February 10, 2004: Dan Hill has an excellent thought-piece on the merits and pitfalls inherent in Apple's design ethos of perfection. He's also collected thoughts and links on the idea of adaptive design (i.e. designing for adaptation). From the article:

In essence, adaptive design is about designing to enable the user to change things. You strive for 'good enough' as a starting point, such that the user feels they have a 'way in', almost an implicit goal of working through the finished design themselves. It sees design as a social process, developing over time, via a relationship with the user. It draws heavily from [Stewart] Brand's idea of separating a building's architecture into 6 different layers, from slowly developing layers through to relatively quickly moving layers.