What Is Good Design?!

Now that it is the end of the semester and the class, I think that the most important theme that I have extracted from my experience in this class is the debate between whether good design is based on quality or affordability. There was one class in particular where this topic came up, and I remember it being one of the most personally impacting of the semester.
The discussion came up in reference to the Functionalism assignment towards the beginning few weeks of the class, and stemmed from the reactions of students in the timelines we were asked to create. The subject of the timelines was the chair, and we were asked to reference within them the ideas of the importance of function set forth by Walter Gropius and the Bauhaus movement.
While I chose to view functionalism more from the direction of how it defines form, I found the other ideas people had about it interesting. For some reason when trying to come up with a good example of functionalism in furniture I barely even thought about cost, or production, or manufacturability. Perhaps this is because it was one of the earlier assignments in the semester, but I definitely overlooked a lot of the more interesting if slightly more obscure reasons for what makes good design.
One of the most interesting arguments that was brought up dealt with the question of whether one should design a good product, with quality materials and painstaking craftsmanship or something that might be cheaper to create but would therefore be cheaper for the consumer to buy. While the well-made product might last indefinitely and be almost more of a work of art than a product, it will also probably be expensive and therefore very limited. If only the wealthy can afford it, does it really make it worth it?
On the other hand, if something is made so that the average person can afford it without breaking the bank, does it mean instead that they will end up breaking their investment? There isn’t much point to buying a product if you have to buy it again in three years, and then another three years, until you might as well have bought the expensive piece to begin with. I think that this is one of the biggest Catch-22s in design today, because it depends pretty much on the individual user’s personal preference.
This conversation was never resolved in class, partially because of obvious time constraints but also because it really is a nearly impossible question to answer completely. Because individual opinion amongst consumers is so unique, there is no way to generalize it totally, only to the furthest percentile possible. So no matter how good one person thinks a design is, it does not mean that the design is actually good. It only means that it appeals to that person. It sounds cliché, but in this case the old parable that “beauty is in the eye of the beholder” rings very true.