Comments on: What is good design?

By: Nick Drew

Nick Drew — Thu, 22 Sep 2005 01:07:36 +0000

Yah – good design. Hmmm – you remind me of my optician testing out lenses: “Better or worse”, he’d say, and try another lens. “Better or worse”. The best lens was the one which ALLOWED ME TO SEE PROPERLY. Was it a good design for a lens? Maybe not for you.

A good design ( in a technical sense ) is a pretty simple concept. Its the blueprint for something that emerges from a good design process.

What’s a good design process? It’s where you set up a set of constraints, and morph something until it satisfies those constraints. You consider options, and evaluate each option against your constraints. Where two designs are equivalent, you create a new constraint that allows you to choose between them.

I say “in a technical sense”, because sometimes I use the term in as if it had some tangible manifestation: “Love the chair, great design”. I may mean its elegant, or stands out, or whatever. But some of those chairs are just plain uncomfortable to sit on.

By: Sam Newman

Sam Newman — Thu, 15 Sep 2005 15:53:25 +0000

I think the spirit of what Hani was trying to say is that the design accomodates unforseen requirements by being flexible – I simplified this by saying easy to change as the word flexible can mean many different things to many different people. I’ve often seen apparently highly configurable/highly flexible systems that were complex – perhaps getting a happy medium between flexibility and simplicity is key.

If a design is easy to change it kind of follows that it’s flexible (please note that by “change” I don’t mean “configure” – too often highly configurable systems seem to be a result of abdication of responsibility on the part of the developer).

By: Brian McCallister

Brian McCallister — Thu, 15 Sep 2005 15:43:00 +0000

I think he captured the correct gist of good design, though. A good design enables uses which were never envisioned or planned for. It is an “open” design which enables things, rather than allows the initial requirements to be fulfilled. Damned hard to capture in words =)

By: Lee

Lee — Thu, 15 Sep 2005 14:03:24 +0000

allows your code to do things you never expected it to have to do

I’d say Hani is way off with this one, and agree with you. The only way a design can exceed expectations in this way is if it has been over engineered, and there is no guarantee that what has been implemented will work for the new usage, because it hasn’t been designed with this usage in mind.