This talk is from WIRED by Design, a two-day live magazine event that celebrated all forms of creative problem solving.

How does David Chang, the chef behind the acclaimed Momofuku restaurant group in New York City, invent his wildly delicious dishes? He embraces the possibility of failure. As he puts it: "Taking risks leads to good, new food."

At WIRED by Design, Chang talked about the delicate balance involved in culinary experimentation. First, there that need to take risks. How else do you find a dish that no one's ever tried before? When Chang was opening his second restaurant, Momofuku Ssam Bar, he defied fine-dining orthodoxy at every turn. "All our bad ideas started to seem like good ideas," he says. "Somewhere in that mess I knew we could find something really delicious."

But equally important to experimenting, Chang says, is the need to be honest when a dish isn't quite working. He mentions something chef served at one of his restaurants: a beef tongue sandwich on rye with bone marrow soup. The chef liked it; Chang did not. "It relied on nostalgia instead of actual appeal," he says. "Worst of all, it was a safe move...It was not reaching for high or low. It was reaching for the middle, which I am vehemently against."

For more, see live.wired.com.