Good Design.…According to whom?

“Good design isn’t a fixed property of an object. It’s a relationship between a product, a person, and a context.”

in store

A few weeks ago I found myself in an electronics and home appliances store. If you’ve ever been to one, you’ll know the feeling. Bright white lights. Endless shelves. Every appliance promising to be smarter, faster, quieter or more premium than the one next to it. I wasn’t there to buy anything. I was simply pacing through the home appliance aisle. Old habits die hard. Industrial designers don’t just look at products — we watch people look at products. So yes… I was unintentionally eavesdropping on a couple deciding whether to buy a product

The product sat quietly on the shelf. It had no idea it was about to become the center of a design review. Not by designers. By everyone else.

Reviewer #1: The Lady: She picked it up. “It’s actually nice.” She rotated it. “I like the colour.” A few seconds later… “It feels a little heavy though.”

Reviewer #2: The Man: He barely looked at the specifications. Instead he frowned. “It looks fat.” Then he squeezed the handle. “Feels brittle.” Not “unsafe.” Not “poorly engineered.” Just…“Brittle.” One adjective. That was enough for him.

Reviewer #3: The Sales Executive: Trying to rescue the situation, she quickly picked another model. “This one sells much better.”

Notice what happened there. She didn’t defend the design. She defended its popularity. Popularity became proof. Sales became validation.

Reviewer #4: A Random Grandma: She had absolutely no reason to join the conversation. Yet she did. “I’ve used this brand before.” “I trust them.” That’s all. Her review wasn’t about ergonomics. Or CMF. Or interface design. It was memory. Trust. Experience.

The couple eventually walked away. The shelf became quiet again. Only then did I pick up the product. Not as a customer. As a designer.

I looked at the draft angles. The injection moulding split lines. The material transitions. The weight distribution. The handle geometry. The airflow path. The assembly strategy. Completely different observations. Standing in the exact same place. Looking at the exact same product.

And then one question refused to leave me.

What exactly is “good design”? And according to whom? We have been asking the wrong question.

When designers ask, “Is this good design?” We unknowingly assume that there exists one universal answer.

As if “good” were an objective property. Like mass. Or length. Or voltage. But design doesn’t behave like physics. It behaves like relationships.

The same product can be:

• beautiful to one person,
• intimidating to another,
• intuitive for one,
• confusing for someone else,
• premium to a customer,
• expensive to another,
• profitable to a company,
• impossible to manufacture,
• easy to repair,
• difficult to recycle.

Which one is correct? The uncomfortable answer is: All of them.

So I started reading.

Whenever someone asks, “What is good design?” you inevitably encounter the same names. Steve Jobs, Don Norman, Dieter Rams, Ingvar Kamprad.

Every generation has produced people who tried to define what makes design good.

Steve Jobs famously said,

“Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.”

Don Norman taught us that good design communicates itself.

Dieter Rams gave us his famous Ten Principles of Good Design.

Ingvar Kamprad built IKEA around democratic design.

These aren’t wrong. Far from it. They’re brilliant. But somewhere along the way, something interesting happened. Their observations slowly became rules. Rules became principles. Principles became checklists. Checklists became evaluation criteria. And suddenly we found ourselves asking,

“Does this satisfy the principles?”

instead of,

“Who is this good for?”

Let’s look at Rams’ famous principles.

Dieter Rams proposed ten characteristics of good design:

1. Good design is innovative

The possibilities for innovation are not, by any means, exhausted. Technological development is always offering new opportunities for innovative design. But innovative design always develops in tandem with innovative technology, and can never be an end in itself.

2. Good design makes a product useful

A product is bought to be used. It has to satisfy certain criteria, not only functional, but also psychological and aesthetic. Good design emphasizes the usefulness of a product whilst disregarding anything that could possibly detract from it.

3. Good design is aesthetic

The aesthetic quality of a product is integral to its usefulness because products we use every day affect our person and our well-being. But only well-executed objects can be beautiful.

4. Good design makes a product understandable

It clarifies the products structure. Better still, it can make the product talk. At best, it is self-explanatory.

5. Good design is unobtrusive

Products fulfilling a purpose are like tools. They are neither decorative objects nor works of art. Their design should therefore be both neutral and restrained, to leave room for the users self-expression.

6. Good design is honest

It does not make a product more innovative, powerful or valuable than it really is. It does not attempt to manipulate the consumer with promises that cannot be kept.

7. Good design is long-lasting

It avoids being fashionable and therefore never appears antiquated. Unlike fashionable design, it lasts many years — even in today’s throwaway society.

8. Good design is thorough down to the last detail

Nothing must be arbitrary or left to chance. Care and accuracy in the design process show respect towards the consumer.

9. Good design is environmentally friendly

Design makes an important contribution to the preservation of the environment. It conserves resources and minimizes physical and visual pollution throughout the lifecycle of the product.

10. Good design is as little design as possible

Less, but better — because it concentrates on the essential aspects, and the products are not burdened with non-essentials. Back to purity, back to simplicity.

They’re excellent principles. But notice something. They are design intentions, not universal measurements. A product can satisfy all ten and still fail in the hands of a customer. Likewise, a product might violate several of them and still become deeply loved. Because people don’t experience principles. People experience products.

Back to store.

Here’s the part that made me laugh. The product everyone was casually judging…had actually won a prestigious design award. It had commercial success. Professional recognition. Critical appreciation. Yet in a store aisle…one person called it heavy. Another thought it looked brittle. The salesperson ignored it. A grandmother trusted it. And I admired its engineering. Five people. One object. Five completely different definitions of “good.”

Good design has more stakeholders than designers.

The product doesn’t begin its life on a retail shelf. It travels through dozens of hands.

Someone researches it. Someone sketches it. Someone engineers it. Someone chooses materials. Someone negotiates manufacturing costs. Someone packages it. Someone markets it. Someone sells it. Someone repairs it. Someone eventually throws it away.

Every single person wants the product to succeed. But every one of them measures success differently.

The manufacturer wants efficiency. The marketer wants desirability. The retailer wants turnover. The customer wants value. The service technician wants repairability. The recycler wants disassembly. The designer wants coherence. So…whose definition wins?

Maybe perfection was never the goal.

When I first began studying industrial design, I found myself reading about Lord Vishwakarma — the divine architect in Hindu tradition.

Not from a religious perspective. From a design perspective. It made me wonder. I feel none of god’s creation are perfect or good design. As designers, however, we often chase a different ideal. We strive to eliminate every flaw, resolve every inconvenience, and anticipate every possible user need. But what if, in doing so, we also eliminate opportunities for people to form a relationship with the product? Some of the most memorable objects in our lives are not memorable because they are flawless; they are memorable because we learned them. We adjusted to their quirks, developed routines around them, repaired them when they broke, and in the process, made them our own.

This is not an argument for designing bad products or celebrating poor craftsmanship. Rather, it is a reminder that products, much like nature, exist within an evolving relationship with people. They wear, they age, they get repaired, they accumulate stories, and sometimes they even outlive the intentions of their creators.

Maybe good design is not about creating something that demands nothing from its users. Maybe it is about creating something that leaves room for people to participate — to adapt, personalize, maintain, and ultimately build memories with it. In that sense, imperfection is not failure. It is an invitation. And perhaps the products we remember most are not the ones that were perfectly designed, but the ones that quietly became a part of our lives.

Maybe “Good” Is Simply Too Small a Word

After all this thinking, observing, reading, and questioning, I arrived at a rather simple conclusion. Maybe “good” is simply too small a word.

We use it so casually that we’ve almost forgotten how little it actually tells us. Imagine walking into an art gallery and describing every painting as good. Or watching a film and saying, “It was good.” Technically, you’ve expressed an opinion, but you’ve explained nothing. Was it emotional? Was it thought-provoking? Was the cinematography beautiful? Did the story stay with you for days? “Good” doesn’t capture any of that.

Products deserve the same treatment. When we look at a product and immediately say, “That’s good design,” we unknowingly stop the conversation before it even begins. We never ask why it feels good, for whom it is good, or in what context it is good. The word has become a shortcut — a convenient label that compresses hundreds of design decisions into a single adjective. But products are far more complex than that.

Every adjective reveals a different relationship between the product and the person experiencing it. Perhaps that is a more meaningful way to talk about design. Not by asking,

“Is this good design?”

but by asking,

“What kind of design is this?”

That one question opens far more doors than the word good ever could.

So… According to Whom?

By the time I left the store that day, nothing about the product had changed. It was the same object, sitting on the same shelf, with the same materials, the same form, and the same engineering. What had changed was my understanding of it. I had just witnessed five completely different evaluations of the very same product. None of them were entirely right. None of them were entirely wrong either. Each person judged the product through their own experiences, priorities, expectations, and context.

Perhaps that’s what design has always been. Not an object waiting to be labelled as good or bad, but an object waiting to be experienced. Maybe we’ve been too eager to hand out verdicts when we should have been asking questions.

Instead of saying,

“This is good design.”

Perhaps we should pause and ask,

“What makes it good?”

Or better still,

“Good for whom?”

Because a product doesn’t exist in isolation. It exists in homes, offices, factories, repair shops, retail shelves, and recycling plants. It passes through designers, engineers, manufacturers, marketers, salespeople, customers, service technicians, and eventually, someone who decides whether to throw it away or keep it for another year.

Every one of them experiences a different product. And every one of them has a different definition of good. Maybe that is why no single principle, award, bestseller list, or design philosophy can completely define good design. They can guide us. They can inspire us. But they cannot speak for every interaction a product will ever have.

As designers, perhaps our responsibility isn’t to chase the impossible goal of creating a universally “good” product. Perhaps it is to understand the people we are designing for, acknowledge the trade-offs we choose to make, and be honest about them.

Because in the end, every product is a conversation. Not between the designer and the object. But between the object and everyone whose life it touches.

So the next time you hear someone say,

“Hmm… that’s good design.”

I hope you’ll smile for a second before agreeing.

And quietly ask,

“…according to whom?”

Objectively: it doesn’t claim to have found the answer — it encourages readers to become more thoughtful observers of design.