 When someone decided what the thousand dollar bill should look like, was that the grand design? Take a moment and look around you. No, seriously, look around. I'll tell you when you should come back. Every single man-made object that you can see, from the screen to the website you're using to the room you're sitting in, had some person or group of people deciding every single minute detail of how it should look, what shape it should be, what it should be made of, how you would use it, how much it should cost. I mean, you and I have always lived in a world of stuff made by people, so we take the thought intrinsic to the creation of that stuff for granted, but just take a moment and appreciate the fact that every aspect of everything you own is the way that it is because someone has decided it should be that way. Okay, come on back. So we tend to think of designers as people in Black Turtle necks and square frame glasses who draw iPad concept art all day, but design is really something that we all do whether we realize it or not. If you're figuring out how to arrange your furniture so that your tiny apartment looks less cramped, that's interior design. If you're figuring how to hook up the bundle of cables behind your TV so that you can switch between your DVD player and your cable box easily, that's circuit design. Even just getting up in the morning and deciding what you want to wear for the day is technically fashion design. You are a designer, and although design varies as much as the kinds of stuff that people make, there are certain things that the person who decided what color your shoes should be has in common with the person who programmed your computer's operating system. There are certain ideals of design that are universal, and no matter what you do for a living, knowing those principles can give you direction when you need to think about the best way to do something. For example, it's universal that a good design minimizes complexity. If you can achieve exactly the same result with one thing instead of two, you've just have the number of things that can go wrong. I mean, if you look at an engine, it looks really complicated, but there really is no part in this thing that doesn't absolutely need to be there. You might say that in aesthetic detail like the nameplate is superfluous, but those details are part of what make the experience of using or owning something, and I guarantee that there was a conversation at Ferrari about where to feature their logo under the hood. It's also possible to want something to look busy and crammed with stuff, but even then, there shouldn't be anything extra. Extra stuff costs time, money, resources, weight, size, it just sucks. Second, a good design considers everybody who has to interact with it, and makes their lives easier whenever possible. YouTube has put a ton of effort into making its website easy for you to use, because if you had to fight through awkward menus or slow loading pages to watch cute pictures of puppies, you might decide to go do something else. However, although it's partially built for you, YouTube is also built to make it easy for advertisers to buy ads. It's also built to make it easy for YouTube's programmers to edit and update code. Every one of those interactions is engineered to be smooth, efficient, intuitive, and to leave everyone involved confident in what they've done with the site. Design is all about serving human interests. There's sometimes a balancing act between those interests, but a good designer will consider the full range of human interaction, from getting materials that are easy to build with to making sure that the final product is safe once it's in the landfill, and will make life easier for every human being in between. Third, a good design doesn't make any unnecessary compromises. There's no reason that a sculpture can't be easy to assemble, or that a bulldozer can't be pretty. The people who buy sculptures and the people who buy bulldozers generally care about very different things, but practicing good design means caring about every person who has to interact with what you make, whether they're a connoisseur of fine art, or a construction worker, or both. Of course, the people who make bulldozers aren't going to spend millions of dollars to make their stuff look pristine like Apple computers, because that would be wasteful. But so long as they're making stuff, it doesn't have to be ugly. You're probably already familiar with these concepts on some level, but professional designers focus on principles like these and work to incorporate them into every aspect of everything that they make, until they finally stick it in a box and ship it. What's really crazy is that the absolute best designs are so keyed in to human thought that they become essentially transparent. They become extensions of ourselves. Like you probably don't think much about the thousands upon thousands of man hours of work that has gone into designing Google, you just go to Google, type in what you want, and it's usually the first result. But taking a moment to step back and think about the decisions that go into the things that you interact with every day, from your mouse to your underwear, can help you to recognize those designs that are so good that you can't even see them anymore. And in so doing, maybe learn something. You are swimming in an ocean of human thought centered on you and making your life better. And taking some time to think about what works and what doesn't, can maybe help you figure out how to make it better yourself. If you have any design in your life that you really appreciate for some reason, whether it's how your phone fits perfectly in your hand or how your favorite pen writes, please leave a comment below and let me know what you think. Thank you very much for watching. Don't forget to blah blah subscribe, blah share, and I'll see you next week.