Abstract: The importance of the information processing system's market, technology revolution, explosion of new market competitors, high requirements of application oriented embedded systems, and many other factors create a situation in which the quality-driven design is becoming a necessity. The aim of this paper is to provide and discuss some theoretical and methodological foundations of the quality-driven decision making for design. In the paper a new definition of quality is proposed and the quality-driven design paradigm is introduced. Subsequently, an original methodology of the design space exploration is proposed; specifically, the methods for the construction and analysis of the decision models. A number of ideas presented in the paper have already been applied with success for solving various design problems. Currently, the methodology presented is being applied to the hardware/software partitioning.