The goal of design is not just to be visually pleasing. It is to make FUNCTIONALITY that is visually pleasing. Design is not without purpose. To lose sight of the purpose is to fall prey to bad design.
For example, today it is raining "cats and dogs" here in Davis, and my class is held in an off campus classroom with an aluminum roof. Needless to say, the professor's lecture went unheard and the students left uneducated. Bad design.
From the outside, the aluminum roof complements the building well. Visually, the design works well--year round. However, the designer lost sight of what the space functions as. A classroom. You don't need to have a design degree to know that one of the most, if not the most, important elements in a classroom are the acoustics. Students need to hear the professor, and a classroom that doesn't allow this is not a functional classroom. While skies are clear, the design functions well. However the climate isn't static, and when it takes a turn for the worse, unfortunately so does the function of the design.
A designer is not only responsible for the visual outcome of their creation, but for how it interacts with society—twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.
