Designed for Opinion

Design is incredibly easy to react to. That doesn’t mean it’s easy to judge.

In the studio, we often talk about why design is questioned in ways other professions usually aren’t. Not challenged in a healthy, investigative way, but questioned at the level of taste.

Design is visible. Immediate. Emotional. You see it and you feel something straight away. Like it. Don’t like it. Not sure. That speed of reaction is part of what makes design powerful. It is also what makes it deceptively easy to overrule.

Give ten plumbers a toilet to install and you will get broadly the same result.

Give ten designers a toilet to design and you will get ten very different outcomes.

That difference matters. Other professions feel objective. Design, because it deals in tone, aesthetics and emotional resonance, feels subjective. And when something feels subjective, it naturally invites opinion.

“I don’t like that colour” is a real reaction.

“I’m worried that colour won’t stand out in a busy environment” is a judgment about performance.

One is preference.

The other is purpose.

Both matter. Only one tells us whether the work is actually doing its job.

Another reason design is questioned so easily is consequence. If you ignore a doctor, you may get ill. If you ignore an electrician, your house could burn down. If you ignore a lawyer, you could end up in court. The risks are direct and visible.

Design rarely works like that.

The impact of poor design is usually slower and harder to see. A weakened brand. Reduced trust. Lower conversion. Missed opportunity. These things do not explode, they quietly erode. And unless you actively test against alternatives, you often never truly see what was lost.

When consequences feel invisible, expertise feels optional.

There is also status. Professions like medicine, law and engineering are institutionally protected. You need qualifications to enter and accreditation to remain. Design, for better and worse, is largely unprotected. Anyone can call themselves a designer. The tools are accessible. The barriers are low. That openness is a strength, but it also blurs where professional expertise really begins and ends.

Then there is the sheer breadth of the discipline. Design spans identity, digital, packaging, environments, products, services and systems. The word “designer” on its own is almost meaningless without context. So people often fall back on the version of design they already understand. Very often that means style or decoration, even when the work in front of them is neither.

This is where fashion plays a big role in the confusion.

Fashion is absolutely a form of design, but it is a discipline that openly optimises for culture, identity and trend before it optimises for function. It is built for reaction. Built for turnover. Built for disagreement. Opinion is not a side effect in fashion, it is the engine.

Most other forms of design work very differently. Brand systems, digital products, environments and services are not meant to turn over every season. They are meant to hold steady, reduce friction, create clarity and build trust over time. They do not exist to generate novelty, they exist to generate consistency.

The tension appears when fashion logic is applied to non-fashion design. When brand is treated like an outfit. When identity is judged like a trend. When systems are critiqued the same way a seasonal collection is. That is when design starts getting evaluated primarily through taste, even when what it really needs to be judged on is performance.

On top of that, most of the work itself is invisible.

Doctors diagnose and treat.
Joiners measure, cut and build.
Engineers calculate loads, tolerances and forces.

Designers build ideas, strategies and systems. You usually only ever see the outcome. When people cannot see the complexity of the process, it is easy to underestimate the expertise behind it.

Design also creates a culture of feedback. A roofer does not ask how you would like your chimney structurally repaired. Designers do invite collaboration, because the work must serve the people commissioning it as well as the end audience. That shared authorship is a strength. But once feedback becomes the norm, it also becomes expected at every level, including the purely subjective one.

And design is personal. It represents values, ambition, reputation and identity. The emotional investment is real. A question about a colour or a font is often really a question about confidence, risk and what happens if this goes wrong in public.

From our side, when we push back on certain feedback, it is rarely about defending taste. It is about defending context. The audience, the environment, the competition, the compromises already made and the future life of the work.

Most design work is not answering, “does this look nice?”

It is answering, “will this work in the real world?”

From the other side, questioning design makes sense too. Visual decisions carry public risk. They attach themselves to reputations. So we often end up with two people talking about the same anxiety from different angles.

One says, “I don’t like it.”

The other hears, “This doesn’t solve the problem.”

Both might be true. They are just being expressed at different levels.

Designers also have to own their part. If the thinking only lives in our heads or flashes past in a deck, feedback will always default to taste. If the reasons behind decisions are not made visible and verbal, people can only respond to what they see.

You should not need to be a designer to question design.

But there does need to be shared language to question it properly.

Instead of “I don’t like it,”

“I’m worried how this will land with the audience.”

Instead of “Can we try another font?”

“I’m not sure this fits the tone we’re aiming for.”

Those small shifts turn opinion into direction.

Design will always invite opinions. It is visual, public and emotional. That is its power.

But the best work does not come from eliminating opinions.

It comes from learning how to talk about them better.

When the question changes from “Do I like this?” to “Will this work?” the entire relationship between design and decision-making changes with it.