Less, but Better: Thinking About Dieter Rams’ “Good Design Ten Commandments”

Braun Sk61 (from Wikipedia)

German industrial designer Dieter Rams is known, if not revered, for his “functionalist” (arguably, reductive) and influential mass-produced consumer product designs (most famously from his time as head of design at Braun from 1961 to 1995): elegant slab-sided turntables (this model was nicknamed “Snow White’s Coffin”) and speakers, beautifully boxy radios, juicers, calculators, slide projectors, watches…and so on and so forth. His design philosophy was Weniger, aber besser (Less, but Better) and his designs embody this with their balance of simplicity, functionality, and beauty.   Rams, however, felt this philosophy was being challenged, as design firm Vitsoe says:

Rams was becoming increasingly concerned by the state of the world around him – “an impenetrable confusion of forms, colours and noises.” Aware that he was a significant contributor to that world, he asked himself an important question: is my design good design?

Consequently, Rams put forth his good design “Ten Commandments”:

• Good design is innovative
• Good design makes a product useful
• Good design is aesthetic
• Good design helps a product to be understood
• Good design is unobtrusive
• Good design is honest
• Good design is durable
• Good design is consistent to the last detail
• Good design is concerned with the environment
• Good design is as little design as possible

I’m going to look at several of Rams’ commandments in a bit more detail, focusing on how they may apply outside the industrial design world, instead to digital products.  Rams’ thoughts on the consumer design process sound very familiar to those of us in web design:

The first thing was that it had to be very easy for people to use; it could not be overloaded with functions that only technicians could understand. Products have to be designed in a way that they are comprehensible. We know most people don’t like to read instruction manuals. And also we had different functions in different colours; you can see that this yellow button is an important one. Having small touches of colour makes it more colourful than having the whole thing in colour.

As we move more and more of our lives into the digital space, the products we interact with are less and less physical, yet “good design” is even more necessary to cut through the noise and confusion of information barraging us:  ”Less, but better” is still an important mantra.

Good design is aesthetic

At the 2009 South by Southwest festival, Jason Santa Maria moderated a panel called “Not The Same Old Story.”  The group discussed the design and display of digital content and how, oftentimes, beauty, context, and deeper meaning are missing when information is dumped unceremoniously into web templates (compared, for instance, with the rich and meaningful design applied to Wired Magazine articles).  The challenge is: how are stories told in a data-centric digital world where content battles with advertisements, intrusive navigation, and a plethora of social widgets?

Some outlets manage to balance aesthetics with compelling storytelling, such as Monocle (designed with a focus on “the idea of high-quality journalistic content” instead of any specific technologies), A List Apart (with their limited publication schedule allowing for custom illustration to augment each article), or even the International Herald Tribune (which has done an admirable job balancing design with technical implementation).

Similar to Rams’ concerns about “noise” and “confusion,” Mandy Brown writes in her “In Defense of Readers,”

Readers flourish when they have space—some distance from the hubbub of the crowds—and as web designers, there is yet much we can do to help them carve out that space.

An interesting movement seems to be handing the reigns aesthetic control to the people.  For instance, Arc90 Labs recently released their Readability bookmarklet, which, simply put, allows you to strip out everything but the content you would like to read, displaying it in an elegantly simplified (and customizable) text-only display.  Custom CSS and Greasemonkey scripts have been performing similar feats for some time now.

Good design helps a product to be understood

Freckle distills time sheets down to its basics (through its “simple and thoughtful” redesign and rethinking of the time tracking experience).  Get Satisfaction takes the pain out of customer service.  All of 37 Signals‘ products focus on streamlining processes through good design (Basecamp for collaboration, Highrise for contacts, Backpack for project organization, and Campfire for chat).  Mint clarifies personal finance.

Good design also helps more complex concepts to be understood, for instance, lifestreaming: aggregating one’s digital identity and activity through a single website or application.  When monitoring your own lifestream and those of your friends, many solutions, however, tend to be inelegant in how they handle this deluge of information…usually presenting things as a long constantly-updating list.

Fallon’s Skimmer application, instead, seems to more closely follow Rams’ idea that “the most important task of design is to optimize the utility of a product.”  Rather than focus on the sheer data being processed through lifestreams, Skimmer focuses on making information “more organized, manageable, and available” (the open source lifestream service AmpliFeeder is similarly design-focused).  Thus, through an elegant design and a blance between content, interaction, and display, Skimmer is a step in the right direction of helping use and make sense of lifestreams.

Finally, there is a burgeoning pool of information visualization applications designed as simplification layers to otherwise complex systems:  Wikirank, which adds a graphical touch to Wikipedia’s voluminous updating, to SmallTalk, a weather visualization based on real-time Twitter updates, to Twistori, which gives us a look into everyone’s feelings (pulled from Twitter)  to Daytum (from Nicholas Felton, author of the Feltron Report, which in an of itself is an interesting design experiement, visualizing the statistics that make up one’s day-to-day experience), a service allowing you to create a beautifully visualized design to just about any information you’d like.  All of these, in some small way, attempt to make complex concepts better understood.

Good design is unobtrusive

Rams wrote that good designs should “be both neutral and restrained leaving room for the user’s self-expression.”  In the digital realm, good designs accommodate for a range of user skill levels and intentions/desires…outlets for their self-expression.

For a novice user, Flickr, the photo sharing application, can be utilized easily as a place to share photos through its implementation of simple forms and upload tools, refined interface, and core focus on communication.  With a little exploration, more advanced users discover many other features: tagging, groups, organization, mapping, etc.  The design of Flickr focuses on the content and base features, while advanced features have been moved just slightly behind the scenes: hovering over icons reveals deeper levels of interaction, secondary editing options are located unobtrusively away from the main content area.  This concept of discovery creates greater knowledge, and this knowledge comes at the user’s pace.

Twitter, of course, is an example of, perhaps, the simplest concept (an empty text box and a character count) allowing for a world of self-expression.  Matt May, the author of “In Persuit of Elegance,” writes of his first few months with the service:

It’s symmetrical, because the 140 character is the same for everyone. It doesn’t change, no matter what you do, where you are, who you are, or when you tweet. It’s seductive to the point, at least for me, of addiction. Something about filling in that empty block in a creative way is compelling. It’s subtractive, because you absolutely must edit and reedit your thoughts, compress links, conserve characters, and leave space for “retweets.”

Good design is as little design as possible

At its surface, this speaks to the concept of “less is more” and of a minimalist design aesthetic.  More and more, sites are favoring direct interaction with content over overly-design navigations (for instance, CSSRemix lets you explore simply through screenshots).

While graphic elegance is important, good design can be expressed through simplicity in concept and function.  The most obvious example of this is the simplicity of the Google homepage and the general aesthetic of that company’s products overall (however, with the recent unhappy departures of several key designers from Google, one has to wonder if the numbers-based magic of the company’s technology flies in the face of Rams’ ideology: is functionality running rough-shod over design?).  Open APIallow clever applications to sit on top of complex information sources (for instance, the NYTExplorer strips down the paper into Google-like search results pages, and TwitEarth displays global messaging),  often elegantly focusing on niche areas. 

Less, but better

Rams is cognizent that the challenges facing designers today (including, I assume, digitial designers, even though Rams himself does not own a computer) are similar to those of years past, saying:

As designers we have a great responsibility. I believe designers should eliminate the unnecessary.