked example: the idealized redesign of the U.S. National Scientific Communication and Technology Transfer (SCATT) system, built participatively and revised through public criticism, alongside real idealized designs Ackoff's team produced for the government of France (Paris) and Mexico City. The Paris design accepted recommendations — moving the capital out of Paris, making Paris a self-governing open city — that were infeasible taken separately but became sensible once derived from the shared ideal of Paris as the world's informal capital.

Why It Matters

Idealized design breaks the trap of only ever proposing improvements that look feasible from inside the current system, since feasibility judgments are themselves shaped by that system and quietly rule out the biggest wins. By suspending politics, budget, and precedent during design and reintroducing them only when building the path back to reality, it produces a "system of solutions to a system of problems" that can be jointly feasible even when none of the parts would be feasible pursued alone.