Design Principles
The Principle of Operational Need – Design must be a response to individual or social requirements which can be met by technology or culture.
The Principle of Physical Realizability – Design objectives must be goods or services which are physically realizable.
The Principle of (Economic) Worthwhileness – The goods/services being designed must have use to the consumer that equals or exceeds the costs of production.
The Principle of Resource (Financial) Feasibility – The operations of designing, producing, and distributing the good(s) must be financially supportable.
The Principle of Optimality – The choice of design concept must be optimal among the available alternatives; the selection of a manifestation of the chosen design must be optimal among all permissible manifestations.
The Principle of Design Criterion – Optimality must be established relative to a design criterion which represents the designer’s compromise among possible conflicting value judgments that include those of the consumer, the producer, the distributor, and his own.
The Principle of Design Morphology – Design is a progression from the abstract to the concrete.
The Principle of Design Process – Design is an interactive problem-solving process.
The Principle of Subproblems – In attending to the solution of a design problem, there is uncovered a substratum or subproblems; the solution of the original problem is dependent on the solutions of the subproblems.
The Principle of Reduction of Uncertainty – Design is a processing of information that results in a transition from uncertainty about the success or failure of a design toward certainty.
The Principle of Economic Worth of Evidence – Information and its processing has a cost which must be balanced by the worth of the evidence bearing on the success or failure of design (Optional).
The Principle of Basis for Decision – A design project is terminated whenever confidence in its failure is sufficient to warrant its abandonment, or is continued when confidence in an available design solution is high enough to warrant the commitment of resources necessary for the next phase.
The Principle of Minimum Commitment – In the solution of a design problem at any stage of the process, commitments which will fix future design decisions must not be made beyond what is necessary to execute the immediate solution. This will allow maximum freedom in finding solutions to subproblems at lower levels in the design.
The Principle of Communication – The design is a description of an object and a prescription for its production; therefore, it will have existence to the extent that it is expressed in the available modes of communication.