Designs for parsonage houses, alms houses, etc. etc. with examples of gables, and other curious remains of old English architecture

When I say that design must be for users, I don't mean to imply that good design aims at some kind of lowest common denominator. You can pick any group of users you want. If you're designing a tool, for example, you can design it for anyone from beginners to experts, and what's good design for one group might be bad for another. The point is, you have to pick some group of users. I don't think you can even talk about good or bad design except with reference to some intended user. You're most likely to get good design if the intended users include the designer himself. When you design something for a group that doesn't include you, it tends to be for people you consider less sophisticated than you, not more sophisticated. And looking down on the user, however benevolently, always seems to corrupt the designer. I suspect few housing projects in the US were designed by architects who expected to live in them. You see the same thing in programming languages. C, Lisp, and Smalltalk were created for their own designers to use ...»