Dieter Rams and the Ten Principles That Still Hold

Dieter Rams spent most of his career at Braun, the German consumer electronics company, designing objects that were so considered in their form and function that they became the reference point for an entire philosophy of design. His ten principles, articulated in the late 1970s, have been cited so often in the decades since that they risk becoming wallpaper. Repeated without being read. Agreed with without being applied.

It is worth reading them again, slowly, and asking which ones have held their meaning and which ones need to be reinterpreted for a world that Rams could not have anticipated.

Good design is innovative. This one holds. Innovation in design is not the same as novelty. It is the discovery of a better way to solve a real problem. The digital environment has created new problems that require genuinely new solutions. The principle applies as much to an app interface as to a radio.

Good design makes a product useful. This holds and has become more important. In a world of products designed primarily to be photographed and shared, the return to usefulness as a primary criterion feels almost radical. The most admired digital products of the current moment are the ones that do one thing extraordinarily well.

Good design is aesthetic. This one requires nuance. Rams meant that the aesthetic quality of a product is integral to its usefulness, that beauty and function are not in opposition. This is true. But the principle has sometimes been used to justify aesthetic decisions that serve the designer's taste rather than the user's needs. The aesthetic must serve the use, not the other way around.

Good design makes a product understandable. This holds completely and is perhaps the most violated principle in contemporary digital design. Products that require tutorials, onboarding sequences and help documentation to use are products that have failed this test. The best interfaces are the ones that teach themselves.

Good design is unobtrusive. This is the principle that the attention economy has most thoroughly abandoned. The products that generate the most engagement are often the ones that are most obtrusive, most demanding of attention, most insistent on being noticed. Rams's principle is a rebuke to this entire model. The question it asks is whether a product that demands constant attention is actually serving its user or exploiting them.

Good design is honest. This one has become a political statement. In a landscape of dark patterns, manipulative interfaces and products designed to extract behaviour rather than enable it, honesty in design is an ethical position as much as an aesthetic one.

Good design is long-lasting. This holds and is increasingly urgent. The culture of planned obsolescence, of products designed to be replaced rather than repaired, is in direct conflict with this principle. The brands that are building for the long term are the ones taking this seriously.

Good design is thorough down to the last detail. This holds. The details are where trust is built or lost. The user who encounters a product that has been thought through to its edges feels something different from the user who encounters one that has been finished to the point of adequacy.

Good design is environmentally friendly. This principle, which seemed almost incidental when Rams articulated it, is now the most urgent of all. Design that does not account for its environmental consequences is not good design. It is design that has externalised its costs.

Good design is as little design as possible. This is the one that is most often misunderstood. It does not mean minimal. It means purposeful. Every element should be there because it needs to be there. Nothing should be added for decoration, for complexity, for the appearance of sophistication. The discipline required to achieve this is enormous, and the result, when it is achieved, is a product that feels inevitable.

Rams made these principles in the context of physical objects. They apply, with varying degrees of translation, to every designed thing. The question they ask is always the same: is this serving the person who uses it, or is it serving something else?