Overengineering
Overengineering (or over-engineering, or over-kill) is the act of designing a product to be more robust or have more features than often necessary for its intended use, or for a process to be unnecessarily complex or inefficient.
Overengineering is often done to increase a factor of safety, add functionality, or overcome perceived design flaws that most users would accept.
Overengineering can be desirable when safety or performance is critical (e.g. in aerospace vehicles and luxury road vehicles), or when extremely broad functionality is required (e.g. diagnostic and medical tools, power users of products), but it is generally criticized in terms of value engineering as wasteful of resources such as materials, time and money.
As a design philosophy, it is the opposite of the minimalist ethos of “less is more” (or: “worse is better”) and a disobedience of the KISS principle.
Overengineering generally occurs in high-end products or specialized markets. In one form, products are overbuilt and have performance far in excess of expected normal operation (a city car that can travel at 300 km/h, or a home video recorder with a projected lifespan of 100 years), and hence are more expensive, bulkier, and heavier than necessary. Alternatively, they may become overcomplicated – the extra functions may be unnecessary, and potentially reduce the usability of the product by overwhelming lesser experienced and technically literate end users, as in feature creep.
Overengineering can decrease the productivity of design teams, because of the need to build and maintain more features than most users need.
Excessive pursuit of simplicity and minimalism in a product in order to avoid these effects, however, can result in premature optimisation, potentially to the detriment of the project due to diminishing returns on time and effort invested in the design process, thus also constituting overengineering.
“The perfect race car crosses the finish line in first place and immediately falls into pieces
Ferdinand Porsche