Free A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future by Daniel H. Pink

who are low-income or (formerly) homeless.
    Design can also deliver environmental benefits. The “green design” movement is incorporating the principles of sustainability in the design of consumer goods. This approach not only creates products from recycled materials but also designs the products with aneye to their eventual disposal as well as their use. Architecture is likewise going green—in part because architects and designers are understanding that in the United States, buildings generate as much pollution as autos and factories combined. More than 1,100 buildings in the United States have applied to the U.S. Green Building Council to be certified as environmentally friendly. 18

    If you’re still unconvinced that design can have consequences beyond the carport and cutting board, point your memory back to the 2000 U.S. presidential elections and the thirty-six-day snarl over whether Al Gore or George W. Bush won the most votes in Florida. That election and its aftermath may seem like a bad dream today. But buried in that brouhaha was an important, and mostly ignored, lesson. Democrats alleged that the U.S. Supreme Court, by halting the recount of ballots, handed the election to George W. Bush. Republicans claimed that their opponents tried to steal the election by urging voting officials to count chads—those little rectangular ballot pieces—that were not fully punched out. But the truth is that both sides are wrong.
    According to an exhaustive examination of all of Florida’s ballots that several newspapers and academics conducted a year after the election—and whose findings were largely lost amid the coverage of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and utterly forgotten after Bush’s 2004 reelection—what determined who won the U.S. presidency in 2000 was this:

    This is the infamous butterfly ballot that voters in Palm Beach County used to mark their choice for President. In Palm Beach County—a heavily Democratic enclave populated by tens of thousands of elderly Jewish voters—ultraconservative fringe candidate Pat Buchanan received 3,407 votes, three times as many votes as he did in any other county in the state. (According to one statistical analysis, if the voting pattern of the state’s other sixty-six counties had held in Palm Beach, Buchanan would have won only 603 votes.) 19 What’s more, 5,237 Palm Beach County voters marked ballots for both Al Gore and Pat Buchanan, and therefore had their ballots invalidated. Bush carried the entire state by 537 votes.
    What explained Buchanan’s stunning performance and the thousands of invalidated ballots?
    Bad design.
    The nonpartisan investigation found that what decided the outcome in Palm Beach County—and therefore determined who would become leader of the free world—wasn’t an evil Supreme Court or recalcitrant chads. It was bad design. The bewildering butterfly ballot confused thousands of voters and cost Gore the presidency, according to the professor who headed the project. “Voters’ confusion with ballot instruction and design and voting machines appears to have changed the course of U.S. history.” 20 Had Palm Beach County had a few artists in the room when it was designing its ballot, the course of U.S. history would likely have been different. *
    Now, intelligent people can argue whether the butterfly ballot and the confusion it wrought ultimately produced a good or bad result for the country. And this isn’t partisan sniping from somebody—full disclosure—who worked for Al Gore ten years ago and who remains a registered Democrat. Bad design could have worked to Democrats’ advantage and the Republicans’ chagrin—and one day it likely will. But whatever our own partisan persuasion, we should consider the butterfly ballot the Conceptual Age equivalent of the Sputnik launch. It was a surprising, world-changing event that revealed how weak Americans were in what we’d now discovered was a fundamentally important