Good design requires a dictator: design by committee is a synonym for bad design, because a design has to be all of a piece.

Added to korrents 6 Sept 2026 · How quotes work · Something wrong? Tell us

Where this collides

• In tension with

  Experts should supply the facts and leave the methods to the people affected: a community will trust and implement a solution it chose itself, even one identical to the expert's.

  Graham says good design requires a dictator, because a design has to be all of a piece. Norman says experts should supply the facts and leave the method to the people affected, since a community will implement a solution it chose itself even when it is identical to the expert’s. They are talking about different objects — a product and a community intervention — and the disagreement about who decides is real in both.

Shared subject first, then similar wording. They may agree or disagree.

• A baby-step version of eval-driven design is to sketch out 10 to 20 hero flows and run the feature or interaction through them to see where it falls apart. EBEd Bayes9 Sept 2026design
• A blank chat box is lazy: it violates the first rule of a good user experience, that it is obvious what you can do. JZJulie Zhuo12 May 2025design
• A company deserves everyone in it, the chief executive included, to spend as much time as possible in their zone of genius — which is an org design problem. RVRahul Vohra23 Mar 2025design
• A company hiring a designer is not hiring a politician or spokesperson, so it should just get into the design work. DMDanny Martinez29 Sept 2026design
• A company that adopts AI tools without changing its organisational design misses the biggest change under way. EVElena Verna10 Sept 2026design

On the map

Open the map on its own page