Universal Principles of Design, Updated and Expanded Third Edition

024 Chesterton’s Fence

Seek to understand why things exist the way they do before changing or removing them.

Chesterton’s fence, proposed by the writer and philosopher G.K. Chesterton, is introduced in The Thing as a principle regarding reform. As a thought experiment, the reader is asked to imagine a fence across a road. Not knowing why it is there, a “modern type of reformer” will rashly choose to remove it, whereas a “more intelligent type of reformer” will seek to understand why the fence was put there before deciding whether to remove it. Thus, Chesterton’s fence, the principle: Do not remove a fence (or anything else for that matter) until you know why somebody put it there.1

In its modern form, Chesterton’s fence is a heuristic that ...