Week 10: Is Bad Design Actually Bad?

Some of the bad design you've spent nine weeks mocking turns out to be doing its job on purpose — and now you have to defend it

10 May 2027

Airport security is slow, invasive and frustrating, and almost nobody would call it badly designed. This week is the course’s central twist: design quality depends on what behaviour a system is trying to produce, and for whom, not on how it feels to be on the receiving end of it. Bad experience and bad design are different claims, and so are good experience and good design — a distinction this week asks you to hold onto for the rest of the semester, because it’s the one the Redemption Project is built on.

Outline#

• design quality as “what behaviour is this trying to produce, and for whom”
• frustrating-but-necessary design: security, warnings, confirmations, interlocks
• why slowing someone down on purpose can be the whole point, not a failure
• Defend the Indefensible, this week’s session
• from here, weeks 11 and 12 are the Redemption Project’s own workshop, not new topics