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The history of civilization,
in some ways, is a history of maps:

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How have we come to understand
the world around us?

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One of the most famous maps works
because it really isn't a map at all.

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[Small thing. Big idea.]

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[Michael Bierut on
the London Tube Map]

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The London Underground
came together in 1908,

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when eight different
independent railways merged

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to create a single system.

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They needed a map to represent that system

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so people would know where to ride.

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The map they made is complicated.

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You can see rivers,
bodies of water, trees and parks --

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the stations were all crammed together
at the center of the map,

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and out in the periphery, there were some
that couldn't even fit on the map.

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So the map was geographically accurate,
but maybe not so useful.

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Enter Harry Beck.

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Harry Beck was a 29-year-old
engineering draftsman

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who had been working on and off
for the London Underground.

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And he had a key insight,

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and that was that people
riding underground in trains

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don't really care
what's happening aboveground.

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They just want to get
from station to station --

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"Where do I get on? Where do I get off?"

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It's the system that's important,
not the geography.

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He's taken this complicated
mess of spaghetti,

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and he's simplified it.

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The lines only go in three directions:

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they're horizontal, they're vertical,
or they're 45 degrees.

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Likewise, he spaced the stations equally,

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he's made every station color
correspond to the color of the line,

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and he's fixed it all
so that it's not really a map anymore.

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What it is is a diagram,

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just like circuitry,

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except the circuitry here
isn't wires conducting electrons,

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it's tubes containing trains
conducting people from place to place.

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In 1933, the Underground decided, at last,
to give Harry Beck's map a try.

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The Underground did a test run
of a thousand of these maps, pocket-size.

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They were gone in one hour.

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They realized they were onto something,

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they printed 750,000 more,

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and this is the map that you see today.

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Beck's design really became the template

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for the way we think of metro maps today.

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Tokyo, Paris, Berlin, São Paulo,
Sydney, Washington, D.C. --

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all of them convert complex geography

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into crisp geometry.

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All of them use different colors
to distinguish between lines,

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all of them use simple symbols
to distinguish between types of stations.

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They all are part
of a universal language, seemingly.

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I bet Harry Beck wouldn't have known
what a user interface was,

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but that's really what he designed

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and he really took that challenge
and broke it down to three principles

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that I think can be applied
in nearly any design problem.

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First one is focus.

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Focus on who you're doing this for.

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The second principle is simplicity.

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What's the shortest way
to deliver that need?

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Finally, the last thing is:

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Thinking in a cross-disciplinary way.

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Who would've thought
that an electrical engineer

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would be the person to hold the key

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to unlock what was then one of the most
complicated systems in the world --

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all started by one guy
with a pencil and an idea.