The Case for Programmatic Design

There was a time when design aspired to be correct.

Not fashionable, not persuasive - simply correct.

The designer’s task was to translate function into form with the least possible distortion. What worked was what was true.

That idea has become almost embarrassing now. In the long decline from craft to commerce, correctness has been replaced by engagement. The modern designer no longer pursues coherence; he manages behaviour. The interface has become an instrument of compliance - always helpful, always “intuitive,” never honest.

Consumer design is built on the assumption that truth is too sharp for general use. It must be softened, framed, and constantly reinterpreted in the language of the approachable. A button no longer means “press here.” It means “trust me.” And as with all institutions that demand trust without earning it, something essential collapses beneath the surface.

What has been lost is proportion - the sense that a system can be right in itself. I am not speaking of mathematical correctness, but of moral and structural integrity: the alignment of intent, logic, and consequence. When design forgets that alignment, it drifts into performance. The contemporary interface does not reveal; it gestures. It reassures. It sells.

Programmatic design, by contrast, is not concerned with persuasion. It is concerned with coherence. Its beauty lies in the fact that it cannot lie. The loop between input and outcome is immediate, unforgiving, and therefore honest. When I design Human–Machine Interfaces - systems that control autonomous vehicles, heavy equipment, or remote robotic operations - there is no room for opinion. If the design is wrong, the machine will tell you, and it will do so unambiguously.

This is design as correspondence, not communication. The interface is not a performance of empathy; it is an articulation of cause and effect. Each signal, each warning, each visual state exists because it must. It is not delightful. It is correct.

And in that correctness, something deeply human re-emerges. The operator and the system enter a relationship based not on seduction but on respect. The design assumes competence. It assumes responsibility. It assumes that both parties - human and machine - are capable of error and therefore bound by precision.

We need more of that spirit in design, not less. The insistence on seamlessness has produced a generation of designers allergic to friction and ambiguity, as though confusion were a sin rather than a signal. But friction is not failure; it is feedback. It is the moment when the system reveals the limits of our understanding. To erase it entirely is to deny ourselves the opportunity to think.

The future of design cannot rest on flattery. The algorithms that now govern our tools and institutions demand a higher standard of correspondence between idea and execution. Correctness, in this sense, becomes a form of humility - an admission that design’s task is not to manipulate the world into beauty but to describe it faithfully.

A programmatically correct design is not sterile. It is exact. It does not pander to taste or trend; it aligns with reality. And in an era when reality itself is increasingly negotiable, that alignment becomes radical.

If design still has a moral purpose, it lies here: in the restoration of correctness as both discipline and ethic. To make something right is not to make it simple. It is to make it inevitable.