Great Design: What is Design? (First Draft)

In our last episode, I introduced the tentative title "Great Design" for this series of articles. I have something very specific in mind when I use the words "great" and "design," and it's worth spending some time defining it.

First, "design."

You know those gorgeous old brownstones in New York City? With the elaborate carvings, gargoyles, and beautiful iron fences? Well, if you dig up the old architectural plans, the architect would often just write something like "beautiful fretwork" on the drawing, and leave it up to the artisan, the old craftsman from Italy to come up with something, fully expecting that it will be beautiful.

That's not design. That's decoration. What we, in the software industry, collectively refer to as Lipstick on a Chicken. If you have been thinking that there is anything whatsoever in design that requires artistic skill, well, banish the thought. Immediately, swiftly, and promptly. Art can enhance design but the design itself is strictly an engineering problem. (But don't lose hope -- I'll talk more about beauty in future articles).

Design, for my purposes, is about making tradeoffs.

Let's design a trashcan for a city street corner, shall we?

Let me give you some design constraints.

It has to be pretty light, because the dustboys, er, sanitation engineers come by and they have to pick it up to dump the trash in the garbage truck.

Oh, and it has to be heavy, or it will blow away in the wind or get knocked over. (True story: I once got in an accident because a trash can blew in front of our car. Nobody was hurt, not even the trashcan.)

It has to be really big. People throw away a lot of trash throughout the day and at a busy intersection if you don't make it big enough, it overflows and garbage goes everywhere. When that happens, one of the little six-pack plastic ringy-dingies will get in the ocean, and a cute little birdy will get ensnared in it, and choke to death. YOU DON'T WANT TO KILL BIRDIES, DO YOU?

Oh, also, it needs to be pretty small, because otherwise it's going to take up room on the sidewalk, forcing the pedestrians to squeeze past each other, which, possibly, when the Effete Yuppie Listening to His iPod gets distracted by a really funny joke on the Ricky Gervais podcast and accidentally brushes against the Strangely Haunted Vietnam-Era Veteran, can result in an altercation of historic proportions.

Ok, light, heavy, big, and small. What else. It should be closed on the top, so rubbish doesn't fly away in the wind. It should be open on the top, so it's easy to throw things away.

It should be really, really, really cheap.

Notice a trend? When you're designing something, you often have a lot of conflicting constraints.

In fact, that's a key part of design: resolving all of these conflicting goals.

The only goal that usually doesn't conflict is the requirement that whatever you design be really, really cheap.