What are the principles of good design?

There are ten principles for good design: 1.
Good design is innovative.
2.
Good design makes a product useful.
3.
Good design is aesthetic.
4.
Good design makes a product understandable.
5.
Good design is unobtrusive.
6.
Good design is honest.
7.
Good design is long-lasting.
8.
Good design is thorough down to the last detail.
9.
Good design is environmentally friendly.
10.
Good design is as little design as possible.

Good design maximizes two factors without one of them getting into the way of the other: utility of the product and the pleasure it gives to the user while using it (aesthetic value).

Please read about Gestalt laws for perception

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gestalt_psychology

Balance Proportion Rhythm Emphasis and Unity

Aesthetic value is the main component for sure.
I'm not a design expert but this is my opinion.

COLOR, SHAPE, FORM, BALANCE, WEIGHT, TEXTURE, HARMONY

“No matter who you are, most of the smartest people work for someone else” is

known as Joy’s Law in the high-tech industry. Attributed to Sun Microsystems cofounder Bill Joy, this “law” emphasizes the essential knowledge problem that faces

many enterprises today, that is, that in any given sphere of activity most of the pertinent knowledge will reside outside the boundaries of any one organization, and

the central challenge for those charged with the innovation mission is to find ways

to access that knowledge.

The causal explanation of Joy’s Law is provided in the seminal work of economists Friedrich Hayek and Eric von Hippel on the distributed and sticky nature of

knowledge and innovation. Hayek1

, in1945, arguing for the importance of the

market economy, emphasized that at the macro level knowledge is unevenly distributed in society, and that centralized models for economic planning and coordination are prone to failure due to an inability to aggregate this distributed

knowledge. Thirty years later, micro-level studies by von Hippel2

began to suggest

that in many industries users were the originators of most novel innovations.

Users’ dominant role in originating innovations reflects the fact that knowledge is

not only distributed but also “sticky,” that is, relatively difficult and extremely costly to move between locations, thus shifting the locus of innovation to where it is

the stickiest.3

Users generate functionally novel innovations because they experience novel needs well ahead of manufacturers, and manufacturers develop dimension of merit innovations (that improve the performance of existing features)

because they specialize in producing products for the mass market.4