Good design

HosPortal is lucky enough to be able to have its offices at one of the fancier co-working spaces. You know the ones: excellent baristas, sun-drenched balcony for casual meetings, ‘breakout’ rooms, audio recording booth….and collections of fancy magazines and books lying around the public spaces to make it seem that all the tenants are cool, hip and profitable. Think Monocle magazine and the AFR’s glossy ‘Life & Luxury’ supplement that inspires readers to covet $100,000 watches.

While we were waiting for our coffee recently we spied a copy of Great Thinkers: a book with short chapters about 60 luminaries. One chapter in particular caught our attention, about the great German industrial designer Dieter Rams. Born in 1932, he was famous for helping to make Braun the industrial powerhouse of domestic appliances it is today.

Rams was particularly famous for his Ten Principles of Good Design, shown below. The book highlights five underlying lessons from his life’s work:

• The value of simplicity: reduce design back to the essentials as ‘it follows from a hard-won clarity on what matters’

• The value of modesty: ‘the art lies in concealing the art’

• Empathy with the customer: ‘you want objects to communicate how to use them, not via an instruction manual, but by the way they look’

• Being classic: ‘tap into things that don’t change’ rather than responding to fads and fashions

• Art and product design: there is nothing too mundane or everyday that cannot benefit by aspiring to be art.

At HosPortal we are nowhere near the capability of Rams. But we are sure that Rams did not face some of the design challenges HosPortal faces every day:

“Hey, Dieter, great work on the phonograph. Now we need to add on a toaster”

[sounds of clanging from the workshop]

“Yeah…nice toast. But where is the ‘pumpernickel’ setting?”

Nevertheless, his style of thinking is something that underpins many of our conversations and powers many of our internal debates about exactly how we should design certain features.

If you want to score us on how successful we have been then please get in touch.

From the website https://onlyonceshop.com/blog/dieter-rams-10-principles-of-good-design - Photo: Abisag Tüllmann, Source: Vitsœ.