Good designers must always be avant-gardists, always one step ahead of the times. They should, and must, question everything generally thought to be obvious. They must have an intuition for people’s changing attitudes. For the reality in which they live, for their dreams, their desires, their worries, their needs, their living habits. They must also be able to assess realistically the opportunities and bounds of technology. – Dieter Rams
Neither Retrospective, Nor Predictive
Finishing out the year, I thought it would be worthwhile to re-visit a designer whose visionary approach in design I hope will never goes of out style: German industrial designer Dieter Rams. While some may write predictions for 2012, an endeavor most certainly useless after having read “Fooled by Randomness,” I am convinced the author of said predictions is stuck hopeless between writing something so vague and obvious as to be completely useless (i.e. just about any of the hyperventilating cyber-circle-jerking social media predictions for 2012); else meaningful, measurable, and specific, in which case almost certainly to be proven a fucktard.
Given this Scylla and Charybdis choice, I decided to simply write about the principles of design, the design of objects as sign systems, and the projection of identity into these sign-vehicles.
A Concern
Back in the early 1980s, just after the United States elected a B-movie actor to the most powerful position in the world, preparing to flex American military testicular fortitude in Operation Urgent Fury, designer Dieter Rams was becoming increasingly concerned by the state of the world around him – “an impenetrable confusion of forms, colours and noises.”
Packaged Meaning
If we consider that all objects are “packaged” to deliver certain meanings – what might one say about the semantics of well designed things? Further, if I imagine, as we head into the new year, with the hope of new objects released into our culture, what role does the desire for our fetishized objects act to package and perform our identity in public? Does desire package meaning?When we dress, we package ourselves, our bodies adorned in a grammar of social signals. Every thing and object has a skin through which it speaks. We live in a world, and there are objects in this world. We have intimate feelings about and for these objects — we project into them, and communicate through them. I think there is a ritual relationship to these objects that occurs on a daily basis.
A Semiotic Dance
In primitive societies, objects may be found on the ground, literally, strewn about the place as in a “natural” state. But in our advanced hyperreal branded simulacra of society, objects are found on iPhones, on tables, on electronic billboards in Times Square. These surfaces are vehicles of presentation; they are objects, they have functions, but they also have skins, histories, narrative performances. . . objects then become a partner in a semiotic dance of self-reflexive co-creation.
“To see the object as in itself it really is,” has been justly said to be the aim of all true criticism whatever, and in aesthetic criticism the first step towards seeing one’s object as it really is, is to know one’s own impression as it really is, to discriminate it, to realise it distinctly. – Walter Pater
Designing Self
Something happens when you choose to project yourself into the creation of an object. It becomes a canvas of idealized self. Aware that Rams was a significant contributor to the world of designed objects, he asked himself, “are my objects manifesting good design? What is good design?” To which I add, “what is the meaning of the objects that I design, and is it projecting something positive into the zeitgeist?” As good design cannot be measured in a finite way Rams set about expressing the ten most important principles for what he considered was good design. (Sometimes they are referred as the ‘Ten commandments’.) Here are his 10 principles of good design which have been written about all over the interwebs, but worth repeating, which can apply to the design of objects, interfaces, products and services, but also the design of ourselves in the New Year.
Dieter Rams 10 Principles of 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, sexual, and aesthetic. Good design emphasizes the usefulness of a product whilst disregarding anything that could possibly detract from it’s core beingness.
Good design is beautiful
The aesthetic quality of a product is integral to its usefulness because products we use every day affect our selfhood and our well-being. But only well-executed things can be beautiful. Ideas and ideals never executed can never be beautiful.
Good design makes a product understandable
It clarifies the product’s structure. Better still, it can make the product engage in conversation. At best, it is self-explanatory. In HCI we call this affordance. Tautologically speaking, it is what says it is.
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. An object should allow a person to project themselves into and through the product.
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. It never promises magic, or a bigger penis, or a happier life.
Good design is timeless
It avoids being fashionable and therefore never appears antiquated. Unlike fashionable design, it lasts many years – even in today’s throwaway, designed for obsolescence, society of the spectacle.
Happy New Year.