You can set your standards as low as you want, adma, but good design affects everyone who comes into contact with it positively, just as bad design has the opposite effect. Our values system is based on standards of excellence in medicine, law, and many other things, including design. Our daily lives are full of encounters with objects, and systems, that weren't given enough thought at the conceptual stage before they were introduced to the public. That leaking coffee-maker at home; riding the TTC and changing trains in a station where pedestrian traffic flow wasn't considered properly; at work sitting in that uncomfortable chair; in the cafeteria where the plates, cutlery, salt, pepper, mustard, sugar, napkins, drinks and food aren't arranged logically before or after the checkout and everyone is criss-crossing one another, etc. The role of design is to solve problems - a process - on the way to producing objects - a solution. Much of design is common sense, plus the magic ingredient of inspiration.
The magic ingredient that makes some buildings great isn't something that you can quantify - but you can recognize and delight in it, as with any work of art, when you encounter it. You can't draw anything out of a finished design that wasn't put into it through the process either - a clunker will always fail to satisfy. In terms of appreciating art and design, "looking" is just the first part of a two-phase process that includes the payoff of "seeing". But not seeing isn't a moral failing either - it's an enticement to visual literacy and the benefits of that are a reward in itself as with any other form of literacy.
Even without analyzing "how" something is done, our lives are better for art because we are affected by it at an emotional level.