Design Trade-offs
Design is rarely about finding the perfect solution.
It’s about choosing which compromises you’re willing to live with.
Every decision trades one thing for another:
– Flexibility for stability
– Simplicity for capability
– Standardisation for expression
What matters isn’t avoiding trade-offs.
It’s being deliberate about which ones you make early — and which ones you defer.
In my experience, the most resilient spaces aren’t the ones with the fewest compromises.
They’re the ones where the compromises were consciously chosen, not discovered later.
