Dieter Rams: ten principles for good design | Hacker News Reader

Dieter Rams: ten principles for good design

vitsoe.com

134 pointspart1of247 comments

Earlier this year, I saw Gary Hustwit's documentary about Rams. Rams is arguably one of the most influential designers of the last century. His lessons on design are valuable for software engineers and others.

https://www.hustwit.com/rams

In that documentation he only talks once about the tech scene and he absolutely nailed it: "The one thing that we have to get right is that humans are in control of the technology and not vice versa."

Given that technology has been and is currently being used to control people, I’d say we failed.

Used by whom? Humans. Humans control technology to control other humans. Several layers of failure, there.

Yes of course. Or gui design it is obvious

I extended it to engineering and marketing fields: https://neil.computer/notes/good/

It's a stretch, these principles are just extremely abstract and perhaps even non-actionable; the devil is in the details :-).

I finally managed to overcome the objections of Mrs VR46 and order some Vitsoe shelving for my office - she thought it was ugly - but after a few months (arguably 10 years) she changed her mind completely and thinks they’re great. I wish I would always have had the money to buy long-term, because you get more satisfaction AND spend less money.

If I made a software and I took someone 10 years of constant usage to start liking it, I'm not sure I'd say it's a very well designed software. 10 years is enough to make anyone like anything.

That was me joking that it took about 10 years of convincing her to let me buy it, but only a few months of it actually being in the house for her to like it :)

oh, had understood it the other way around :)

How much did it cost? The process seems extremely expensive if you are not a millionaire.

Apple is perhaps the continuator of Diet Rams philosophie of design. Jonathan Ive was totally a fan of the German designer Rams. You can really feel it in the simplicity of Apple products.

I am a big fan also even if less gifted.

I watched the Hustwit documentary on Rams this year too, and while I liked the documentary (my review: https://www.gwern.net/Movie-reviews#rams ), I felt it put a finger on why Apple imitates Rams's surface but doesn't actually live up to his philosophy. Rams's radio and chair etc are all fully functional. Rams removed the accidental complexity by careful design, leaving only the essential complexity (the user still has to choose a radio channel, the radio can't choose it for him!). But there is a difference between removing accidental complexity and hiding intrinsic complexity.

Apple's approach is, all too often, to avoid intrinsic complexity and optimize for a surface simplicity which actually shoves away all the hard problems by either forbidding them or relegating them to the CLI or 'power user' tools or makes it the devs' problem. This makes for products which look great sitting in the Apple Store, but then as you try to do anything complex or hard... You run straight into Tog's "third-user" critique: https://asktog.com/atc/the-third-user/ Apple's products are far more shiny than empowering or deep solutions. (Who would ever dare compare an iPad with a Smalltalk or Lisp Machine?)

So you get inordinate attention to making the perfect squircled corner, but meanwhile, you have to grip your iPhone right for the antenna to work, or your keyboard breaks at the dust from the drop of a hat, and as always, the web browser lags half a decade behind and can't play basic audio file formats like OGG Vorbis, and Mac OS X ships with breaking bugs; this isn't even reaching the standards of basic competence, much less truly fulfilling Rams's 10 principles and creating user-empowering interfaces and violins of the mind.

There is a remarkable difference in Jony Ive's approach towards design and Dieter's despite of his inspiration (OSX calc, iPod, etc.). For e.g., Dieter truly explored texture of the surfaces not from an aesthetic goal, but as a tool to aid functionlism (knobs have knurling, sliders have striations, grippy things had rough texture, areas that shouldn't be touched were gloss). Jony just made things beautiful that sold well because that's what sells. That's what luxury brands do.

He threw away the german functionalism that Dieter is so well known for, and adopted the hollow aesthetics of his work. Jony was obsessed with how a thing looks more than how a think works (besides the fact that Apple mouse is horrendous to use, it at one point had a charging port under the mouse). He ignored and still to this day ignores ergonomics, transparency, affordances, feedback and many aspects of design that are fundamental to designing a product that interfaces with humans. Instead of looking up to the challenge to make products more usable whilst keeping a consistent coherent aesthetics, he prefers to hide things or flat out omit important features so that the design is clean. He almost had an authoritarian role at Apple - engineering had to bow down to him.

About the only thing Jony Ive did with Dieter Rams was adopted minimalism for the sake of aesthetic goals. Dieter would never design a clock that had a transparent face, made legibility poor and had white numerals on clear glass (which does not guarantee contrast): https://watchesbysjx.com/2013/10/jaeger-lecoultre-newson-atm...

Jony Ive IMO is one of the worst designers in modern history despite of his success.

Some of Ive's designs were highly functional. The iPod clickwheel is probably the best example. Much, much better than other contemporary music player interfaces.

If you read Walter Isaacson’s biography of Apple, it wasn’t that clear who’s idea it was.

Steve Jobs*, not Apple :-).

Apple copied that from the Beocom 6000 phone by Bang & Olufsen.

> it at one point had a charging port under the mouse

I've read that the motivation for this decision was to ensure that the customer would use the device wirelessly as intended. I guess it could be beneficial for the battery as well.

In any case, it proves your point further.

I understood this as a feature when, after using the Apple mouse with this charging port, I got a Logitech Bluetooth mouse as I needed a middle mouse button for one program. It happens to have a front facing charging port. The mouse worked well and I recommended it to colleagues. On occasions when the battery died, I left a USB cable plugged in and assumed I was using the mouse by USB. At some point I realized it was for charging only after wasting time on “i don’t understand, even after I turn off Bluetooth, the USB interface doesn’t work.” A few times since then I’ve helped colleagues troubleshoot by informing them that there is no USB data interface and they should be checking Bluetooth and not swapping out cables.

In both cases (Apple and Logitech), a “charge only” label would have been nice.

Interesting, thanks for sharing. That just made it even worse! What they should've done is to make it work either way so if the battery is low, you can connect it via USB to the mac and still use it while it is charging.

I feel Apple is literally the anti-thesis of Dieter Rams.

Johnny Ive's design philosophy i have always felt is very much "form over function" and has resulted in horrific abominations like skeuomorphism and mobile radios that don't have enough signal and touch bar.

Even with Johnny Ive partly out of the picture I to this day find it inefficient and difficult to meaningfully use my daughter's iPad.

Scott Forstall (along with Jobs) was the skeuomorphism proponent, not Ive. iOS 7's huge shift to "flat" design was after Forstall resigned and Ive's vision of mobile design fully took over.

Oh good to know! Thanks!

"Good design is invisible" Donald A. Norman - The Design of Everyday things

I have been reading this book for a while and the 10 points in this article seem so much on the surface only with no depth. It's probably about marketing more than design principles.

Here is an interesting view on the revolution of Dieter Rams design principles . https://youtu.be/nXwpn90Gdec

Power sockets in the photo are not easily accessible. Poor design.

https://youtu.be/wChkvofR7Q0

https://youtu.be/A6-wA-7QIeE (Interesting talk with Rams)

Apple, in the Jonathan Ive périod, is to my point of view ,the modern implementation of Brauwn-Rams . You can see this in the video

11. Good design is expensive

A base model of their chair is GBP 3245 (USD 4200).

"A good life is an expensive one" - Unknown

I haven't found empirical evidence if the functionality of these Braun products were compromised by his aesthetic choices or not. i.e. were these actually good products at the time, or did they only look good in your living room? Does anyone have data on this?

I don't know, but if they allowed the aesthetic to impede the functionality, they did so in violation of design principle #2 because good design MUST (tongue-in-cheek RFC-like capitalization) disregard anything that detracts from the usefulness of the product.

The speakers look nice but those shelfs will get old quickly, they bend under the wait of books and have the cheap look of a grocery store. If ur into design pay a carpenter for bespoke shelfs.

The discourse on this article is such low quality, so I wanted to delete my comments and leave. But Hacker News won't let you delete it after a while I guess, so I'll just edit it and leave this comment instead.

considering it's just anchored to drywall.

Wow, that's terrifying, given your photo. I hope you don't live in an earthquake-prone zone.

Are you talking from experience with these shelves? Or are you making an assumption about their quality and long term stability?

To me, they have the same functional design as Rams has promoted since the 1950s which has had a lasting effect on the world of design in both technology and other areas.

Note that the shelves form a system of shelving, so you can adjust them in many different ways to suit different storage needs. They are usable in numerous different environments and mounting configurations.

That's design. Eames said "Design is about constraints". The constraints here are things like wall types (and the requirements for mounting), using compression to support free standing shelving where it forms both storage and area separation.

The sizing supports standard wall stud spacing and both plasterboard/solid construction as well as semi-freestanding and entirely freestanding configurations.

yes as is implied in the comment.

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