Personal taste is an unavoidable part of being a designer, but what happens when the person you’re designing for loves everything you don’t? A reflection on taste, ego, empathy and commercial reality, and why good design should feel good, not just look good.

As technology makes it easier to create almost anything, I keep coming back to the things that still feel unmistakably human. A reflection on creativity, imperfection, craft and why efficiency isn’t always the most interesting thing we can ask of design.

Good design has an ease to it. The information is where you expect it to be, the space makes sense, the instructions are clear and somebody has already done a lot of the thinking for you. But designing beyond our own experience means asking a harder question: who did we forget to think about?