Checkmate

The purpose of chess is checkmate. Everything else – the number of pieces taken, the clarity of the strategy, the finesse of the tactics – is just the stuff you do to get to checkmate.

Of course, for some, the game also evokes beauty and fascination for its own sake. So it’s great if you can do both – but it is critically important to be clear on your personal priorities. A successful chess game is not conducted as a compromise between elegance and winning.

Design projects, on the other hand, are often presented as a balance between time, cost and quality: design as a hostage to value engineering. But getting the balance right doesn’t mean there isn’t an endgame: design, create, checkmate.