A thought that keeps surfacing: we celebrate design decisions but almost never interrogate the maintenance burden they create.
A beautiful public fountain is a design decision. It is also a commitment to someone cleaning it, someone repairing the pump, someone removing the coins, someone winterizing the pipes, someone budgeting for all of the above. Forever.
The invisible half
Stewart Brand's "How Buildings Learn" gets at this from the architecture side, but the principle is broader. Every designed thing has a maintenance shadow. The more complex the design, the longer the shadow.
Public infrastructure is the most obvious case. A city builds an elaborate pedestrian bridge with LED lighting and custom railings. Five years later, half the LEDs are dead, the railings are rusted, and nobody budgeted for replacement parts because the original designer specified custom fabrication. The bridge still functions, but it now communicates neglect instead of care.
Where this leads
I think there's a design ethic buried in here: the best design decisions are the ones whose maintenance costs are honest, visible, and proportionate to the community's capacity to sustain them. That's not a glamorous principle. But it might be the most important one nobody teaches in design school.
This needs more research. I want to find specific examples of designs that failed not because they were bad ideas but because their maintenance requirements were unrealistic.