The Dark Side of Minimalist Design: Updating Dieter Rams’ Ten Principles [video] | Hacker News Reader

The Dark Side of Minimalist Design: Updating Dieter Rams’ Ten Principles [video]

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68 pointszdw21 comments

“There’s no functional purpose for wearing a watch anymore.”

This could not be further from the truth. If anything, the advent of tech watches has made it even more clear to me how valuable a watch that runs forever and never needs to be removed is. To have certainty that 24/7/365, I can look down and immediately know what time it is has been tremendously helpful, and the design of that watch is incredibly important to that end.

I wear a dive watch with a nato strap, because it’s light, durable, and comfortable enough to have completely disappeared years ago. It never comes off.

I disagree with most of this video. He uses incredibly minimalist high heels as an example of counter-minimalism, presumably asserting that they should be flats, which ignores the entire purpose of heels. Heels are a tool used to achieve a certain posture, appearance, and an associated response. They’re designed to do a job, as are the basketball shoes he keeps showing, which are functionally reinforced in certain areas, but otherwise fairly minimalist too.

I saw an employee at a hardware store yesterday with a full sized iPhone strapped to his wrist like a watch. It's just such a convenient place for information that people are going to keep using it, whether we design products for that or not. I bet that people keep using virtual watches on their wrists in AR.

it's actually already a pretty common method to place important information for the user on his virtual wrist in VR.

Examples: - Half Life Alyx - Lone Echo - Fallout VR

Not to mention the Wrist Link used throughout the galaxy in Star Wars.

https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Wrist_link

And Fallout's PipBoy is pretty much a smartphone strapped to the wrist, just with a bulkiness and physical interface that seemed realistic when the first game released in 1997

Yeah, when he argues that a marble sculpture is "dishonest" it started to look like he was grasping for outlandish examples to make a point.

I generally eschew videos like this anyway — fall into the “writing about music is like dancing about architecture” category.

I prefer not to expound on and on about what is good design and what makes it good design. I know it when I see it.

He's saying it's dishonest according to the principle that the materials used to build something should not be hidden or made to look like other materials. I think it's a bad example, because, as he admits, it's art and not design, but his next example about Dieter Rams wearing plastic glasses made to look like tortoise shell is more persuasive.

I think his point is that each of the "principles" is one side of a coin, and that Dieter Rams might be famous for one side of each coin, but he deals in both sides, because the preference for one over the other is not absolute. It's a fair point.

> I know it when I see it.

Design is not only about how things look. In most cases, design is about function as well, so you need to actually use the thing to have a clue whether it's a good design. The most aesthetically pleasing design is completely useless if it inhibits the users' ability to do what they want. I'll take something without any aesthetic qualities if its easier to use

That is very true.

He's saying that heels and basketball shoes are great because they do not adhere to minimalism. If they strictly adhered to just doing their job they would be less decorative than they are. We want these objects to also be expressive, and so we design them to be so. He's suggesting this expression is good, and shouldn't be constrained by an adherence to minimalistic design.

I hear you, but my point is the broad definition of shoe = “thing that protects your feet” shouldn’t be applied to either, anymore than “thing used to drive other things into things” should be applied equally to hammers, sledgehammers, mallets, and fence post drivers.

Yeah, they all do that, but they all do it in different ways and for different reasons and are adorned to match the specific outcomes they’re after, not just as superfluous ornamentation.

Look closer at the high-tops he shows (https://cdn.flightclub.com/TEMPLATE/152035/1.jpg). They are reinforced around the ankle, heels, and toes, because that’s where they are most stressed by a basketball player. They have vents, so the players feet don’t get too hot. Those are necessary design elements. The only thing that could be simplified, and still do the job as well, is the color scheme and Nike logo.

That’s why they’re timeless, which is exactly what Rams was saying. If you shift the category from shoe to running shoe, or ballet shoe, the essential elements shift, and the ideal design shifts with them.

It seems important to understand the context that these principles were created from. If, for example, you were to go to a design event at SF Design Week, and wondered if you were actually at a fashion event, then we might start to think about the context that the 89-year-old Dieter Rams is coming from.

The principles (as stated by the designer) were meant to evolve. And evolve they have. When most tech products were being designed without the input of designers (say, 15 years ago), we started to have many people write books like "Don't Make Me Think." This was because engineers' culture of one-upping each other in the smarts department was spilling over into the design of tech products, and at the same time, tech was becoming more important and more mainstream.

A lot of design in tech has felt like it's been finding its way through these principles. When Microsoft started caring about design, people criticized that their products looked like they looked good in a Powerpoint, as opposed to in-person. The last time I used Google's material-ui toolkit, it harshly encoded the very large, wide spacing that is the default for some of their web UIs (like gmail), where a user cares much more about being able to read through a large amount of structured information, rather than making it appear "aesthetic." It's not so much don't make me think, as it is: please respect the task I have at hand.

I feel like "Don't make me think" is geared more towards designers who want the things they design to look different or unique or new. The main thesis of that book is to follow established conventions in web design. To me, it seems like engineers following conventions is what they'd prefer so that they don't have to think about how things look too much.

Most of his principles seem great, it's just the less is more, and the idea of honestly(Which sounds great taken literally but has problems when interpreted as truth to materials).

We have the tech to make dishonest things durable now. We can make plastic look like whatever we want. We can make something hollow and still stand up, because we can use software to optimize the reinforcements.

It might not always look or feel "high quality" on close inspection, but it will look great sitting on a desk, and won't break itself or your foot if you drop it, for 1/10th of the price of "Luxury" stuff designers like to make, full of glass and metal.

The luxury stuff will be destroyed if not very well cared for(Which seems to be considered almost a feature by fancy designers who want design to reflect the stability and resources of the owner more than the accuracy of some industry guy's FEM model).

And we can do things in software rather than hardware on many devices.

Software, and new forms of manufacturing, also let us pack in features without making things heavy or delicate, often saving the need for multiple separate devices, which saves space, resources, and money, and makes redundancy easier(You'll probably always have a USB charger at home they're randomly built into everything these days, everything online has a clock, etc).

It definitely takes more effort to get highly feature dense and low-substance design right, but it's amazing when they do. You can have something that costs nothing, looks great, and lasts a decade, almost like the real defining element is the structure, with the physical material just kind of supporting it the way a computer supports software.

This was a nice video, and I'm glad I watched it.

I could not help but notice, though, that (with one exception) he did not try to update the ten principles, as is claimed in the title. Instead, he just brought up counter-examples to poke holes in many of them.

It's really easy to come up with gotchas for almost anything.

It's like if I wanted to poke holes in a different set of ten commandments, and I said: "Thou shalt not kill? Really? What about killing a virus? What about killing a tree that's about to fall on your house? This rule makes no sense!"

But it does, basically. It's certainly better than the negation. If by coming up with edge cases where the rule doesn't make sense leads you to believe the rule is wrong in most cases, or even that you should do the opposite, then it's not a useful criticism.

It's much harder, but more useful, to make a positive declaration like: "this is what I believe is true" and then put it into practice.

Youtube is showing me this -

Video unavailable: This video is no longer available due to a copyright claim by Film First Corp

Is the video available anywhere else?

I did appreciate the heavy burn when he pointed out that Dieter is himself wearing eyewear that is a fake material emulation of real tortoise shell.

My favorite trick is putting sand or scrap metal inside something to make it seem more expensive. Works every time.

It's a great trick especially when it would otherwise side around on a desk. No reason to waste real valuable materials when random trash will do.

What's the digital equivalent of this?

Deliberately adding latency. Although sometimes you need to because users are so accustomed to slow software that 'fast' reads as 'broken' to them.

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