Part 2: Design is a search for the opinions

Every tool and device carries an opinion. It pulls you toward certain behaviors and away from others. It makes some actions effortless and makes others annoying, slow, or expensive. This is responsibility of design, and also its greatest contribution. Making something great for others to benefit.

The level of opinion you introduce has tradeoffs. A very flexible system gives you many choices, but less guidance. An opinionated system gives you guidance, but fewer choices. People and businesses often buy opinionated systems for the same reason majority of the world buys cars, iPhones, or sandwiches. Someone already made a thousand decisions. You get the benefits quickly and move on to what matters, the work, the goal, getting from A to B.

The economy would grind to a halt if everyone rebuilt everything from scratch, from sandwiches to software. Civilization runs on shared decisions and reused solutions.

The “make your own things” from generic blocks idea is warm one, and I do appreciate it. Where it starts to lose me is when it tries to force a reality that doesn’t really exist, and it's not what people do or look for.

Look at any craft. The kitchen. The workshop. Purpose-built spaces filled with purpose-built tools, often shaped by centuries of tradition (also sometimes known as experience).

Serious craftspeople don’t operate in primitives. A chef doesn’t stock “a knife”, “a pot", “a carrot”. They have a specific knife, a specific size, a tradition they trust. A sushi chef doesn’t buy a generic knife from IKEA. A hobbyist might, because they don’t know better and they don’t do it every day. A cabinetmaker doesn’t buy “a saw.” They buy the best milling machine they can afford. As someone goes deeper into a craft, their needs get more specific, not more generic.

The metaphor of single use tools, like apps being avocado slicer goes only goes so far. If you're slicing avocado all day, then you might really want to invest in a good avocado slicer while most people mind find it useless or excessive. And while it's true that some apps are useful for one singular thing, like a fart app, doing one singular thing is not necessarily bad. A tool that does one thing extremely well can be valuable, even admirable. It's not a monstrosity.

What to me is a monstrosity is the all-encompassing systems that don’t do almost anything particularly well. Trying to reduce life into atomic blocks, taking over everything. Like the Star Trek's Borg. They assimilate the world into generic concepts to prove some unified grand theory.

Push that worldview into physical space and you get generic houses, white cubes. Then you hand people foam blocks and Minecraft-style primitives and tell them to construct their dwellings and tools. For some that could be very appealing, but I think many would fine it quite tiresome or not that inspiring.

Put that next to the world people actually love living in. Buildings shaped by tradition. Furniture shaped by designers. Art shaped by artists. Tools shaped by makers. Each object carrying a specific purpose and a story. That fabric is part of what life is and what makes it interesting.

Software isn’t exempt from this. Everything has conventions, all the way down. Programming languages have opinions. Frameworks have opinions. Even machine code comes with rules. There’s no true opinionless layer. Every system operates with some rules, in other words, opinions.

So the work is choosing which opinions to embed, and where. The search is for the design that feel human and help people get somewhere meaningful without trying dissolve the world into a bland table of primitives.

Instead of one grand theory or unification, I prefer a world of passion projects. Unique contributions. Ideas layered over centuries.

Not a bland, atomic table of primitives for me to play with.