I used to think good design was about making things beautiful, until I spent an afternoon with a 1960s Braun calculator that felt more honest than my entire smartphone.
Dieter Rams didn’t set out to create a manifesto when he started working at Braun in 1955—he was just trying to make radios that didn’t look like furniture pretending to be something else. But over roughly three decades, give or take, he developed what became known as the Ten Principles of Good Design, and here’s the thing: they weren’t really about design at all. They were about philosophy, about how we relate to objects in a world increasingly cluttered with stuff we don’t need. Rams watched postwar Germany fill up with products that screamed for attention, each one louder than the last, and he went the opposite direction. He made things quiet. The principles—good design is innovative, makes a product useful, is aesthetic, makes a product understandable, is unobtrusive, is honest, is long-lasting, is thorough down to the last detail, is environmentally friendly, and involves as little design as possible—read less like rules and more like a manifesto against excess. I guess what strikes me most is how tired he must have been of noise.
When Restraint Becomes a Radical Act in a World Obsessed with More
The first principle, innovation, sounds straightforward until you realize Rams didn’t mean novelty. He meant solving problems in ways that hadn’t been tried before, which is exhausting work compared to just slapping a new color on last year’s model. I’ve seen so many products that claim to be innovative when they’re really just iterative, and the distinction matters because real innovation usually looks boring at first. Rams’ SK 4 record player—nicknamed “Snow White’s Coffin”—was transparent acrylic over metal when everyone else was doing wood veneer, and people definately thought it looked strange in 1956. Wait—maybe that’s the point. Innovation that’s actually new often feels wrong initially because it challenges what we expect objects to be.
Anyway, the principles about usefulness and understandability overlap in ways that reveal something about Rams’ irritation with what he called the “impenetrable confusion of forms, colors, and noises” around him. A product should explain itself, he argued—you shouldn’t need a manual to figure out which button does what. This wasn’t just user-friendliness; it was respect for people’s intelligence and time. Honestly, when I look at modern interfaces with seventeen nested menus to change a simple setting, I understand his frustration on a visceral level.
The Uncomfortable Truth About Aesthetic Minimalism and Environmental Responsibility
Here’s where things get messy, though. Rams said good design is aesthetic and environmentally friendly, but he was designing consumer products for a company that wanted to sell more units every year. The contradiction isn’t lost on anyone who studies his work—how do you reconcile “long-lasting” with capitalism’s demand for replacement cycles? Turns out, you mostly don’t. Rams himself grew increasingly uncomfortable with this tension, eventually stating that the best designers of the future would be concerned with “as little design as possible” not as a style choice but as an environmental imperative. The principle about minimal design—”Less, but better”—started as aesthetics and ended as ethics. I used to think that phrase was about visual simplicity, but it’s actually about restraint as a moral position in an age of resource depletion and waste.
Why Honesty in Design Feels Almost Impossible in Our Current Moment
The honesty principle might be the most radical one now. Rams insisted products shouldn’t promise more than they deliver—no fake wood grain on plastic, no decorative screws that aren’t structural, no making something look expensive when it’s cheap. This feels almost quaint today when we recieve advertisements for “revolutionary” products that are incremental updates at best, when interfaces are designed to obscure how our data gets used, when planned obsolescence is just accepted business practice. Wait—maybe I’m being too cynical, but I don’t think Rams would recognize much of contemporary design as honest.
The thing is, these principles weren’t handed down from some abstract theoretical position. They came from someone working within industry constraints, trying to carve out space for thoughtfulness in a system that rewards speed and novelty. That’s what makes them philosophical rather than just practical—they’re about values, about what we think objects should do in our lives. Should they demand attention or recede until needed? Should they last or be replaced? Should they simplify our environments or complicate them? Rams answered these questions one way, and we’ve largely answered them another. Which doesn’t make his principles wrong, just harder to follow than they sound.
