No system in the world has been designed for every possible situation. Most of them have been optimized for a particular range and “use case”. As an engineer by training, it sometimes baffles me how this concept is not well understood.
When we go outside of the design parameters of a system, it stops behaving as it was promised to do, and we start to get all kinds of weird things. There are a few examples (curiously, I couldn’t come up with an example unrelated to the arts), like when you push an amplifier’s gain past its limits and we get distortion guitar (was that Satisfaction for the first time?), or when the studio engineer cranks the tune correction to 11 and Cher surprises everybody with Believe. Other examples are motion blur, or a high-key photograph. They are out of boundaries.
All that is fine, as long as we understand that it is used that way. Not one of us assumes that Cher talks that way. Yet we do sometimes think that we can always cool down the house faster just by turning the thermostat to 40 degrees in the summer (hint: it will not cool faster than if it is set to 50 degrees), or we expect perfect quality at 120% of capacity.
Problems arise when we fail to recognize that a system is operating outside its boundaries and we still expect it to have a reliable output. One of the easiest safeguards is to build-in some slack.