Design Is Compromise

I really like the article, as it resonates with me.

However, I also think it's a bit of a meta-commentary.

Ultimately it boils down to definition of the word "compromise", so a better article is one that establishes those semantics first.

Absolutely spot-on.

However, most folks (not just designers) have a difficult time with compromise, these days. It's become a value judgment (You're "weak," if you compromise).

I learned, when I was a kid, that I can't always get what I want (I think that someone even sang about it, way back then).

The art of compromise, is one of the most valuable skills I had, during my career, and I'm still at it. In fact, I was just texting with a team member, a few minutes ago, where we have to come to a compromise.

Compromise is the last tool in the designer's toolbox. Before settling with a compromise, the designer should relentlessly try to narrow down what the problem being solved is, while trying out all possibilities, until it looks like there is no solution that matches exactly the problem (or they run out of time).

More often than not, a compromise means that the problem wasn't scoped out well enough, and it ends up partially solving a problem that didn't need solving.

Edit: I do think it's about trade-offs though. Choosing to solve one problem, acknowledging another problem will be disregarded.

Is this a response to marketing lingo specifically or some other cultural phenomenon? There's a difference between what you want to do to advance your goals (e.g. compromising), and what you want to say for visibility for whoever's goals they are (e.g. "uncompromising" the customer's goals).

There might be a deeper point being communicated, not sure, but I see no issue here.

Not quite. Design is about optimization (of user experience, performance etc). Optimization implies constraints. Constraints are what made you think of "compromise".

A very comprehensive and cognition-based work is the following by Henrik Gedenryd;

How Designers Work – Making Sense of Authentic Cognitive Activities - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48352065

Another way to put it: design is the outcome of an optimization against a given set of objectives and constraints. This would also help to keep track of the reasoning underlying changes in the design to provide an audit trail.

Well there's compromise that means multi-dimensional constraint optimization, and that's fine. But a lot of time what people mean by compromise is they compromised on cost, or on effort, or on attentiveness. Colloquially that's what people usually mean when they use the word with a negative connotation.

"Design depends largely on constraints." - Charles Eames

similar to what a person is capable of. we cant be good at everything, we're specialists; backend engineers, frontend developers, machine learning engineers, etc... as in design, it cannot appeal to every eye, being opinionated makes good design stand out.

Design for the many vs design for the few vs design for one's self can be one of the issues.

Design for others can be different than needing to impose your design on others.

The problem isn't compromise.

It's pretending there isn't one.

Every product optimizes for something. The interesting question is what it chose to sacrifice.

the way i see it is that design actually never get treated what its meant to be treated as - a service to help make business more money..