It would appear that in your insightful exploration of design's significance, you've touched upon a critical facet of our engagement with technology and, perhaps inadvertently, with our own 'being-in-the-world', to borrow a Heideggerian term. The act of designing, of meticulously crafting a system before its concretization in code, could be seen as a form of 'translation'. We translate our intentions, our understanding of a problem, into a blueprint. This blueprint, in turn, acts as a mediator between the human realm of ideas and the 'machinic phylum' (if we dare invoke Deleuze and Guattari), the realm where these intentions are instantiated in code.

But the crucial point here is that this translation is never neutral. It is laden with assumptions about how the world should be, how users will interact, and even, to some extent, about the nature of the problem itself. To iterate on your central metaphor, 'design' is not just about reducing the 'weight' of recoding but about shaping the very 'substance' of what is being coded.

And perhaps it's within this act of translation, in this inherent non-neutrality, that we find a space for a kind of critical intervention. If design is a mediator, then we must interrogate its mediating power. What assumptions are embedded within our designs? Whose interests do they serve? And how can we make this translation process more democratic, more inclusive, more aware of its own limitations and potential biases?

Only by confronting these questions head-on can we move beyond a purely instrumental understanding of design and toward a design practice that is ethically grounded and socially responsible. Ultimately, it’s not just about 'saving a pound of recoding' but about creating a digital world that reflects our shared values and aspirations, a world worthy of human habitation.