Dieter Rams, a German industrial designer and architect, has profoundly shaped the field of design. For over 50 years, his iconic work at Braun and Vitsoe has left an indelible mark on product design and influenced how we perceive and interact with consumer goods. His design ethos, championing simplicity, honesty, and restraint, continues to resonate in design theory and practice today. Vitsœ has worked continuously with Dieter Rams for over 65 years. In 1957 he began to develop a storage system that formed the basis of the company Vitsœ, which was founded in 1959. Vitsœ’s designer, Dieter Rams.
The Philosophy of "Less, But Better"
One of the key tenets of Rams' design philosophy is "less, but better." This principle emphasizes paring down designs to their essential elements, eliminating unnecessary features and decorations. He believed that good design should be functional, practical, easy to use, and easy to understand.
Rams was also deeply concerned with the environmental impact of design. He advocated for designers to create sustainable and long-lasting products, minimizing waste and promoting responsible consumption.
The Ten Principles of Good Design
About 50 years ago, in his quest to answer the question “Is my design a good design?”, Dieter Rams developed ten principles of good design, sometimes also known as 10 commandments. It’s amazing to see how valid these principles are today, so much that we might feel than even more than back then, when Rams actually wrote them! These principles serve as a guide for designers seeking to create products that are not only aesthetically pleasing but also functional, sustainable, and user-friendly. These principles can be applied to any category of the design discipline. They are not just mere rules that we should follow, but they are more of an attitude and behavior that we should try to adopt.
Here’s a breakdown of each principle:
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1. Good Design is Innovative
The possibilities for innovation are not, by any means, exhausted. Technological development is always offering new opportunities for innovative design. But innovative design always develops in tandem with innovative technology, and can never be an end in itself. Design always comes about in connection with innovative technology. How can design be good if the technology is not on the same level? Modern technology is constantly evolving, and this brings us countless opportunities for its advancement through innovative design. As designers, we should definitely know the people we are designing for. Or anticipate what they would like. But if that were all, then the Wright brothers would have kept on creating and selling bicycles instead of inventing the airplane. For designers in the past and even more so for designers now, there is no excusable reason to not keep innovating and improving.
2. Good Design Makes a Product Useful
A product is bought to be used. It has to satisfy certain criteria, not only functional, but also psychological and aesthetic. Good design emphasizes the usefulness of a product whilst disregarding anything that could possibly detract from it. Above anything else comes functionality because that is the main reason why people buy a product in the first place. The product should build trust with the user by solving the purpose it was intended for. It must not further add to the uncertainty that the users already possess. Design must serve rather than dominate people.
Even when designing digital interfaces, we can bring Rams’ commandment on board and make our web designs useful by:
- Making them easy to interact with to the point that the user delights in it. This is user enjoyment through user enablement.
3. Good Design is Aesthetic
The aesthetic quality of a product is integral to its usefulness because products we use every day affect our person and our well-being. But only well-executed objects can be beautiful. We know that what is truly good is somehow beautiful, and what is truly beautiful is somehow good. It’s not a direct relationship but it’s a deeper connection. Aesthetics is a by-product of a well-thought and well-crafted design. Have you ever noticed that there are some products that bring you joy every time you use them? Aesthetics plays a crucial role in our identities, self-perceptions, and the psychological nature of things. For example, People with Macs report feeling more creative, or someone with a Dyson vacuum on their wall will feel as though their house is cleaner, regardless of the quantity of dust present in their home. Good design creates ripples beyond the product.
4. Good Design Makes a Product Understandable
It clarifies the product’s structure. Better still, it can make the product talk. At best, it is self-explanatory. Our design should always show the user what its function is so that there’s never a gap between what the user perceives the design’s capabilities are and what they truly are. Design is all about the experience you want to deliver. The key to connecting all the components and factors of a product together lies in the context. To create something that people will love and want to interact with, we must understand people, technology, culture, and ultimately human emotions. Knowing for whom we are creating a product? Why are we making them? These kinds of variables influence design decisions while shaping the product. By asking ourselves these types of questions, we can design things that speak to people and don’t need manuals to explain what they’re for.
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- Designing with a view to guide our users towards the needed interactions. We must make buttons look like clickable buttons and think about positive and negative interactions. Think of traffic lights: green means go (positive); red means stop (negative).
A good design can speak for itself, without asking the user to commit much effort: showing is better than telling. If a user can intuitively deduce what to do with your design, that’s ace! If you have to compose instructions to get him/her to interact with it, that’s not so ace. In your design, think about this: can you cut down the user’s cognitive load so that the design has already done the thinking for him or her, and all the user has to do is go along with it and interact? Yes, we’re designing for the digital realm, so we have a challenge that mechanical products didn’t. Looking at a hairdryer, you can work out straight away what to do. Looking at a web/app design will take more mental investment. As long as we can make our designs understandable and flow in a way that our users can interact efficiently, there’s a great chance that we’ll save ourselves from generating user frustration.
5. Good Design is Unobtrusive
Products fulfilling a purpose are like tools. They are neither decorative objects nor works of art. Their design should therefore be both neutral and restrained, to leave room for the user’s self-expression. Crafting simple, perfect, and stripping down to the essentials is what, a designer should aim for while creating products. Achieving true simplicity is the biggest challenge for designers as this practice forces them to think about the most essential thing and cut away anything unnecessary. The product should be an extension of the person. “In reality, the design is meant to disappear; it is meant to be the structure for everyday life.” The very best products are the ones that allow the consumer to do exactly what they want to do without much restriction, all the while assisting them to do their tasks productively and joyfully.
6. Good Design is Honest
It does not make a product more innovative, powerful or valuable than it really is. It does not attempt to manipulate the consumer with promises that cannot be kept. A product communicates with customers in the same way that people communicate with one another. Anything built on a foundation of dishonesty doesn’t last very long, whether it’s a product or life in general. Honesty should always be at the center of our work and must be a guiding question as we continue to build around our constantly changing product goals. Falling into the trap of making fake promises for the sake of marketing would not do us any better, but lose the trusting relationship we work towards. So, having a sense of purpose gives the product away to marry design and marketing. Lastly, the phrase “user empathy” often gets thrown around a lot without any real regard for what users truly need. If we really are dedicated to honesty in our design, it should always start with understanding how we can provide value to our users.
- Not building unneeded elements into our designs. Remember the 80/20 rule and think carefully before adding every element to avoid the chance of clutter.
- What are you designing for? Is it a bank, where security and padlock insignias and the use of an ever-reassuring blue color scheme are needed? Make your design reflect the character of the purpose of the design and remember that, on the scale between engineering (aestheticless functionality) and art (functionless aesthetics), we’re in a unique position-design.
7. Good Design is Long-Lasting
It avoids being fashionable and therefore never appears antiquated. Unlike fashionable design, it lasts many years - even in today’s throwaway society. When an object of design is long-lasting, it has two concurrent effects on us: first, we gain respect for its stability and persistence. It becomes like an old friend, something we can count on like a sturdy pair of denim, a hardcover book- all of these impress upon us a lasting sense of security and a pleasant stubbornness. Second, when we spend time with an object, it takes on the mark of use and so it becomes evidence of our existence. By these effects, a good design vouch for a bit of immortality with every use. But what about bits and bytes or pixels? Our capacity to experience things is being diminished by all this digitization. Pictures on our feed vanish one by one, leaving no lasting impressions in our minds. I’m sure the books on my shelves would last a hundred years even if I died tomorrow. However, the software I’m using to type these words and the files on my laptop won’t last more than a year or two. Does this imply that they are inferior? Perhaps. Instead, long-lasting is now measured not only in years but also in minds; that is, not by how long an object persists but by how many people it changes. The quality of having a restrained aesthetic and function that is as optimized as possible leads to long utilization cycles. As designers, we should aim to contribute a larger moral imperative: to enrich human life in a way that encourages holding on to things rather than constantly seeking the novel or the spectacular.
- We should be especially careful to keep our designs from being put in the “old hat” pile. The first way to avoid this is to ensure that your product/service serves a purpose, as we have seen with the previous principles. Besides, you can also try to:
- Future-proof our designs by keeping them adaptable. Don’t hem yourself in with assumptions about “new ways forward”.
- Keep a neutral aesthetic feel to your design. For example, be mindful of crisp, clear text (which will always be readable) versus playful fonts that seem “cool”. Check out the lettering on the covers of 1970s pulp-fiction books … dated, aren’t they?
- The web is a living medium. Updates happen all the time. So, the easier it is to maintain your design, the more likely it will survive on new devices. This means getting back to basics and keeping an eye on the nuts and bolts of design. Yes, we mean brushing up on your HTML to get ready for what the future throws at us all.
8. Good Design is Thorough Down to the Last Detail
Nothing must be arbitrary or left to chance. Care and accuracy in the design process show respect towards the user. As a designer, we should build something that we would love to use ourselves. Every detail must pull its weight on the journey to reaching the best UX. So, think out every detail. Nothing can appear as an afterthought, including that “Forgot password?” screen. Error alerts are another area to watch. When do you customize a design to go the extra mile to reassure the user? During loading, is your page showing a spinning hourglass, a message, a neat animation, or…did you leave it all sterile and white, leaving users wondering?
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9. Good Design is Environmental-Friendly
Design makes an important contribution to the preservation of the environment. It conserves resources and minimizes physical and visual pollution throughout the lifecycle of the product. Watching carbon footprints is relevant to designing. It may sound comical, but the clicks users take and the amount of time they spend on electronic devices add up. If we imagine the Internet as being like the world, we’re on the right track there. Think how you can design with impact and not fill up the Internet with unnecessary pages. That sacred minimalism of “less is more” comes through to another dimension on that note!
- This is crucial for us in web/app design.
10. Good Design is as Little Design as Possible
Less, but better - because it concentrates on the essential aspects, and the products are not burdened with non-essentials. Back to purity, back to simplicity. Simplicity in web and app design, as with mechanical design, is the ultimate goal in helping users in the digital age. The Internet is saturated with element-heavy designs. This may give us confidence that we can beat out competitors who don’t know what they’re doing wrong, but there’s still the point that many users are wary of the Internet because over-designed sites dominate. Less is more, but “thoughtfully less” means “better”. Making our designs good means making them simple; making great designs means staying focused only on the essentials. Cut off the frills.
- Not building unneeded elements into our designs. Remember the 80/20 rule and think carefully before adding every element to avoid the chance of clutter.
The Enduring Legacy of Dieter Rams
Dieter Rams' influence extends far beyond his own work. His principles have inspired countless designers across various disciplines, including Jony Ive, the former Chief Design Officer at Apple. The calculator on your iPhone is at least partially inspired by the Braun ET44 calculator. Rams’ designs even inspired Steve Jobs and Jony Ive of Apple. His emphasis on simplicity, functionality, and sustainability continues to be relevant in today's world, where consumerism and environmental concerns are at the forefront.
Rams is a documentary portrait of Dieter Rams, one of the most influential designers alive, and a rumination on consumerism, sustainability, and the future of design. The man who all but invented consumer product design as we know it today. To quantify his impact, you need only look at the millions of Apple products in our pockets. Dieter Rams’ design ethos has shaped the way entire generations think about making and consuming. Indifference towards people and the reality in which they live is actually the one and only cardinal sin in design.
In 2008, Gary interviewed Dieter for his documentary Objectified, but was only able to share a small piece of his story in that film. Dieter, who is now 86, is a very private person; however Gary was granted unprecedented access to create the first feature-length documentary about his life and work. Rams includes in-depth conversations with Dieter, and deep dives into his philosophy, his process, and his inspirations. But one of the most interesting parts of Dieter's story is that he now looks back on his career with some regret. "If I had to do it over again, I would not want to be a designer," he's said. "There are too many unnecessary products in this world." Dieter has long been an advocate for the ideas of environmental consciousness and long-lasting products. He's dismayed by today's unsustainable world of over-consumption, where "design" has been reduced to a meaningless marketing buzzword. Rams is a design documentary, but it’s also a rumination on consumerism, materialism, and sustainability. Dieter's philosophy is about more than just design, it’s about a way to live. It’s about getting rid of distractions and visual clutter, and just living with what you need. The film features original music by pioneering musician and producer Brian Eno. Rams had its television premiere on the BBC and screened at special events worldwide. It is now available to stream digitally.
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