Great design is not just a solution, it is the elimination of the problem.

Onur Cobanli e fa'amatala mai:
I am pretty much certain I had said this in another way, but before I explain my quote, I want to tell you why I bother to explain my other quotes; it is because I do not want people to put into my mouth; I do not want people later to hypothesise why I said what I said, I want to tell my opinion as is, without little interpretation as possible, that being said; great design should mainly focus on the elimination of the problem; there are many products, projects, services that focus on providing you with relief; relief is a pain killer; most products are pain killers; they make you numb to your pain; the cause of the pain is still there, the cause of the pain must be addressed; of course that is more expensive and requires more effort and thinking but it should be done; great design must focus on finding the source of the problem and fixing it; we must cure the patient instead of providing the patient with temporarily reliefs that are not curing the patient; to cure the patient, you must eliminate the issue that is causing the pain at the first place; for all products, for all services, we could think, why these exists; is it because of inability of another product to fulfil its duty completely; is it a systematic problem or because of government? You really need to dig deep into the source. Let me give you some very tangible examples: You need to buy a car because you need to go to work long distance; your design solution to buy a car is bad design; you moving next to work or working from distance or hopefully getting a job next to work if you have to travel, that is proper good design; not only you now do not need car to go to work (sure buy it anyway and travel other places), but you do not lose hours in the traffic every day either. You have a datacentre with heated up computers, you buy cooling; that’s bad design; you must move your datacentre to a cold climate so you could use the external cold reserve, which is free and also more environmentally sound, that is good design; or you should redesign the CPUs to be more efficient and emit less heat, that is even better design. The problem as you see is that the solution scope is generally not within the same design domain; but it is in the larger design domain nonetheless, therefore while it is easy to say this quote, it is very hard to put it into action; yet we should because in the long run this is the way.