People seem focused on the interpersonal conflict angle in the comments here, i.e. winning and losing in a battle of wills.

I think its just as important to realize ideas themselves can be conflicted or contradictory, and that practical action requires compromise. Many seductive ideas may not be well-formed if you really dig deeply enough. It's not just economic or political pragmatism. Even the solo designer/thinker needs to compromise such untested ideas in search of a realizable system.

> I learned, when I was a kid, that I can't always get what I want (I think that someone even sang about it, way back then).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You_Can%27t_Always_Get_What_Yo...

Compromise is a lose-lose. It originally meant a promise between two parties to follow the decision of an arbiter. Sometimes this is the best we can hope to do, and right and necessary in order to have nice things: see for instance the Wikipedia essay "The Wrong Version", https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/The_Wrong_Version or the Northern Ireland peace process. However, a mutual preference is a win-win, and is a creative new idea instead of merely splitting differences, and is way superior, if you can get one. Often people don't make the distinction and call both things compromises.

...why the downvote, please (mystery downvoter)? I can only read that as saying "No! You must not arrogantly hope to be creative and solve problems for mutual benefit! It's important that everyone be quiet and learn to suffer!"

That’s true. But in a business context I’ve found the opposite mindset is helpful. Anything which might be a constrain which is not contrary to your goal is probably a real constraint. Yes in theory you can rebuild X, Y, Z but what can we actually do in this initiative. I’ve taken to even taking social constraints as real and I communicate them to my management in that way.

It depends on how you define compromise. Is it a compromise to consider things like screen size, load wait times, or the average expected user's attention span? If so, then design is a big juggling act of compromise.

If not, and compromise is just stuff like "add yet another floating ad footer to make the c-suite happy," then absolutely it should be the last tool.

That’s not my experience. Every decision favors one use case or principle over another. The best design is when you have the vision and confidence to say what’s important for each those decisions and what you’re ok leaving out.

When you give someone a problem, they can find a solution, but if you give them a dilemma then a compromise is almost a given.

Constraints != Compromise.

Compromise is stuff like what I'm going through, right now. The user needs to know that a set of locations on a map, can also be displayed as a sortable list, but the affordances for that access are not working with the overall design. It's extremely easy to add a button, but it messes with the screen layout.

We'll figure it out, but we can't ignore it. It's too important to our users, so we may have to make a graphical compromise. It's really tempting to think that "stupid users should know better," but that's a fairly destructive mindset.

Optimization implies constraints. But multiple targets implies compromise. How do you optimize for multiple measurements without compromise? You have to decide how to weight each against the other.

"How can I maximize my widgets-produced-in-six-months output given that I'm constrained by having $x budget?" - constraint that could give you a different solution than higher or lower budget.

"How can I maximize my widgets-produced-in-six months output AND my customer satisfaction given that I'm constrained by having $x budget" - now you have to compromise one or the other.

Here I'm talking about the physical design of how the widget is made as it's the first super-concrete example that popped to mind, but almost any sort of design operates in a similar multiple-goals world.

"Design is compromise" is basically saying that the thing you're optimizing is not at its optimum for all the variables separately which is often true, and therefore it is not a remarkable thing to say, and it is also not necessarily true.

To join in the pedantry: I always see optimization as being about compromise. Free wins that are strictly superior aren’t optimizations, they’re just doing it properly. Optimization is to make certain properties better, usually at the cost of others.

I like this phrasing.

Agreed. And making explicit that a trade off needs to be made tends to make people uncomfortable. They want to keep their options open.

Understanding this seems to be essential for leaders in general.