You’re looking at a sidebar. It shows signal counts — how many posts of each type are in the feed. The data is accurate. The styling is clean. Something is still wrong.
You could stare at it longer. Or you could ask five of the most influential designers who ever lived what they think.
That’s what the Design Council does.
What It Is
Design Council is a Claude Skill — a reusable context file you install into Claude Code that activates a multi-lens design evaluation framework on demand.
When you invoke /design-council, five distinct philosophical lenses become active. Each one examines your design from a fundamentally different angle:
| Designer | Domain | The Question They Ask |
|---|---|---|
| Jony Ive | Product design | Does this respect its medium? Does every detail earn its place? |
| Dieter Rams | Industrial design | Is this as simple as it can possibly be? What can be removed? |
| Zaha Hadid | Architecture | How does the user move through this? Where are the thresholds? |
| Bjarke Ingels | Architecture | Where is the delight? What element serves two purposes? |
| Don Norman | Cognitive science | Does this teach you how to use it? Does it prevent errors? |
These aren’t personas. They’re lenses — five different ways of seeing the same object.
Why Five
Any single design philosophy, applied without counterweight, produces extremes.
Pure Dieter Rams produces work that’s honest but cold. Pure Bjarke Ingels produces work that’s delightful but cluttered. Pure Zaha Hadid produces spatial drama that users can get lost in.
The value of five is in the tension. When three lenses accept a design decision and two reject it, you’ve found something worth examining. When all five reject it, you’ve found something that needs to go. When all five accept it — that’s a rare and confident signal.
Back to that sidebar. Here’s what the council said:
Rams: Kill it. Passive data in an interactive panel. Duplicates what the type pills already show.
Norman: Either kill it or make it interactive. No passive element should live alongside interactive ones — it creates false affordance.
Ive: Reduce to two sections maximum. Mixed passive and interactive elements feel like a drawer full of mismatched utensils.
Hadid: The sidebar should respond to context — it should appear with the stream and disappear with it. It’s the stream’s companion, not the page’s furniture.
Ingels: Add one ambient element that communicates aliveness. “Last signal: 2 days ago.”
The decision became clear: remove the signal counts, keep only interactive elements, add the timestamp. None of that came from “I think this looks better.” It came from four out of five lenses reaching the same conclusion for different reasons.
How to Use It
Install via the Claude skills system. In Claude Code:
/design-councilYou can invoke it at any point during design work — when reviewing a component, evaluating a layout decision, or stress-testing an interaction pattern. It also triggers automatically when Claude Code detects design-related work in context.
The evaluation sequence runs each lens in order:
- Material Truth (Ive) — what is this made of, and does the design honour that?
- Honest Restraint (Rams) — apply the ten principles, identify what can go
- Movement Through Space (Hadid) — trace the user’s path, find the thresholds
- Playful Function (Ingels) — find where delight and utility can share a form
- Human-Centered Affordance (Norman) — does it teach itself? Does it prevent mistakes?
Each lens produces a score (1–5) and a verdict. The tensions between verdicts are often more informative than the scores themselves.
What It Catches That You’d Miss
The most valuable moments are the ones where a lens flags something that felt obviously correct.
Hadid on static sidebars: Any element that doesn’t respond to the page’s narrative is a piece of furniture in a room that’s supposed to feel alive. You wouldn’t notice it on your own — the sidebar looks fine. Only the spatial-movement lens asks “what happens to this element as the user moves through the page?”
Norman on decorative pills: A UI element that looks clickable but isn’t is a violation of perceived affordance — Don Norman’s term for the gap between what something is and what it tells you it can do. A purely visual review won’t catch this. A cognitive-science lens catches nothing else.
Rams on anything you’re proud of: The principle “as little design as possible” is not about minimalism for its own sake. It’s about removing every element that doesn’t serve the user’s purpose. The things you worked hardest on are exactly the things Rams will ask you to justify.
The Methodology, Extracted
The underlying pattern here is reusable beyond this specific skill:
- Choose evaluators with distinct, articulable philosophies — not “perspectives,” but documented frameworks you can actually apply
- Run diagnosis before generating solutions — analyse the current state through each lens before proposing changes
- Generate principles, not features — ask what should be true about this design, attributed to a specific evaluator’s reasoning
- Let rejection patterns constrain the solution space — when multiple lenses reject the same thing for different reasons, the rejection pattern points toward what the right solution must not be
- Use productive tension as a design goal — resolving a genuine conflict between two valid philosophies often produces something neither would have produced alone
The Design Council is an implementation of this pattern. The five designers are a specific instantiation — calibrated for web and product design. The methodology is general.
Get It
Design Council is open source. The full skill definition and install instructions are on GitHub:
github.com/seevali/claude-skills/tree/main/design-council
The skill works in Claude Code and Claude.ai. Invoke explicitly with /design-council or let it trigger automatically on design-related context.
The views expressed here are my own.