Design is an autoantonym, meaning both "clear thinking made visible" (Edward Tufte) and "prettiness with as little concession to the needs of users as possible." Today’s Horrible Example of the latter is a $41 million dollar library with three floors it can’t use.

Don Norman (who wrote the book) on designing things better for us old folks. [Fast Company]

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

Design, like oversight and sanction, is an autoantonym: It means two opposite things. There's design as "clear thinking made visible" [Edward Tufte] and there's creating elegantly simple objects that win awards from other designers while making as few concessions as possible to the suckers who have to use the device. Here's how design in the second sense can make cars more lethal.

Thanx to andrewducker

ETA: As the article makes clear, good design is also clear thinking made tangible.