Intelligent Design, Eames-Style
Hi, I’m Mark Nottingham. I write about the Web, protocol design, HTTP, Internet governance, and more. This is a personal blog, it does not represent anyone else. Find out more.
For a while, I’ve had the fairly well-known Charles Eames quote “Design depends largely on constraints” as the tagline on my blog (if you read this in a feed aggregator, you’ll have to go to one of the HTML pages to see it).
In putting together one of her classes, Anitra came across the full interview from which it was sourced. The relevant section says it well, whether the topic is furniture design, graphic design or designing the architecture of networked software;
What constraints? The sum of all constraints. Here is one of the few effective keys to the design problem—the ability of the designer to recognize as many of the constraints as possible—his willingness and enthusiasm for working within these constraints—the constraints of price, of size, of strength, balance, of surface, of time, etc.; each problem has its own peculiar list.
Read the whole thing, though; it’s only a single page, and there are a few other gems applicable to programmers as well; e.g.,
