People think design is about making things pretty — mostly physical products or visual systems. But design isn’t just polishing the appearance of something. It's making deliberate, structural choices about it. Beyond the physical, visible realm, design is perhaps more important in invisible abstractions that shape our lives.

Nation-states by (lack of) design

Think of the country you live in.

A country is the byproduct of countless decisions made by different people across time and space. It’s like writing a Google doc that stretches for centuries and involves people from very different places. All the presidents, insurgents, founders, military leaders, and even the common people that has lived along each historical period. All of them have shaped the country with their actions, decisions, thoughts, and beliefs.

This is what happens in the absence of the design.

It’s the aggregate of disparate things into a messy ensemble. Each component is there by chance, not intention. The clutter compounds over time and you get incredibly messy systems that try to solve problems by adding more complexity instead of reducing it. The added complexity brings more problems, which bears more complexity. It’s a negative feedback loop that runs through the veins of most nation-states.

This goes beyond countries though, as most systems work like this.

Clutter in software organisations

Another compelling example are tech companies.

People who run them aren’t technical and the engineers have no idea about business strategy. The result is knowledge silos that make it extremely hard to operate efficiently. As countries, companies accumulate clutter over time because of this.

For example, the management may want to implement machine learning for something that can be fixed with regular expressions (a much simpler alternative). This requires hiring machine learning engineers to train the models, data engineers to process the data for the models, data analysts to turn the data into actionable insights, and teaching your sales team to sell machine learning models. All of it sprinkled with increasing infrastructure costs that beg for an army of devops engineers.

This single decision doesn’t only affect the product line, revenue, or cost structure, but changes the organisation as a whole. Now imagine hundreds of such decisions made every year and multiply it by thousands of companies. The upshot is utter inefficiency.

Better design is the solution for this.