Founding Fathers Design Team

I don't really like to run. I do it as an obligation to myself but I take little pleasure in the act itself so, to make the time pass, I usually download a book to listen to and hit cruise control. Not very adrenaline pumping but it does the trick. 

The last book was "Change by Design" by Tim Brown of IDEO. It's a wonderful book about design-thinking that really helped me see more clearly many of the thoughts about design that I had long had but was never able to sort out so cleanly. Thinking of design as a process for problem solving as opposed to an act of decoration was something that I was always struggling to get others to accept but almost no one I worked with saw it this way, and I had come up in such an old-school design way that I lacked the words, evidence, and support.

The book I'm listening to now is "Founding Brothers" by Joseph J. Ellis and it's about the the personalities involved in the creation of the USA and some of the key events that shaped our early republic.

At first glance these two books seem pretty unrelated but as I thought more about it I started to wonder if the Continental Convention wasn't one of the greatest design-thinking efforts of all time. with one of the greatest interdisciplinary teams of all time: Madison, Jefferson, Franklin, Hamilton... Each brought very different talents, perspectives and interests to the table and collaborated on a brief that would change the world.

I guess the brief would have been: "How can we create a sustainable government based on the principles of individual freedom and equality."  

It's an interesting idea worth further exploration I think.