My friend and personal trainer Bryan Krahn has a delightful saying about losing weight: "Diet is 100%, and exercise is also 100%."

What he means by this is that good diet is the most important thing when it comes to weight loss, and that no matter how much you exercise, you can't undo a bad diet. However, exercise is a crucial foundation in order to realize the benefits of good diet, for a host of physiological and psychological reasons.

I thought of this when following the recent debate about John Maeda's remark that "design is not that important." There was a lot of hand-wringing and finger pointing in the design community, and Maeda felt the need to clarify his position in the opening of his new book, "How to Speak Machine." He elaborated that saying design is important, yes, but that it's nothing without a solid understanding of the machines that enable it.

He's absolutely right.

As designers, we feel optimistic about our ability to change the world. As we should! This optimism is what fuels creative thinking and the desire to create change.

However, the reality is that design is enabled by several underlying factors. Computation, as John Maeda explains, is one of them. So is business, economics, politics, and a variety of other domains.

No matter how great a design for a new product might be, if it's not created in harmony with the business goals for a company, it's not going to become a reality.

Design is 100%. But computation, business, and a few other factors are also 100%.