Are design hypotheses just posh opinions?

I am suspicious of designers who use the first person in the explanations of their designs. Why should we care what they personally like or want? What makes their opinion any better than anyone else’s?

Those who state an idea about a design on the basis of even a handful of data points, a thought experiment, or just an unsupported conjecture are much more likely to be good designers because their ego doesn’t matter. They might even end up designing things they think will fail in order to determine the strength of an hypothesis.

So it’s unfortunate that some designers are conscious of not bringing their ego into it, but respond to this instead by refusing to think until they “have all the data”. That leads to a separate problem.

Opinions are one thing, but testable hypotheses are another.