Including nudge in design contradicts the aim of design -- almost without being aware of these very contradictions. In design, aesthetics serve more than the user's needs, but also their desires. “Design ideally is about service on behalf of the other—not merely about changing someone's behavior for their own good or convincing them to buy products and services.”

Yet choice architecture is precisely an exercise focused on changing behavior without addressing the vital role that aesthetics and service to the user have in design. Design addresses our desires by treating objects as particular representations of the truth, while disregarding the notion that we can understand the truth itself. We are godlike in creation, but not in our ability to understand what those creations will bring forth.

In this way, design stands in opposition to science and, by extension, choice architecture which attempts to exert process and prescription upon the very nature of being. Choice architecture would claim that we are godlike both in our creations and in our understanding of what those creations will bring forth. We can change people and make them better. _ Yet while we can predict _particular aspects of what our creations will manifest, it is impossible to predict the sum-total of changes we introduce into a system. All we are left with, then, is the pursuit of aesthetics. Creating objects that interact with other objects, not to affect how they behave, but toward the end of understanding the world through the act of creation and engagement with it.

Design is not the pursuit of perfection through reduction or abstraction. It is not perfection of the individual, or the things the individual interacts with, or the things that interact with other things. As Nelson and Stolternman note

… it is important to appreciate the danger of creating a design motivated by a quest for the absolute ideal design solution. This often leads to the creation of something that cannot be supported, maintained, afforded, or controlled by the proposed beneficiaries of the design. Attempts to create perfectly glorious designs can bring ruin, or the threat of ruin, because they are not formed by the intention of designing the adequate, but by the unrealized quest for the comprehensive and utopian.

There is no utopia, and no such ideal exists within our grasp. No processes or micromanaging will get us closer to perfection.

Design is the rejection of outcomes-oriented processes like nudge, and the embrace of the warm, noumenal possibilities contained within aesthetics. Without aesthetics, there is no metaphor and without metaphor, there is no sublime. By introducing choice architecture into design, we not only apply a methodology incongruous with the practice, but we remove an opportunity for the individual to access the very thing that informs design practice -- creativity through the messiness of the universe.