Two recent practitioner blog posts converge on a problem that runs through my own research into planning, governance, and design. In a recent week-note, I reflected on Jaimes Nel's (2026) recent proposal of the IO Loop model and its suggestion that the designer's "compass" - a capacity for evaluation and adaptation - is what distinguishes productive design from mere process adherence. Nel argues that the conversation about good design, or the role of design as an exercise in taste and judgement, "comes tantalisingly close to capturing this but misses the mark somewhat by skimming the surface"; evaluation, in his account, asks "is it good?" rather than "does it look good?". MC Dean (2026a) who Nel references arrives at a parallel diagnosis from a different direction: design frameworks were optimised for slow-moving production environments, and now that AI-accelerated tooling allows a product manager to move from idea to interactive prototype in an afternoon, the skills that matter - systems thinking, empathy, taste, strategic thinking - are precisely what gets bypassed when teams ship "good enough" output without the design conversation. Both are identifying an evaluative capacity that design practice depends on but has not adequately theorised; and both are describing conditions in which that capacity is structurally suppressed - whether by governance frameworks that reduce design to a stage within a programme plan, or by production velocities that bypass the design conversation entirely. The question both raise, and one that connects to my research into service design in NPM public sector programme management and decision-support contexts, is what that evaluative capacity actually consists of, and what becomes of the designer's role when the production layer is increasingly automated, or the constraints of the programme to rigid, predetermined or focussed on speed of delivery to support good design decision making and judgement anyway.
This evaluative capacity is under pressure from two directions that my research has explored: programme governance that recognises only the planning register - whether the process has been followed, whether milestones have been met - while leaving unexamined the design judgements that framed those milestones in the first place; and AI-accelerated production that bypasses the design conversation entirely, automating what Verganti and Vendraminelli (2020) call the problem-solving layer while leaving problem-framing irreducibly human. Both compress or eliminate the space in which evaluative judgement operates - one through reification of process into governance checkpoints, the other through velocity that outpaces the reflective engagement design requires.
This post attempts to unpack what that design capacity actually consists of. The design literature I've encountered in my PhD research, across a variety of traditions, offers not one but seven distinct theoretical accounts of evaluative judgement in design, each operating at a different register. They are not competing explanations of the same phenomenon; they describe different aspects of what it means to evaluate whether a design is working. Taken together, they constitute a richer account of Nel's compass than either practitioner intuition or the narrower discourse about aesthetic taste can provide.
These accounts are drawn from traditions with genuinely different ontological commitments - Kantian aesthetics, Peircean phenomenology, second-order cybernetics, Aristotelian practical philosophy, somaesthetics, organisational theory, and ecological psychology. The diversity is deliberate. Evaluative capacity, if these accounts are right, is a phenomenon no single philosophical tradition captures; each illuminates a register the others leave dark.
Compositional judgement: the architecture of design evaluation
Nelson and Stolterman (2014) provides one of the most architecturally complete accounts of design judgement. In The Design Way, they argue that design judgement is a distinct category - neither metric nor scientific - that operates through several interlocking "ideal types". The signature form is what they call compositional judgement: "bringing things together in a relational whole", encompassing "aesthetic and ethical as well as sensual considerations" (Nelson and Stolterman, 2014, p. 13). This is not the judgement of whether a single element is good or bad; it is the judgement of whether diverse elements cohere as an intentional totality.
Nelson and Stolterman's compositional judgement resonates with what Ana Kustrak Koper and I termed the designer as "holist" - one of ten generative metaphors for the service designer role identified in our NORDES 2023 paper, discussed in The Service Designer as Abstract Signifier. The holist does not resolve design dimensions in sequence but holds them in simultaneous tension; the compositional act is precisely the act of making form, function, ethics, aesthetics, and material constraint cohere as a single intentional whole rather than as separately optimised parameters.
Nelson and Stolterman distinguish this from two adjacent forms:
Appreciative judgement, drawing on Vickers, concerns "determining what is to be considered as background and what requires attention as foreground" (Nelson and Stolterman, 2014, p. 13) - the figure/ground distinction that precedes any evaluation.
Connective judgement concerns how functional assemblies bind together. The three forms are not sequential stages but interlocking capacities that operate simultaneously during design work.
What makes them distinctively design judgements, rather than general cognitive capacities, is that they deal with "volition and desiderata" (Nelson and Stolterman, 2014, p. 13): they concern what is desired, not what is optimally calculated. As Nelson and Stolterman put it, "compositions never emerge from prescriptive rules or principles. They are always the result of acts of judgment" (Nelson and Stolterman, 2014, p. 21).
Conceptually thick aesthetic judgement: the philosophical grounding
Jane Forsey (2013) approaches design evaluation from philosophical aesthetics, developing a Kantian account grounded in the concept of dependent beauty. Her argument turns on a distinction between free beauty - which responds to formal appearance without requiring knowledge of what an object is - and dependent beauty, which is "conceptually thick": it requires knowledge of what an object is and what it is for. Design judgement, Forsey argues, is necessarily of the latter kind.
To judge a designed object aesthetically, you must know its purpose, understand how other realisations of that purpose have been achieved, and have experience of using it. Forsey (2013, p. 9) demonstrates this through a sustained comparison of two coffee pots: you cannot discover that brass conducts heat (burning your fingers), that conical shapes resist unscrewing with soapy hands, or that aluminium corrodes without actually using the objects. The judgement integrates form and function not as separate considerations but as a "fully integrated teleological style" in which "differences between objects - and innovations to objects - can be both formal and functional, and both elements contribute to their beauty, not separately but in the fully integrated teleological style that they display in the contingent way that their purposes are realised" (Forsey, 2013, p. 9).
This challenges any account of design evaluation as either purely formal (how does it look?) or purely functional (does it work?). The evaluative capacity Forsey describes requires domain knowledge, functional knowledge, and comparative knowledge operating together. It develops through use and accumulates through experience - which is why, as Forsey acknowledges, "no one knows all of the elements involved in creating the perfect espresso maker" (Forsey, 2013, p. 9). The evaluative capacity is always partial, always developing, never complete.
Aesthetic feeling as disposition: the phenomenological register
Where Forsey emphasises the knowledge-laden character of design judgement, Kamil Michlewski (2016) identifies a different register: a pre-reflective disposition that operates beneath and alongside conceptual analysis. Drawing on Peirce, Michlewski distinguishes aesthetic feeling from emotional evaluation. "The latter are secondary sensations, like symptoms and transitions, whereas aesthetic feeling is more like a disposition. It attracts or repels, according to Peirce" (Michlewski, 2016, p. 13). Susan Vihma, whom Michlewski cites, describes this as "immediate, inexplicable and un-intellectual consciousness that runs in a continuous stream through our lives" (Michlewski, 2016, p. 13).
Aesthetic feeling in this account is not an emotion (which would be a secondary phenomenon) but a firstness - a mode of immediate consciousness that registers quality before reflective analysis begins. Michlewski (2016, p. 15) describes this as a "deep aesthetic gauge" that designers use to "assess the efficacy of the idea in the face of enormous complexity and 'wickedness' of the problem". The gauge operates on "complicated, multidimensional factors of taste, integrity, tone, beauty, rhythm and meaning, which need to be addressed in the process of design" and which "are only partially susceptible to scientific analysis" (Michlewski, 2016, p. 13).
Kolko (2010) extends this Peircean analysis in a complementary direction. Where Michlewski focuses on firstness - the immediate felt quality that precedes reflection - Kolko focuses on the abductive inference that follows: design synthesis as "a way to apply abductive logic within the confines of a design problem" (Kolko, 2010, p. 5), an "abductive sensemaking process of manipulating, organizing, pruning, and framing data in an effort to produce information and knowledge" (Kolko, 2010, p. 14). The evaluative dimension operates through the designer's frame: "synthesis taps deeply into the ability of a designer to judge, through a highly subjective frame, the design problem she is solving" (Kolko, 2010, p. 4). Michlewski's aesthetic feeling registers that something is right or wrong; Kolko's abductive synthesis is the inferential move through which that registration becomes a design hypothesis. Both draw on Peirce, but they occupy different registers - phenomenological firstness and logical abduction - which together describe how felt quality becomes propositional claim.
The relationship between Michlewski's account and Forsey's is complementary rather than contradictory. Forsey identifies the conceptual structure of design judgement; Michlewski identifies the felt dimension that accompanies and sometimes precedes it. A designer looking at a prototype may experience an immediate sense that something is wrong (Michlewski's aesthetic feeling) and then articulate what is wrong through the kind of conceptually thick analysis Forsey describes. The two registers operate in tandem; neither is sufficient alone.
Mads Nygaard Folkmann (2013; 2023) provides a framework that systematises the relationship between these two registers and extends it further - a framework I first explored in the context of service aesthetics and the challenge of articulating aesthetic judgement across different professional domains. His account of design aesthetics distinguishes three dimensions through which design frames experience: the sensual, the conceptual, and the contextual. The sensual dimension concerns "sensory appeal... how design objects - by sensory and tactile effects, outer shape, and use function - create an appeal to human experience" (Folkmann, 2023, p. 9); this is the territory Michlewski's Peircean firstness occupies. The conceptual dimension concerns "framing of understanding through concrete objects and solutions" (Folkmann, 2023, p. 9) - design objects as aesthetic media that structure modes of understanding - which maps onto the knowledge-laden evaluation Forsey describes. The contextual dimension concerns "systems of meaning; ideology" and "the wider implications of the circulation of objects on a cultural, social, and political level" (Folkmann, 2023, pp. 9-10); this is the register that connects forward to the phronetic account below, where evaluation extends beyond the object itself to the situation it serves.
What Folkmann adds to the Forsey-Michlewski pairing is the insistence that these dimensions operate simultaneously rather than sequentially. The sensual, conceptual, and contextual "are negotiated in various ways" (Folkmann, 2023, p. 12) in any evaluative encounter with a designed object. A designer evaluating a prototype is not first feeling (sensual), then analysing (conceptual), then considering context (contextual); they are doing all three at once, and the evaluative judgement emerges from the interaction between them. Folkmann's earlier work frames this through the concept of possibility: design is "a means of exploring the possible and giving it material expression", operating through "a dialectic between the openness of the possible and the closure of form and material" (Folkmann, 2013, p. 15). The evaluative question, in Folkmann's terms, is whether the design has successfully negotiated this dialectic - whether the closure of form adequately expresses the possibilities it was meant to realise. This connects to what Pearl and Mackenzie (2018) describe as the third rung of the "Ladder of Causation" - discussed in Counterfactual Thinking and Human-AI Teaming - where the capacity for counterfactual imagination goes beyond observing regularities (rung one) and predicting the effects of interventions (rung two) to asking what would have happened had things been different. The evaluative act Folkmann describes requires precisely this counterfactual capacity: imagining what the design could have been, not just assessing what it is.
Shusterman's (2008) somaesthetics - introduced in the context of immateriality and the sensual in service design - provides a philosophical foundation for what Michlewski describes phenomenologically. Where Michlewski identifies pre-reflective feeling as a Peircean firstness, Shusterman locates it in a disciplined bodily practice: somaesthetics is "the critical meliorative study of one's experience and use of one's body as a locus of sensory-aesthetic appreciation (aesthesis) and creative self-fashioning" (Shusterman, 2008, p. 11). The key word is "meliorative": bodily awareness is not a fixed capacity but something that can be deliberately cultivated and refined. Höök (2018, p. 7) extends this into design practice directly, arguing that "training aesthetic sensibility to prepare for soma design entails a deep engagement with your own self, your own soma, during the design process" and that somatic sensitivity must be cultivated through deliberate first-person engagement rather than acquired through analytical study alone. "Learning about your own soma is a prerequisite to designing with it" (Höök, 2018, p. 15). This adds a developmental dimension to Michlewski's account that Folkmann's framework systematises but does not itself supply. The "deep aesthetic gauge" is not an innate gift that some designers possess and others lack; it is a capacity that develops through sustained embodied engagement with the materials, contexts, and situations of design work - which is precisely what the phronetic account below also argues, from the direction of practical wisdom rather than bodily practice.
Cybernetic all-rightness: the process account
Ranulph Glanville, writing in Fischer and Herr's (2019) Design Cybernetics, reframes the evaluative moment in terms of second-order cybernetics. His central claim is that the design process, understood as a conversation between designer and situation, terminates not in an optimal solution but in what he calls "all-rightness": "a sense that this is 'just right'. This is an intuitive condition, an act of recognition and resolution rather than of a problem solved" (Glanville, in Fischer and Herr, 2019, p. 4).
The radical move in Glanville's account is that criteria do not precede the evaluation; they emerge from it. "There are no absolute criteria (there is no clear specification: the criteria emerge after the solution has been found and may be seen as being defined by the solution): design outcomes can only be validated as being good enough (the phrase introduced earlier), not by being best" (Glanville, in Fischer and Herr, 2019, p. 4). The conversation between designer and material - putting marks on paper, seeing what emerges, responding to what the situation offers back - is itself the evaluative process. The feeling of all-rightness is not a judgement applied to a result; it is the recognition that the conversation has reached a state of mutual accommodation.
This has consequences for how evaluative capacity relates to design process. If evaluation is inseparable from the conversational process itself, then it cannot be extracted from that process and applied externally. A manager reviewing a design output without having participated in the design conversation is not evaluating in Glanville's sense; they are making a different kind of judgement - perhaps Boland and Collopy's "decision attitude" judgement, which is the subject of the next section.
Sense of fit: the organisational dimension
Boland and Collopy (2004) shift the analysis from the individual designer to the organisational context in which design judgement operates - or fails to operate. Their distinction between a decision attitude and a design attitude in management is directly relevant to the institutional conditions that produce Nel's GPS problem and the reification dynamics I analysed in The Reification Gap.
The decision attitude, which Boland and Collopy (2004, p. 6) argue is "overwhelmingly dominant in management practice and education today", treats problem-solving as "making rational choices among alternatives" using tools of economic analysis, risk assessment, and calculation. The design attitude, by contrast, "views each project as an opportunity for invention that includes a questioning of basic assumptions" (Boland and Collopy, 2004, p. 6). The evaluative mechanism in the design attitude is a "sense of fit": "the way that the materials, technologies, logics, objectives, timing, scale, and scope of a design work together in harmony to support the overall purpose of the design project" (Boland and Collopy, 2004, p. 46). Crucially, Boland and Collopy insist that this sense of fit, "like an aesthetic judgment, is a subjective matter and should not be relinquished to a technique of calculation" (Boland and Collopy, 2004, p. 46).
The organisational implication is that institutions dominated by the decision attitude have structurally suppressed the evaluative capacity that design requires. The language of decision and increase, Boland and Collopy (2004, p. 46) argue, "is inherently antagonistic to the language of design and balance". When MC Dean (2026b) describes product managers shipping AI-generated output without the design conversation, the dynamic is precisely what Boland and Collopy predict: the decision attitude - does it meet the spec? does it ship on time? - displaces the design attitude's sense of fit, which would ask whether the elements cohere, whether the composition serves its purpose, whether the whole is more than the sum of its parts.
Phronesis: the ethical-practical grounding
The final account locates design evaluation in the Aristotelian tradition of practical wisdom. Vriens and Achterbergh (2009, p. 16) distinguish between techne (skill in making, directed toward producing a specific product) and phronesis (practical wisdom, directed toward living well). The deliberation in each is structurally different: "deliberation and judgment about making entails finding the most suitable means to produce some product", whereas deliberation in practical wisdom "entails finding an appropriate action instantiating the fulfilled life" in a given particular situation. Techne has a determinate, articulable end; phronesis has an end that cannot be decomposed or fully specified in advance.
For design, the distinction maps onto the difference between evaluating whether something is well-made (techne) and evaluating whether it is the right thing to be making, in this situation, for these people (phronesis). The phronetic judgement is irreducibly situated: it "develops as we acquire experience" (Vriens and Achterbergh, 2009, p. 16) and cannot be codified into methods or rules. Nelson (2021) extends this into design directly, arguing that the bridge between "that-which-is and that-which-ought-to-be is not crossed just by putting together more facts" but requires what the ancient Greeks called sophia - "the wise hand" - which Nelson defines as the integration of creative thinking and prudent action. This is the evaluative capacity that connects design judgement to ethical judgement: not just "is this good design?" but "is this good for the people it will serve?"
Ecological perception: the structural account
Burns and Hajdukiewicz's (2017) ecological interface design introduces a different kind of evaluative account - one that locates evaluation not in the evaluator's internal capacities but in the relationship between operator and work domain, mediated by the interface. Where the previous six accounts describe what the evaluator brings - knowledge, feeling, conversation, fit, wisdom - the ecological account asks what the environment must provide for evaluation to occur at all.
The tradition, rooted in Gibson's ecological psychology and developed through Rasmussen's cognitive engineering at Risø, makes a strong claim: that interfaces can be designed to make work domain constraints "perceptually available" (Burns and Hajdukiewicz, 2017, p. 3), so that evaluation becomes an act of perception rather than inference. "Visually showing multivariate constraints is possibly the strongest aspect of ecological design. These relationships are often complex and hard to understand. They may require calculation or looking things up in tables or manuals to confirm" (Burns and Hajdukiewicz, 2017, p. 6) - but an ecological display makes them visible without calculation. The work domain analysis that underpins EID produces an abstraction hierarchy - a means-ends structure connecting physical form through generalised function to functional purpose - and the interface is designed so that constraint violations at any level are directly perceptible. The operator evaluates not by knowing what should be the case (Forsey), or feeling that something is wrong (Michlewski), or sensing whether elements cohere (Boland and Collopy), but by perceiving whether the constraint structure holds.
This is a structurally different philosophical commitment from the other six accounts. EID emerges from first-order cybernetics and control engineering - the same Risø tradition that produced Rasmussen's skills-rules-knowledge taxonomy and informed Brehmer's DOODA loop discussed in the states-not-stages week-note. It shares with Glanville a cybernetic vocabulary but not a cybernetic ontology: Glanville's second-order cybernetics places the observer inside the system in a co-constitutive conversation; EID treats the work domain as an external constraint structure that the interface must reveal. The distinction matters because the two traditions make different claims about where evaluative criteria come from. In Glanville's account, criteria emerge from the conversation itself. In the ecological account, constraints exist in the work domain independently of the operator; the interface's task is to make them visible. The ecological account does not replace the others; it identifies the environmental condition without which the other capacities cannot fully operate. An expert with Forsey's conceptual thickness, Michlewski's dispositional sensitivity, and phronetic wisdom will still struggle to evaluate effectively if the interface conceals the constraint structure of the work domain it represents. I explored this connection between ecological interface design and service design in earlier week-notes on ecological perception in ward environments, the abstraction hierarchy applied to service journeys, and the means-ends analysis of clinical scheduling interfaces.
The command concept as military analogue
The military design literature offers a structural analogue to these evaluative accounts. In the states-not-stages week-note, I discussed Brehmer's (2004) Dynamic OODA loop and its reformulation of the command and control process as a set of functions connected by logical rather than temporal relations. The command concept - which Brehmer drew from Builder, Banks and Nordin (1999) - occupies a distinctive position in this model. It is "the commander's overall concept of how an operation is to be conducted" (Brehmer, 2004, p. 12), and Brehmer described deciding on a command concept as "probably the most important decision in the C2 process" (Brehmer, 2004, p. 12).
The command concept performs two functions that parallel the evaluative capacities described above. It filters information - determining what subset of available intelligence is actually attended to, based on the commander's emerging conception of the operation - and it breaks the purely reactive character of cybernetic loop models by introducing a proactive, goal-directed framing that precedes and shapes all subsequent planning. In Brehmer's (2006) revised model, the command concept was absorbed into the sensemaking function, whose output became explicitly a course of action (COA). The absorption is instructive: what had appeared as a separate evaluative step turned out to be inseparable from the sensemaking process itself - just as Glanville's all-rightness is inseparable from the design conversation.
Brehmer's (2006, p. 9) further observation that "evaluation and assessment of effects is not a separate stage in the DOODA loop, but is handled by the loop concept" resonates with the pattern across these accounts. Evaluation is not a discrete checkpoint that can be inserted into a process; it is an emergent property of the process's feedback structure. The quality of sensemaking determines the quality of planning; the quality of the command concept determines the quality of information filtering. These dependencies are logical, not temporal - which is why adding an "evaluation gate" to a design process (as governance often demands) misses what evaluation actually requires.
What the compass consists of
Read together, these seven accounts reveal that Nel's compass is not a single capacity but a family of evaluative modes operating at different registers. Forsey establishes what design judgement is: necessarily conceptually thick, requiring knowledge of purpose, experience of use, and awareness of alternatives. Nelson and Stolterman describe its integrative character: multiple interlocking judgement types - appreciative, compositional, connective - holding diverse elements together as a relational whole. Michlewski identifies the pre-reflective feeling that operates beneath conceptual analysis: a dispositional sense that attracts or repels before deliberation begins. Glanville shows how evaluation emerges from conversational engagement: criteria defined by the solution rather than preceding it, all-rightness recognised from within the loop. Boland and Collopy provide the organisational framing: the sense of fit as what gets systematically suppressed when the decision attitude dominates management practice. Phronesis provides the ethical-practical grounding: the form of judgement that connects technical making to wise action in particular situations. And Burns and Hajdukiewicz add the environmental dimension: that even an evaluator possessing all six of these capacities requires an interface that makes the work domain's constraint structure perceptually available.
What these accounts share - with the partial exception of the ecological account, which addresses the environment rather than the evaluator - is a rejection of evaluation as something that can be extracted from the design process and applied externally, as a gate, a review, a checklist, or a metric. This is the deeper problem with the GPS condition that Nel diagnoses: when design process becomes institutionalised as a sequence of stages with checkpoints, the evaluative capacity that should operate continuously throughout the work gets compressed into discrete moments of review that cannot bear the weight placed on them. The governance review asks "has the process been followed?" (the reification of process into a thing-like property of the organisation), when what the design requires is the continuous evaluative engagement that these seven accounts, in their different ways, describe. The ecological account's partial exception is instructive: Burns and Hajdukiewicz show that a well-designed interface can make certain constraint violations directly perceptible, reducing the inferential burden on the evaluator. But ecological displays support evaluation; they do not perform it. The means-ends structure must still be interpreted, the anomaly must still be situated, and the phronetic question of what to do about it remains irreducibly human.
MC Dean's (2026b) observation that teams are now "skipping steps on purpose" and "using intuition" can be read, through these accounts, as a rediscovery under pressure of what the evaluative literature has long argued: that the steps were never the point. The point was the evaluative capacity that the steps were supposed to create space for. When that capacity is present - when the designer possesses Forsey's domain knowledge, Michlewski's dispositional sensitivity, Nelson and Stolterman's compositional judgement, and phronetic awareness of what the situation requires - the process can be compressed, reordered, or partially skipped. When it is absent, no amount of process compliance can substitute.
The question this raises - and the one I take up in the next post - is what happens to this evaluative capacity in the context of AI-augmented design work. If these seven accounts are correct that evaluation requires domain knowledge, experiential disposition, conversational engagement, ethical-practical situation-reading, and an environment that reveals constraint structures, then the distribution of design work between human and machine becomes a question about which of these prerequisites can be computationally supported and which remain irreducibly human.
For service design specifically, the question is compounded by the nature of what is being designed. Services are not discrete artefacts but relational processes that unfold across people, institutions, and technologies over time; when algorithmic systems mediate the service encounter - clinical decision support that triages patients, eligibility algorithms that determine access, predictive models that shape what options are presented to whom - the evaluative capacity must operate not on an object but on a situation in which human judgement, institutional constraints, and machine inference interact in ways no single actor fully oversees. The seven accounts suggest that this evaluative work cannot be discharged by a governance checkpoint or an ethical review board alone; it requires the continuous engagement these traditions describe - domain knowledge, conversational attunement, phronetic situation-reading - operating within the sociotechnical system rather than applied to it from outside.
References
Boland, R. and Collopy, F. (2004). Managing as Designing. Stanford University Press.
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