Everyone has an idea of what is good design and what is bad design. Each person's ideas are different. They are usually not articulated, and we just have strong but unclear ideas of what we like and what we don't. We pick up on one detail or another, either turning us on or off, and we are ambivalent towards wide ranges of factors.
For many people, energy efficiency and environmental impact fall into that blind spot that doesn't make the slightest difference to their stylistic appraisal of a product.
In building our house, inevitably my wife and I did not have the same ideas, and the architect's ideas were different to both of ours.
Here's a list of things that I think I believe are criteria for good design. As I said our ideas about design come more from the gut than the mind, and even if they are from the mind, they're from the bit that doesn't do rational thought or logical organisation. Or lists of criteria. So these are criteria that I think I should be using to decide what is good design.
Simple
Sympathetic
Worth what you pay
Uses what you've got
Uses as little as possible
Doesn't need much looking after
Disobeys rules if there is a good reason to do so
They're ordered more on aesthetics than in order of priority, but the number, seven, was not chosen for it's luck. This is an exhaustive list. That's as many things as I could think of, although there may be some criteria that I've forgotten.
