Design succeeds when every element serves its purpose without inner contradictions. Therefore, designers must ask about the purpose first to avoid internal conflict in design.
Christopher Alexander suggested that things with the "The Quality Cannot be Named" feel alive, whole, comfortable, exact, free, egoless, and timeless. At the core of this quality is the absence of inner contradiction.
Inner contradictions destroy purpose. A device meant to save time but difficult to use has failed. A game that claims to be fun but structured to frustrate is fundamentally flawed.
Skilled designers resist the temptation to rationalize these flaws away. Instead, they hunt for contradictions relentlessly and eliminate them.
This requires asking fundamental questions. What is the purpose of the whole system? What is the purpose of each part? Does anything work against that purpose? If so, how can it be reshaped or removed?
For me, removing inner contradictions is the most essential design guidance because it forces clarity about purpose itself.
Any design can be brilliant for one purpose but terrible for another.
For example, complex interfaces fail for casual users, but are ideal when built for experts performing sophisticated tasks. Similarly, Inefficient approaches seem wasteful until you realize the purpose is creating something soulful rather than optimized. Therefore, purpose must come first, and the design must align with its purpose.
Moreover, inner contradiction not only kills design, but also undermines human fulfillment because "There can be no happiness if the things we believe in are different from the things we do."