To say that design sometimes requires tradeoffs is certainly true, but not true enough. It would be more accurate to say that making tradeoffs is essential to design, and that good design is largely a function of insight, skill, discipline and courage in making tradeoffs.*

My belief is that the “de-” prefix of design designates the tradeoff element of design. De-signing is setting apart significant things, against what is seen as irrelevant or insignificant according to the vision of the design, so their complexity is contained and it becomes possible to systematize the parts and produce a whole that is both manageable and grokkable.

Of course, eliminating unnecessary tradeoffs is also an important part of the art of design, but making sacrificed considerations invisible or manifestly irrelevant is even more important.

It is often hard for people new to design (or bad at it) to accept the necessity of tradeoffs, much less to embrace tradeoffs as the key to simplicity and specialness. More often tradeoffs are seen as omissions, flaws — evidence that a system is still incomplete. So wherever missing elements or considerations are detected, attempts are made to incorporate them, often in the locales where the omission is noted, without regard for the whole.

In attempting to avoid tradeoffs an unintended tradeoff is made: simplicity is sacrificed. And it is not just any simplicity. It is simplicity informed by a clear sense of what does and does not matter. And that sense of relevance is the tacit moral content of the design, what is spontaneously experienced as personality or soul. This tradeoff of soul is hard to pinpoint in particulars and articulate. To minds dominated by language — minds who equate word and truth and reality — such tradeoffs of ineffable who-knows-what for effable features seems more acceptable than the reverse, trading a vague and subjective sense of rightness for hard, objective things. By this process, a je ne sais quoi rightness of a product becomes a je ne sais quoi wrongness. There’s nothing exactly wrong with the thing, besides the fact that it seems a bit complicated or confusing — but there’s also nothing right about it.

*Note: the oft-observed incidental beauty of industrial objects engineered with no concern for aesthetic considerations, might be due entirely to the uncompromising tradeoffs made in optimizing performance. Nietzsche wrote extensively about how prolonged, relentless and often brutal observance of custom — much of which consists of prohibitions — eventually results in refinement, elegance and the highest forms of beauty. It might be that every aesthetic sensibility is a disciplined logic of exclusion. It might be that our instinctive detection of personality is a sizing up of value selection and prioritization, in terms of substance, definiteness and consistency.