Unfortunately, Mr Rams was not available for an interview. His thoughts on each principle, reproduced with permission from Vitsoe, come from conversation with Mark Adams, Managing Director of the furniture company.

Based on my experience as a designer, I have distilled the essentials of my design philosophy into ten principles. But these principles cannot be set in stone because, just as technology and culture are constantly developing, so are ideas about good design.

Good design is innovative.

The possibilities for innovation are not, by any means, exhausted. Technological development is always offering new opportunities for innovative design. But innovative design always develops in tandem with innovative technology, and can never be an end in itself.

Good design makes a product useful.

A product is bought to be used. It has to satisfy certain criteria, not only functional, but also psychological and aesthetic. Good design emphasises the usefulness of a product whilst disregarding anything that could possibly detract from it.

Good design is aesthetic.

The aesthetic quality of a product is integral to its usefulness because products we use every day affect our person and our well-being. But only well-executed objects can be beautiful.

Good design makes a product understandable.

It clarifies the product’s structure. Better still, it can make the product talk. At best, it is self-explanatory.

Good design is unobtrusive.

Products fulfilling a purpose are like tools. They are neither decorative objects nor works of art. Their design should therefore be both neutral and restrained, to leave room for the user’s self-expression.

Good design is honest.

It does not make a product more innovative, powerful or valuable than it really is. It does not attempt to manipulate the consumer with promises that cannot be kept.

Good design is long-lasting.

It avoids being fashionable and therefore never appears antiquated. Unlike fashionable design, it lasts many years – even in today’s throwaway society.

Good design is thorough down to the last detail.

Nothing must be arbitrary or left to chance. Care and accuracy in the design process show respect towards the consumer.

Good design is environmentally friendly.

Design makes an important contribution to the preservation of the environment. It conserves resources and minimises physical and visual pollution throughout the lifecycle of the product.

Good design is as little design as possible.

Less, but better – because it concentrates on the essential aspects, and the products are not burdened with non-essentials. Back to purity, back to simplicity.

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.

This is entry nine 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.

Designers are not tree-killers or waste-makers. Rather, we are material utilizers, for better or worse. We create experiences, provide information, and promote interactions, whether it be in products, printed materials, or the spaces we inhabit. Rams was quite ahead of his time with his statement, “Good Design is environmentally friendly.” Today, environmentalism is all the rage. You’d be hard pressed to find a brochure, a piece of packaging, or even an iron that lacks a small statement or tiny leaf proclaiming its care for our world. Worse than that, big brands seem to tout their environmental concern – so much that there is almost a backlash to it.

But this isn’t what Rams’ principle was about.

We have so many options as designers today. The bright side of the trendiness of environmentalism currently seen in the consumer world is that we as designers are pushed a little harder to make conscious choices about the materials we use and decisions we make. For example, there are widely available and well-made recycled papers and plastics, as well as soy-based inks.

But this also isn’t what Rams’ principle was about.

The beauty of Rams’ ninth principle is that it interacts and relies on the others. Like all of them, it says one thing: good design is thoughtful. To be thoughtful, we must be asking questions, and the question for every project must be, “what is our environment?” This single question leads to many others. They provide a rubric for judging our work. In it, we set limits on what materials we use and how much, we decide the lifetime of a particular piece of work.

Aaron Heth wrote on Rams’ ninth principle, Good design is environmentally friendly. Mr Heth co-hosts Read Between the Leading, a podcast for design education and discussion. He recently graduated from Savannah College of Art & Design’s design program and is freelancing in the San Francisco area. Jeffrey Bowman created the above illustration based on Mr Heth’s essay. Mr Bowman works under the name Studio-Bowlegs. He is currently enrolled as MA student at The University of Huddersfield, and has designed for numerous clients, including Urban Outfitters, Computer Arts, and Nike.

This is entry eight 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.

Taken together, Dieter Rams’ Ten Principles of Good Design represent an extension of Bauhaus Modernism, which, while still offering useful guidance to practitioners today, has been successfully challenged by the Pop and Post-Modern generation. However, the principle “Good design is thorough down to the last detail” is equally applicable to design work that crosses ideological boundaries. In the context of the other nine principles it is something of a no-brainer. It could be argued that it simply reinforces the other tenets – after all, we need to have ‘something to be thorough in,’ such as ensuring innovation, usefulness, understanding, aesthetic beauty, environmental friendliness…you get the picture, but how else might we think of thoroughness?

Context is of vital importance here. When Rams was at Braun, industrial design was a smaller and more focused profession than it is today. The field has fragmented and grown and now encompasses speculative projects, critical proposals, provocative and experimental works. Recognising in what context an object belongs determines how thorough different aspects of its design need to be. It would be ridiculous to criticise a lack of manufacture-ability in a piece intended as a gallery one-off.

In mass-market design, there are guidelines many designers follow – guidelines that most of Rams’ tenets include. Thoroughness is manifested in a consideration of the user’s needs, yet designers sometimes test their work only on themselves. A designer can never experience their own product as if for the first time and can easily assume that everything will be clearly understandable. Living with your own prototypes is a good start but enabling others to do so is even more important.

It’s clear that Rams’ interpretation of thoroughness lies not just in diligence but in applying coherence to the otherwise arbitrary decisions designers face. He invents strategies and applies these across all aspects of the object. Mies reputedly said “God is in the details,” but more to the point, ‘He’ is in the consistency of those details. Rams is keen on his analogy that good design is like an English butler; there when you need him, in the background when you don’t. If the butler were wearing a hat with bells on it with his suit, we would notice. If he is going to be a jester he should wear the full outfit.

Today, designers need to be more thorough than ever before. Our increasing awareness of the damage caused by the overproduction of non-recyclable, high-embodied energy products – unethically manufactured and destined for landfills – means designers have a responsibility towards being thorough in areas that were off the radar for Rams and his contemporaries during most of their careers.

Tim Parsons wrote on Rams’ eighth principle, Good design is thorough down to the last detail. Mr Parsons has taught at numerous universities in England since 2002 and regularly contributes to design publications. His recently wrote Thinking Objects: Contemporary Approaches to Product Design and regularly records his thoughts on his blog, Object Thinking. Paul Blow created the above illustration based on Mr Parsons’ essay. Mr Blow is an editorial illustrator based in Dorset, UK. His work has appeared in The Guardian, Boston Globe, and Business Week.

This is entry seven 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.

But what of pixels, or bits and bytes? If I died
tomorrow, I can confidently assume that the
books on my shelves will last a hundred years.
But the files on my laptop – where I’m typing
these words right now – won’t survive more
than a year or two. The words I’ve blogged not
much longer than that; the drives they live on
will fail, or else the space I’m no longer paying
for will be filled by someone else.

Does this mean they are inferior? Perhaps. But,
perhaps instead long lasting can now be mea-
sured not only in years, but in minds – not in
how long an object persists, but in how many
people it changes. A book that is read by mil-
lions but vanishes in the span of a decade does
more good than one that sits untouched for
millennia. Speaking of the destruction of the
Library at Alexandria, Borges said, “If a book
is lost, then someone will write it again, even-
tually. That should be enough immortality for
everyone.” Meaning, nothing lasts forever, but
some things last long enough.

Good design is honest is a fine principle. Maybe even a great principle. But what does it really mean? What is honest in the scheme of capitalism, which is where design is a vital commodity?

Honest can be interpreted in a very literal way. For instance, good design is original. That is, it is not stolen. It may derive from many inspirations (or just one) but in its final form it is unique unto itself. It can also be defined as spiritual. For instance, good design is pure design. In other words, the form is true to the function, and the materials are true to the values underscoring the reason for designing it. Finally, it could be viewed from an aesthetic perspective: honesty is beauty or not depending on the designer’s goal.

Is the opposite of honest design, design that lies? And if it lies, in what way? Bad materials? Poor form? Trivial qualities? False! Pretentious! Kitsch!

Frankly, I never use the word honest when it comes to design. It is one of those high falutin’ modernist buzzwords, used to cover over the fact that most design is meant to manipulate behavior. Is that honest? Well, honestly, if we admit the fact that design is meant to guide, frame and otherwise motivate then we can agree manipulation is the end product. Now, that can be good or bad. But honest? Good design doesn’t always tell the whole truth, it tells the truth that a designer – and often a client – wants to tell.

Steven Heller wrote on Rams’ sixth principle, Good design is honest. Mr Heller is a notable author, writer for Print Magazine and co-chair of the MFA Designer as Author program at the School of Visual Arts in New York. Emory Allen created the above illustration based on Mr Heller’s essay. Mr Allen works under the studio name Ocular Invasion. He currently works for the motion graphics and animation studio Make.

This is entry five 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.

In describing the principle Good design is unobtrusive, Dieter Rams wrote that good designs should “be both neutral and restrained, leaving room for the user’s self-expression.” In other words, a good design allows its users to focus fully on and gain maximum benefit from using it without noticing how it has been constructed. Good design has a specificity of purpose with a built-in freedom of interpretation.

This notion brings to mind the concepts presented within “The Crystal Goblet or Printing Should be Invisible” from Beatrice Warde’s The Crystal Goblet, Sixteen Essays on Typography. In typographic circles The Crystal Goblet is often referred to for its thesis that encourages the use of typography to serve the text instead of the vanity of the designer. Warde clearly rejected the avant-garde in typography as introspective, believing that classical typography proved a ‘clearly polished window’ through which ideas could be communicated. Similarly, I believe that Rams is trying to communicate the importance of the positioning of a design within daily life.

This notion is important in that a design, when properly executed, shouldn’t get in the way of its objective. Consider the fact that most everything in our world is an object of distinct design. Objects are typically created with a specific purpose in mind. They are designs that serve a specific function. But design can be so unobtrusive as to go unnoticed. When an object achieves this delicate balance, it simply exists. It enhances life. When put into practice, this principle helps a design to graduate to a different status of usability – sometimes even becoming as timeless as the work of masters such as Dieter Rams.

While there is room for obtrusive design, it is essentially disposable. And in being disposable these objects seem to negate the effort invested in their own creation. To use the metaphor of music, obtrusive design is Britney Spears. Unobtrusive design is The Beatles.

Duane King wrote on Rams’ fifth principle, Good design is unobtrusive. Mr King is the author of  the upcoming book The Grid System and of Co-Founder of Thinking for a Living. Damien Correll created the above illustration based on Mr King’s essay. Mr Correll is a designer and co-founder of the studio Part & Parcel. His work has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, IdN and Juxtapose.

This is entry four 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.

At the core of Dieter Rams’ process was always the question: “Is this necessary?” His diligence in eliminating the secondary, the distracting, the ornament, brought Braun to the pinnacle of product design at its time and raised the bar for generations of designers to come.

In all creative fields, there are great designs that have remained untouched for decades; to me those are the good designs. If a product can surpass the boundaries of time, language, education, religion and cultural background, we can say that it is an “understandable product.”

But what can we do to make more understandable products?

What are the most basic functions the product has to perform? What do we want the user to do first? What about after that? How do we want the user to relate to the product? Is this a product for one-time use or a product for everyday use? How do these things affect the design approach?

Answering these and many other questions about what the product needs to do helps to bring the design goals into focus. It clarifies the problems that we need to solve. If we can answer these questions, we can make a simple product for the user.

The more essential, the more stripped-down the elements of a product are, the easier it is for the user to establish a relationship with it. The more distractions we build into our designs, the longer it will take the user to understand how to interact with the product in the manner that was intended.

Many designers have trouble differentiating between ‘good’ and ‘beautiful’ design. Without realizing it, they are drawn to beautiful designs, forgetting the final goal of their task – which is to make the product speak for itself.

Ornamentation does not improve a design; this is a principle that the Modernists embraced. Every element must fulfill a function, otherwise it should not be there. If, as we assemble those elements into a design, we can make them harmonic and beautiful, all the better.

Matias Corea wrote on Rams’ fourth principle, Good design makes a product understandable. Mr Corea is the Chief Designer at Behance. Denis Carrier created the above illustration based on Mr Corea’s essay. Mr Carrier is an editorial illustrator and co-founder of French design and art direction studio PNTS.

This is entry three 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 believe this. Don’t you? You must, or you wouldn’t be reading this journal which, with its gray-on-gray scheme and boxy layout, resembles the aesthetic ideal to which Dieter Rams’ designs cleave. A functionalist might quibble with the lack of contrast. A minimalist might quibble with the bars. A modernist might wonder if the 1970s-style logotype wasn’t a little too much. But aesthetically it works: It sets a mood, and a different mood from other design blogs, despite the generalized preference for black, white and gray. Functionally, it works, too: the posts and parts are clearly identified and separated. The headlines are differentiated with just the sort of off-bright color Rams favored for his Braun calculators (look at the ‘equals’ button).

But there are thousands of other blogs that work equally well – maybe even better in terms of legibility, links and stickiness – but look terrible, junked up in the manner of the stereos, shavers and shelves that rivaled Rams’s designs with logos and lights, extraneous moving parts and homey/homely touches. Rams’s principles articulate the ideal of Good Design suggested by the Museum of Modern Art in its exhibitions of the 1940s and 1950s: paring away, smoothing out, reducing visual clutter to try to leave just the parts absolutely necessary to perform the task. The MoMA idea conflated aesthetics and functionalism but left out shoppers who didn’t happen to share the same aesthetic. Some people want their stereo to match their shelves, and not be white, either. Sometimes the paring away goes too far. I’ve written before about my Jasper Morrison coffee pot, which suffers the same staining as the cheap ones and doesn’t have a timer. It looks great but ultimately fails on my functional criteria.

On the flip side, there is the Congress for New Urbanism, which, in practice, fuses aesthetics and functionalism from the opposite side. The charter rightly suggests that development should stress walkable towns, minimized car presence, shared community spaces, open facades. It even says that individual architectural projects should transcend style. Yet, when New Urbanist projects are unveiled, their look is inevitably traditional. How does a gingerbread-trimmed porch function better than one with a concrete floor and steel pillars? It doesn’t, as long as its architect understands materials and proportion. The charter stresses function above all else, but, in reality, aesthetics creep in.

The conflation of aesthetics and functionalism on design’s right and left has led to a newly dominant (at least in the media) third way: social design. It is slightly shameful to admit you care deeply about how something looks. Instead, we care about its post-consumer content, its low price and third-world distribution channels, its health benefits, and so on. Social design goals should be added to the functionalist list. Once cradle-to-cradle is expected, we won’t need to talk about it any more. Then maybe we can acknowledge that aesthetics are subjective, but inevitable. There can be good design (lower case) without aesthetics, but if you believe in this principle, as I do, it can’t be great.

Alexandra Lange wrote on Rams’ third principle, Good design is aesthetic. Ms Lange is a journalist, critic, historian and teacher in the D-Crit program at the School of Visual Arts in New York. Pavel Fuksa created the above illustration based on Ms Lange’s essay. Mr Fuksa is the Commercial Director at Rats Prague and freelance designer and illustrator.

This is entry two 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.

What does it mean to make something usable? ‘Usable’ can be a pretty vague term, differing from one person to the next in its degree of relevancy. However, there is a common threshold where the form, functionality, and aesthetic appeal converge to evoke a psychological and emotional response in the user. More often than not, this is the result of careful consideration and the removal of everything that could possibly hinder the user from accomplishing their goals.

Every product intends to be useful; however, users are frequently left over-promised and under-delivered. Good design aims to minimize this discrepancy by decreasing the chance of failure and increasing a sense of accomplishment. The clearer a design’s basic functions are to the user, the more likely they are to succeed at the task at hand and feel a sense of connection with the product.

As we have become a much more web-centric culture, we find the influence of online experiences shaping the way we see and interact with more and more physical products. Take the ATM, for example. In 2008, Wells Fargo rolled out a brand new interface for their ATMs that was clearly built  around the customer’s needs, concerns and actual goals. The experience was much closer to a well-designed form on a website as opposed to the traditional ATM. The use of larger buttons in a clearly defined grid on a touch-screen interface made it less likely for the user to make a mistake. The addition of a custom side panel – with quick links to the tasks most often performed by that specific card-holder – made the experience less frustrating and a little more personal.

Whether it’s the delight of not having to vacuum in back-and-forth-adjust-the-angle-try-and-get-around-the-furniture lines (thank you, Dyson) or ketchup that delivers on demand without the bottom-of-the-bottle-smacking by simply inverting the shape of the container (nice one, Heinz) – these examples of good design prove that relieving frustration and turning the mundane into a simple, momentary pleasure can fundamentally alter the usefulness and the emotional attachment felt when using the product.

A poorly designed product is rarely usable. However, the testament of good design is a useful product.

Joshua Brewer wrote on Rams’ second principle, Good design is useful. Mr Brewer is a San Francisco-based designer and the Director of User Experience at SocialCast. He co-founded 52 Weeks of UX, an educational online weekly centered around usability on the web. The Journal drew inspiration for the Rams series from Mr Brewer’s Week 8 post on Rams’ Principles. Adam Garcia created the above illustration based on Mr Brewer’s essay. Mr Garcia works under the studio name The Pressure. He is a graphic designer at Nike Sportswear and illustrates for local and national publications.