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1. Perhaps needless to say, I think having philosophers working in design is just obviously a good idea. But why?

2. What makes a good designer? For my money, most of what good designers do is look at the world (or a certain very small subset of it) and try to figure out how it ought to be. Think about that. An Eames chair is just a claim about how chairs ought to look, feel and so on. And they’re so damn popular among designers because we all, in our considered professional opinions, agree with that claim. “Yup,” we think, “the world is a better place because of that thing. The Eames’s really had something worth saying about how the world ought to be.”

3. With practical philosophers, this is even more explicit. They are concerned entirely with figuring out what it means to claim that the world ought to be some way rather than another, and with figuring out ways to systematize their thinking in order to capture our intuitions and theories about that.

4. So what designers can take for granted (that they’ve got it right about the way the world ought to be), philosophers make explicit. That means there are two ways to be a good designer. Either you’ve just got spot-on intuitions, or else you do some practical philosophy to tune up those intuitions. And I think most of us can use a regular tune-up.

5. I think a lot of bad design is based on lazy, solipsistic thinking on the part of designers. When we all look at something and think that we were better off without it, or we’d be better off with something else, what we’re thinking is that the normative claim the designed object represents is just wrong.

6. Which is all to say that if designers are interested in getting it right systematically, what they’re interested in is scrutinizing their intuitions. You can do that with a lot of different tools: cognitive science, experimental psychology, design theory, and so on. But if you want to get down to the kind of skills that undergird those disciplines, there’s only one place to go.