This TED Talk features graphic designer, design critic, and educator Michael Bayrute,

recorded live at TED NYC, 2017.

So there's this thing called the law of unintended consequences. I thought it was just like a saying, but it actually exists, I guess. There's like academic papers about it. And I'm a designer. I don't like unintended consequences. People hire me because they have consequences that they really intend, and what they

intend is for me to help them achieve those consequences. So I live in fear of unintended

consequences. And so this is a story about consequences intended and unintended. I got called

by an organization called Robin Hood to do a favor for them. Robin Hood is based

in New York, a wonderful philanthropic organization that does what it says in the name they take

from rich people, give it to poor people. In this case, what they wanted to benefit was the New York

City school system, a huge enterprise that educates more than a million students at a time,

and in buildings that are like this one, old buildings, big buildings, drafty buildings, sometimes buildings that are in disrepair,

certainly buildings that could use a renovation.

Robin had this ambition to improve these buildings in some way, but what they realized was to

fix the buildings would be too expensive and impractical. So instead they tried to figure out what one

room they could go into in each of these buildings, as many buildings as they could, and fix that one

building so that, fix that one room so that they could improve the lives

of the children inside as they were studying. And what they came up with was the school library.

And they came up with this idea called the library initiative. All the students one time or

another have to pass through the library. That's where the books are. That's where the heart and

soul of the school is. So let's fix these libraries. So they did this wonderful thing where they

brought in first 10, then 20, then more architects, each one of whom was assigned a library to rethink what a

library was. They trained special librarians. So they started this mighty enterprise to reform public schools

by improving these libraries. Then they called me up and they said,

...