Good. Fast. Cheap. Choose two. As introduced by Long Phan in his feature this month, this well-known adage is referred to as The Designer’s Triangle. It applies to the design of systems, as well as the systems themselves.
The adage—and some would say the facts of life—states that we can’t have it all. That when devising a project or process—whether the manufacture of a product, the creation of a Web site, or the implementation of a quality control system—we must choose only two out of the three options.