supergee | The Hunting Lodge*

Design is an autoantonym, with two opposite meanings, like oversight and sanction. As Edward Tufte says, good design is clear thinking made visible, but the good design that wins awards is elegant and "clean" and totally unresponsive to the wants and needs of the people using it, like a cabinet where you can't tell which protrusions open drawers and which do nothing without actually pulling on them. My current unfavorite is the tiny box in the upper right-hand corner of the screen on my desktop computer that closes the window, immediately adjacent to the tiny box that changes the window size, even though there is plenty of room for reasonable-sized ones. Oh, well, at least it doesn't kill children.

*Thank you, Randall Garrett