Good design for whom? The question sounds simple. It becomes genuinely difficult the moment you try to answer it honestly.
Good for the person using the product? The community around them? The organisation paying for it? The institution implementing it? The environment? And for how long?
As designers, we are trained to understand people. We research, observe, map journeys, identify needs, and try to understand context. Then we design something intended to be better for the person in front of us. Underneath that process is an assumption we rarely name: that we know what better looks like.
That assumption gets complicated quickly when you move across communities, contexts, and time.
When Good for One Becomes Wrong for Another
Early in my time designing products for the insurance domain, we built software for a specific client. We went deep into their process. We understood how they worked, how they made decisions, what friction slowed them down. We customised the product carefully to integrate smoothly into everything they already did.
It worked well. For them.
When we tried to take a similar solution to a competitor in the same industry, we hit a wall. The product that had been precisely right for the first client was precisely wrong for the second. The very things we had built in to serve one organisation's process were the things that made it incompatible with another's.
We had designed something excellent in one context. We had made ourselves irrelevant in the next.
The things that made the design valuable in the first place were exactly the things that made it valuable there. Take those away, or try to apply them somewhere else, and you may still have the same product. But you no longer have the same value.
The Definition of Good Is Not Stable
Two communities can experience the same broad problem but have completely different priorities because of their circumstances. A community dealing with immediate economic challenges may be focused on what it needs right now. A more economically stable community may be thinking about what life looks like in ten years. The problem might be shared. The definition of what matters is not.
This creates a real challenge for design. We often talk about designing for a community as though it has one set of needs and one definition of value. But communities are not homogeneous. They have different generations, economic conditions, histories, and aspirations. Even the same person can value completely different things at different points in their life.
Good cannot be treated as a universal design specification. It needs context. And context changes.
Who Should Define It
This raises a question I find genuinely uncomfortable: how much authority should a designer have in defining what good looks like for someone else?
We say we design for people. But perhaps sometimes we need to spend more time designing with people, especially when the consequences of the design extend well beyond the immediate user.
There is also a time dimension that is easy to overlook. A relationship created through a product today can shape behaviour years later. A dependency introduced through technology can become difficult to reverse. A system designed around one generation may create very different outcomes for the next.
So when we talk about designing well, the brief perhaps needs a few more questions. Who defines what is good? Whose definition are we using? What context are we designing within? And what happens when that context changes?
There may never be a perfect answer. But making those assumptions visible, questioning them regularly, and designing with enough humility to recognise that our definition of good is neither universal nor permanent, that might be a more responsible place to start than assuming we already know.
Dr. Idrees Chasi's work on designing across cultures and contexts, and his research into how different communities define value differently, is what sharpened this question for me. The more I sit with it, the more I think it belongs in every design brief.