Guiding Principles for Design Tools

Principles for the creation of open-ended design tools

A tool should be easy to use, meeting the user at his or her point-of-view rather than requiring the user to gain expertise about the tool itself.
A tool should be open-ended, allowing any possible output.
A tool should make the user’s iterative process visible and navigable.
A tool should expand rather than limit or corral the user’s thinking.
A tool should help the user to develop an intuition for the problem space, its inherent constraints and the relationships between properties.
A tool should help the user to break the problem down and work through its components while keeping the whole in mind.
A tool should be adaptable to the user, capable of being transformed by its own design process.

Help needed for "Guiding Principles for Design Tools"!

The following is missing from this set of principles:

Summary: Each design principle can have a brief summary, these could be a couple of lines or a detailed paragraph outlining how this principle is used or measured, e.g.

- principle: Strive to be universal
summary: Our aim is to be a resource that is helpful to everyone. We do this by strictly adhering to principles of progressive enhancement…

Tip! You may be able to find the missing information at the source URL:
https://medium.com/intelligentdesign/guiding-principles-for-design-tools-8a9261bd5150.

It would be great if you could contribute and update this set of principles with anything that's missing!

A tool should be easy to use, meeting the user at his or her point-of-view rather than requiring the user to gain expertise about the tool itself.

A tool should be open-ended, allowing any possible output.

A tool should make the user’s iterative process visible and navigable.

A tool should expand rather than limit or corral the user’s thinking.

A tool should help the user to develop an intuition for the problem space, its inherent constraints and the relationships between properties.

A tool should help the user to break the problem down and work through its components while keeping the whole in mind.

A tool should be adaptable to the user, capable of being transformed by its own design process.