Preparing for the class I teach with Alladi Venkatesh on Design and Innovation Management, I’ve been reading the Henry Dreyfuss classic, Designing for People, published in 1955. From the thirties to the sixties, he designed everything from flyswatters and tractors to airplane cabins and touchtone phones.

One thing that really struck me was the similarity between the things he was imagining in the fifties and the contents of the file I keep on innovation today. Textiles that light up? He designed curtains using tiny medical device lights for a night club in the forties. Cars with automated parking systems? His drawings were there in the fifties.

What was even more striking, however, was how much things have NOT changed in more than 50 years: washing machines, ovens, urban crowding, traffic, gas-guzzling cars. In fact, his photos of relaxed air travel then (complete with comfy sofas and curtained beds) make you long for those good old days.

So while computers and phones are delivering on his promises, most things are not. The differences, I think, are in the inertia that attaches to any established business. Detroit was doing quite well, thank you, with gas-guzzlers so until this year there was no incentive to change. Ditto for washing machines that waste more water than most people use in a week.

It’s not really ideas we lack—it’s the will to buck the system and create much better solutions. It’s been too easy over the last century to forget what architect Daniel Burnham advised: Make no little plans.