What Is Good Design

"Less but Better."

— Dieter Rams

I stumbled upon this book in the library of the School of Design and Innovation and ended up reading for an entire morning as soon as I picked it up.

The first time I heard about Rams was in Jonathan Ive's biography. Jony is without question one of Rams's biggest admirers, and their thinking can be said to come from the same lineage. Later I also heard Zhang Xiaolong talk in WeChat's product design philosophy about his admiration for Rams's "Ten Principles of Good Design." Principles are highly distilled experience. They simplify ideas in a way that makes them easier to spread. To understand Rams's design thinking more deeply, I summarized the most valuable parts I found while reading this book, mainly Rams's views on several topics and, finally, his summary of design principles.

On Good Design and Function

Good design is as little design as possible. By omitting the unnecessary, what truly matters can emerge, and products can become quiet, pleasant, understandable, and long-lasting. But to reach that point, designers must go through a long and difficult journey full of questions, challenges, discussion, and experimentation.

A rational reading of design says that every formal treatment should be verifiable, testable, and understandable. The evaluation of design should not stop at the abstract statement that something "looks good." It should also include more rational criteria: usability, feasibility, and aesthetic quality.

A product's usability is the direct result of the designer's ability to anticipate user needs. Usability should be addressed from the very beginning. Designers should know the actual conditions of use, understand users' wishes and expectations, be familiar with technological and manufacturing limits, and understand the market, including what should not be interfered with and what would amount to outright deception.
A product's feasibility is the ability to produce it within constraints, including cost, materials, manufacturing technology, time, and competition. A strong designer may be imaginative, capable, patient, diligent, and optimistic enough to improve the status quo, but exploration still has to happen within the strict framework of feasibility.
A product's aesthetic quality may be harder to define. For most people, beauty is a matter of taste, so discussion remains open. But for well-trained designers who understand the complexity of interrelated elements in the act of creating a product, beauty can indeed be evaluated, even if not fully quantified.

Good design requires meticulous research. When designing a product, you should ask yourself fifteen questions:

In the beginning, the real question is not whether a product should be designed, but how it should be designed.
Is the product truly necessary? Are there other similar, already tested, already familiar tools that people are used to in this situation? Is innovation here genuinely needed?
Does it enrich people's lives? Or does it merely satisfy greed, possessiveness, and status-seeking? Or does it excite desire only because it offers a novel experience?
Is it conceived for the short term or the long term? Does it accelerate the cycle of disposal, or help slow it down?
Can it be repaired easily? Or does it depend on costly service organizations? Can it really be repaired thoroughly, or does one broken part render the whole product useless?
Does it display fashionable but aesthetically short-lived design elements?
Does it empower people or make them helpless? Does it make them freer or more dependent?
Does it make people feel incompetent or humiliated because it is too complete and perfect?
What human activity does it replace, and can that replacement truly be called progress?
What possibilities for change does it offer, and how broad are those possibilities?
Can it be used in other ways, perhaps playful ones?
Does it provide convenience, or does it encourage passivity?
What would the product's hoped-for improvement mean in a broader context?
Does it make an activity or an action more complex or more simple as a whole? Is it easy to use, or do you have to learn how to use it?
Can it spark curiosity and imagination? Can it awaken a desire to use, understand, or even modify the product?

The functions a product fulfills are often too narrow and too specialized, while human needs are far more varied than most designers are prepared to admit or even able to understand. Functional complexity and variety include psychological, social, and aesthetic dimensions as well as usability.

Product design is always ultimately for users, and users are simply human beings, each with their own complexity, habits, thoughts, and temperament. Indifference to people and to the reality they live in is the only sin in design. Design driven by function is the result of deep, comprehensive, and patient reflection on reality, on life, on needs and desires, and on human feeling.

On What Makes a Good Designer

A good designer should be intelligent and quick to understand, should have a broad grasp of technology, should be critical, fair, and realistic, should be gifted at teamwork, and should be patient, optimistic, and persistent. A good designer should be able to generate better ideas, should have a strong feel for proportion and color, should be sensitive, should have good hands-on skills, and, above all, should have talent.

Designers have nothing to do with artists or decorators. They should instead be seen as "engineers of form" or "technically oriented designers."

Designers must also pay attention to changes in cultural and social values, and must consider every individual in society, integrating them into the design process. Designers who want to create products with appropriate functions must place themselves in the user's role. Designers are the representatives of users inside a company.

Designers must understand everyone's position and needs, and communicate with different roles throughout the entire product development process. That means designers must be good communicators, able to express ideas fluently through many languages: writing, models, drawings, technical notes, and even body language.

In general, a designer is someone who can feel, listen, and understand; analyze in detail, precisely, and quantitatively; and then share and communicate the results of that analysis through appropriate media, producing products that speak to users and satisfy their needs. In the end, designers must create good design and must possess the ability to innovate.

On Designing Inside Companies

Design cannot merely be speculation aimed at better market opportunities. It is a much more integrated task that can only be achieved through an overall concept implemented honestly and confidently. Once a company focuses only on sales returns, the position and goals of the whole company are affected. The safest way to make products then becomes looking at what is already selling well in the market and creating something similar. This "me too" method is conservative and market-driven. It neither stimulates innovation nor produces user-oriented design.

Yet designing outside existing systems is risky, and it usually requires large amounts of time and money for experimentation in order to develop new products. That kind of commitment to product must therefore run through the entire company, not just the design department, and it must be supported by the company's decision-making structure.

The company's responsibility is to give designers the space to create good design, while the designer's responsibility is to propose good design and keep defending it.

Commitment to design must also run through every corner of the company and every aspect of the product. During the design process, everything from product concepts to diagrams, manuals, packaging, advertising, marketing, and display should be understood and considered as part of design.

On Aesthetics

For Rams, beautiful design means honest, balanced, simple, detailed, and modest neutrality. Design is not merely, and certainly not exclusively, about visual pleasure. The beauty of design should be tied to the usefulness of the product.

Aesthetic quality is difficult to discuss for two reasons:

Language struggles to describe visual things, because words mean different things to different people.
Aesthetic quality lies in the handling of detail, subtle color relationships, harmony, and the balance of the total visual composition, so it takes a trained eye to draw correct conclusions.

Beauty comes from simplicity and modesty. The product itself should play a secondary role in its relationship with users. It should not constantly compete for attention, but instead leave users room and freedom. A balanced, quiet, clear, neutral, and simple design best fits people's real needs.

The unstable taste of corporate decision-makers is often a heavy burden for designers. Too many of them believe they are qualified to judge, yet their judgments often come across as dull and superficial. Taste requires training. High-level aesthetic decisions in product design are often inherently tied to form and function, and therefore must be guided by professionals.

Consumers do not necessarily have better taste either. Exploiting buyers' weaknesses is a constant temptation for many companies. It may work in the short term, but it cannot succeed in the long term, because none of us benefit from living and working in a society built on cynical exploitation of human weakness.

On Superficiality and Chaos

The visual pollution of the human world often felt unbearable to Rams, which is why some of his designs begin from a personal need for calm and order. It is the designer's responsibility to rescue people from pollution. If alienation, confusion, and overload were reduced, everyone's life would improve, because life is already full of things that are almost useless, false, or only superficially attractive.

The word "design" has been abused by the commercial culture of consumerism.

Sensitive, disciplined simplicity and restraint are the core of design. Simplicity means discarding what is useless. Discipline means maintaining long-term resolve. Restraint means controlling the ego during the process.

On Bad Design

Bad design is the cynical exploitation of human weakness: greed, vanity, and the pursuit of status. Bad design is also flashy and illusion-making. It only helps put designers under the spotlight while ignoring product function and betraying the promises a product makes.

People numbed by visual overstimulation cannot understand the beauty of restrained, function-oriented design. Simple design is absolutely not ordinary design. On the contrary, it is exactly through use that one can perceive the intense creative labor that had to happen in order to strip form down.

Self-centered, flashy, and overly complicated products, lacking discipline and rigor, are deeply uninteresting to someone like Rams, who understands the intellectual and physical labor required for truly good functional design.

On Users and Consumers

Designers should believe that products are made to be used for a long time, so they should do their best to encourage purchase through quality. Users should be willing to pay a higher price in order to fully use a product's functions and keep it for longer.

The difference between consumers and users is that consumers make decisions based merely on an interesting shape or a fashionable color. They satisfy shallow short-term desires or make aesthetic decisions that are not rooted in functional need. They are wasteful, unreflective, and impulsive. Users, by contrast, are intelligent, thoughtful, and critical. They consciously choose products that genuinely help them.

The Ten Principles of Good Design

Good design is innovative

The possibilities for innovation have not been exhausted in any sense. Technological development always offers new opportunities for innovative design, but innovative design always develops together with innovative technology and never exists on its own.

Good design is useful

A product is bought to be used. It must meet certain standards, not only functional ones but also psychological and aesthetic ones. Good design emphasizes a product's usefulness and ignores anything that could detract from it.

Good design is aesthetic

The aesthetic quality of a product should form a whole with its usefulness, because the products we use every day influence our well-being. But only products that are well executed can achieve beauty.

Good design is understandable

Good design makes a product's structure clear. Better still, it allows the product to speak. Best of all, design becomes self-explanatory.

Good design is honest

Design does not make a product appear more innovative, more powerful, or more valuable than it really is. Good design does not try to manipulate consumers through promises it cannot fulfill.

Good design is unobtrusive

Products that fulfill a purpose are like tools. They are neither decorative objects nor works of art. Therefore product design should be neutral and restrained, leaving room for users' self-expression.

Good design is long-lasting

By avoiding fashion, it avoids becoming unfashionable. Unlike trendy design, good design lasts longer, even in today's wasteful society.

Good design is thorough down to the last detail

Nothing in design should be arbitrary or left to chance. Care and precision in the design process show respect for users.

Good design is environmentally friendly

Good design contributes to environmental preservation. It saves resources and minimizes physical and visual pollution throughout the product's entire life cycle.

Good Design Is as Little Design as Possible

Less, but better. Because good design focuses on the essential, products are not burdened by the non-essential. Back to purity. Back to simplicity.