Dieter Rams, a renowned German industrial designer, is celebrated for his influential work at Braun. His design philosophy, encapsulated in his "10 Principles of Good Design," offers a framework for creating products that are not only functional but also aesthetically pleasing and enduring. These principles, developed approximately 50 years ago, remain remarkably relevant in today's rapidly evolving design landscape. These principles are sometimes also known as 10 commandments.
The Enduring Relevance of Rams' Principles
In an era dominated by fleeting trends and planned obsolescence, Rams' emphasis on simplicity, functionality, and environmental consciousness provides a refreshing perspective. His principles encourage designers to move beyond superficial aesthetics and focus on creating products that genuinely enhance the user experience and stand the test of time. As Dieter Rams has received even more attention than usual after Gary Hustwit released his documentary, Rams (2018), profiling the famous designer, Rams has long been elevated to the status of design legend, and the recent documentary has solidified and spread this status wider than ever before.
The 10 Principles of Good Design
Here are Dieter Rams' 10 principles, offering valuable insights into his design philosophy:
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.
Looking at this principle, the implication that good design must be tied to technological innovation can be seen as an extremely narrow understanding of good design. From a simple definition it is clear good design is not necessarily innovative. Often we specifically do not want to introduce new ideas or ways of doing something.
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Trying to define ‘innovative design’ is highly subjective, as we see from the range of opinions above. However, from the snippets above and our dictionary definition of innovation we could say that innovative design is not only something new, but also marked as extraordinary by its excellence that separates it out as quite clearly different.
Good design doesn’t need technological advances, to change the world or stand out as strikingly beautiful. And it probably won’t leave you wondering how you lived without it. Good design is often not noticed at all, precisely because it is good design. The problem with Rams’ first principle is that he has confused and collapsed two things into one: good design and innovative design are not the same thing, and one does not necessarily follow the other.
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.
The most immediate issue that occurs is the focus on ‘product’, and highlights an issue for all Rams’ principles. Good design is not always put to the service of products. It could then be said that the usefulness in this type of high-end fashion is concentrated on the ‘psychological and the aesthetic’. We could then clarify Rams’ principle so that usefulness is defined as either functional, aesthetic or a combination.
The principle presumes we will know beforehand exactly how the outcome of our design will be used. When we design a toaster or a radio we know what its intended use is, but in other design contexts it may be limiting to try and conceive of a specific intended use. In the digital space the relationship between designer and user is more symbiotic, where the direction and usefulness of a product is in flux and determined in a continuous feedback loop between creator and user.
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3. Good Design Is Aesthetic
The aesthetic quality of a product is integral to its usefulness because the products we use every day affect our person and our well-being. But only well-executed objects can be beautiful.
When we talk of aesthetics we open a philosophical can of worms and we must immediately question whether it’s even possible to agree an objective measure or definition of beauty. But even without entering this debate we can see that the purpose of good design is often not concerned with beauty; in the sense that someone perceiving the result of a design would be compelled to appreciate its beauty.
Regardless of debates on aesthetics and beauty, it is clear that the aesthetic quality of a design is not integral to its usefulness. Love it or hate it, Helvetica is highly legible and readable, and as such is incredibly useful for many different uses. Its utility derives in large part precisely because most people do not even consider its beauty (or lack of) - they simply read the words and are left to focus on the meaning of their message. The type of minimalist design approach Rams advocates is a very western, 20th-century approach to design.
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.
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?
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People react positively when things are clear and understandable. Products have to be designed in a way that they are comprehensible.
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.
Digital design affords a lot of room for expression. Because of this, we have to design with an appropriate structure. We designers can get trapped sometimes. Digital design is an abstract tableau, and we know that we often have a job to make concepts easier for our users.
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.
An honest design communicates solely the functions and values it offers. It does not attempt to manipulate buyers and users with promises it cannot keep. 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.
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.
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”.
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.
This is crucial for us in web/app design. 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.
My heart belongs to the details. I actually always found them to be more important than the big picture. Nothing works without details. They are everything, the baseline of quality.
9. Good Design Is Environmentally 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.
As designers we have a great responsibility. I believe designers should eliminate the unnecessary. That means eliminating everything that is modish because this kind of thing is only short-lived.
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.
Rams’ signature statement might be: “Less, but better”. 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. 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.
Applying Rams' Principles to UX Design
Rams' principles extend beyond physical products and offer valuable guidance for user experience (UX) design. By applying these principles to digital interfaces, designers can create websites and applications that are not only visually appealing but also user-friendly, efficient, and sustainable.
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.
- 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.
- 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).
- 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.