Empathy looks like the key to making better design decisions, since defining behavior is basically communicating. (This is why incidental design leaves bad taste—it’s noise.) Singling out software as being made of decisions is not entirely fair though, as this applies well generally to significant part of our conscious reality.
On a higher level there are decisions that do not directly define the behavior of the end thing under some specific conditions, but rather apply to the process by which that design happens. Those meta-decisions can also be incidental, and can be felt if you take the end thing as existing in longer time frame.
Comments
Empathy looks like the key to making better design decisions, since defining behavior is basically communicating. (This is why incidental design leaves bad taste—it’s noise.) Singling out software as being made of decisions is not entirely fair though, as this applies well generally to significant part of our conscious reality.
On a higher level there are decisions that do not directly define the behavior of the end thing under some specific conditions, but rather apply to the process by which that design happens. Those meta-decisions can also be incidental, and can be felt if you take the end thing as existing in longer time frame.