This is the last entry of a ten-part series based on Dieter Rams’ Ten Principles of Good Design. The Journal asked writers and illustrators to contribute to the project. Each writer wrote on one of Rams’ principles; each illustrator reacted to a writer’s essay.

I am a big fan of Dieter Rams and his ten principles. This last principle sums up all previous nine principles into one:

Find as few solutions for as many problems as possible.

Which is a nearly perfect definition when you talk about design as product design. To understand its theoretic core you need to see that he uses two slightly different notions of design in the same sentence.

Good design is as little design as possible.

With design, as in “Good design,” he refers to design as a form of basic engineering. With design as in “little design” he refers to design as the process of giving shape. (In German, design is Gestaltung, literally: shaping.) If you replace the two notions of design with these more specific definitions, the sentence sounds less paradoxical (and less rhetoric):

Good engineering is giving as little shape as possible.

So good engineers avoid shaping objects? Isn’t engineering just that: giving shape to a concept? Yes, it is: Good engineers focus on shaping the necessary parts of a product. In other words:

In a perfectly engineered product every shape is necessary.

Which, of course, is consistent with the rhetoric in principles two, four and seven. The only way for me to add some opinionated salt to the ten principles – which, to me, read more like a poem than an engineering guideline – is that design also needs a break from total consistency to feel humane and approachable.

Oliver Reichenstein wrote on Rams’s tenth principle, Good design is as little design as possible. Mr Reichenstein is the founder of the design firm Information Architects. Lab Partners, Ryan Meis’ and Sarah Labieniec’s design and illustration studio, created the above illustration based on Mr Reichenstein’s essay. They have designed and illustrated for numerous clients including Monocle, Wired Magazine and HP.