The True Nature of Good Design

Good design is something that most people know when they see but can’t quite describe. Usually they throw out some string of popular buzzwords like lean or minimal or functional. But these are shallow attempts at describing what good design actually is. I’d like to clear up the misconceptions and describe what I believe is the true nature of good design.

Quite simply, good design can be defined as that which optimizes every constraint. The more constraints that are accounted for, the better the resulting design. Let me explain what I mean using an example. The field of design is very broad but, because my expertise is in product design, I’ll stick with that. And to make things even simpler, I’ll use a product without any electronics or complex mechanisms: the drinking glass.

This product serves a simple purpose: holding a liquid and allowing someone to drink from it. I consider these the two primary constrains. A well-designed glass must both hold liquid and allow someone to drink from it or it is considered a design failure. Now this probably sounds obvious and it should be because the primary constraints of a design are always easiest to define and every product on the market makes an attempt to address primary constraints. But it’s the secondary constraints that really set apart good design from everything else.

I consider secondary constrains to be everything that influences a product’s form, material considerations, and economic viability. A good design will identify and optimize as many of these secondary constraints as possible. An okay design will optimize some of these secondary constraints, and a poor design will optimize few or none of them.

Let’s look at the drinking glass example to really see how well secondary constraints can be optimized.

First off, as its name suggests, a drinking glass is made from glass. This material choice optimizes many secondary constraints. The crystalline structure doesn’t allow water molecules to pass through the walls. The material can be highly polished so there are no sharp edges that will cut the user’s mouth or hand. It’s transparent so a user can easily assess the water level from a distance. And it has a certain weight to it that conveys a sense of quality to the user when it’s picked up. All of these secondary constraints are accounted for simply by selecting glass as the product’s material.

Next comes the shape of the glass. The first thing to notice about the form is that it tapers from rim to base. This tapering makes it so a user doesn’t have to rotate the glass past parallel in order to drink from it. The thin rim and thick base of the tapered shape also push the center of gravity lower so the glass doesn’t tip over when liquid is poured into it. A drinking glass is also circular and symmetric around a central axis. This makes it possible to drink from anywhere along the rim of the glass and ensures there is no wrong way to drink from it. Additionally, the lip of the glass is rounded and not too thick. Too thick a rim would force a user to open their mouth uncomfortably wide and too thin a rim has the potential to crack and cut a user’s lips. It’s rounded to both be comfortable against the lips and to prevent potentially catastrophic stress concentrations. Finally, the relative size of the glass has been chosen to hold a cup and a half of liquid. This is large enough to satisfy a user’s thirst but not too large that it makes the object cumbersome to use. Altogether it’s clear that the drinking glass’s form is a result of optimizing a large range of secondary constraints.

And finally the economics. Modern manufacturing processes have made it possible to mass-produce drinking glasses through the use of assembly line machines. By designing a product that can be quickly, easily, and cheaply produced, many secondary economic constraints are optimized. The product is both economically viable to sell and the supply can be adjusted to match the demand. Altogether the design efficiently accounts for the secondary economic constraints.

So those are example of the constraints that determine good design. You have the primary constraints that make or break a product and you have the secondary constraints that influence a product’s form, material, and economic viability. Truly good design determines as many of these secondary constraints as possible and optimizes them.

With that in mind we come to an interesting conclusion about good design: it is always changing. When it comes to product design, advances in technology and materials science result in new ways to optimize a series of secondary constraints that were previously impossible or too costly. The goal posts are always moving and a good design solution today will not necessarily be as good a design solution tomorrow. As a result, everything that is designed will be incrementally refined as time progresses and solutions to secondary constraints change.

So as buzzwords change and technology advances, you can be sure that what we think of as good design will evolve too. However, the true underlying nature of good design will always be same: an optimization of every constraint.