Why do we care about design?
We're authorized to reasonably reject bad design decisions for the same reason we care about design in the first place: because of the inextricably socio-normative structure of design practice itself.
I wrote last week about the role of interpersonal justification in our ability to make assessments about good and bad design decisions. Some of you may have noticed that our friend Kush stopped by and suggested that there might be good therapeutic reasons for talking about design in terms other than "good" and "bad".
I disagree with this, although I think it is likely that our disagreement is at least partially motivated by differing conceptions of what it means for a design decision to be "good" or "bad". I wrote, in response to his comment, that bad design decision just is one that can't be justified to a "motivated, reasonable interlocutor." It's a fair question to ask, though, why it makes sense to think about badness as determined by a justificatory failure, rather than by some other standard.
| Tagged with: | Art, Beauty, Claims, Design, Design Ethics, Justification, Normativity, Obligation, Usefulness, Values |