“Design is the application of intent—the opposite of happenstance…”

— Robert L. Peters

I chose this quote because it pairs nicely with the previous quote from Dieter Rams, and starts to fill out the foundation of my personal conception of what “good” design is.

Mr. Rams says that good design is consequent (or thorough, or intentional) in a way that opposes arbitrariness. He places quality on a spectrum between good and arbitrary. Mr. Peters is doing something similar, but he’s not relating the quality of design, but the definition of design itself in opposition to arbitrariness.

Somewhere between these two quotes lies my personal definition of design, and its existence between good/thoughtful and bad/arbitrary. If we accept that design is the application of intent, and that the depth to which we apply that intent (down to the last detail as Mr. Rams says), determines its goodness; do we also accept that the extent to which we allow chance/happenstance/arbitrariness to shape our design defines its badness?

That really makes sense to me because it accounts for how many things in this world can be made aesthetically beautiful while simultaneously being badly designed. Intent is focused on hedonic qualities to the neglect of pragmatic ones. The reverse is frequently true as well. A thing can function superbly but be deeply unpleasant to experience.

This definition supports the idea that design is not about hedonic attributes or pragmatic attributes, but how many of both we were intentional in crafting. The balance of those things, and how well we engineer the win-win for the user, is the design.