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Dieter Rams: 10 principles of Good Design applied to UX design
All of us, passionate about design, art or technology have probably heard of Dieter Rams at some point in our lives. In my case, it’s one of my highlights back when I was in university, I remember as it if was yesterday the moment I discovered Dieter Rams’ work just after getting introduced to the work of the Bauhaus, and since then that caused a major impact in both my perception of product design as well as my vision of my work as a designer.
For those who don’t know, Dieter Rams is an industrial designer who for years took the creative direction of the development of the German brand Braun, and leaded one of the most important movements of the industrial design known as functionalism for both product design and architecture.
As a matter of fact, Ram’s principles and techniques of design, even his own style was used as the main source of inspiration for some of the most famous Apple products, but that’s something that could be individually discussed in a longer post.
The transition between tangible and digital product design
As someone that comes from an industrial design background as myself, studying industrial design engineering I had to lecture about Dieter Rams and his work on the field of industrial design itself and also as part of the movement that would revolutionise the way we think about products, and in the same way how we think about design and problem-solving.
It’s important to keep in mind that for physical products and digital products the requirements will never be the same, nor the markets where it applies or the user that will make use of it, that’s why its own interpretation of those principles need to be specified in order to get the best approach.
While in physical products we need to take in consideration things like the ergonomics on the usability of a product when working on a digital product that would be replaced by the UX of the interface on itself. There are a set of rules that apply to tangible products that effect in a different way all things digital, an example being the rules of usability set by the Bauhaus school of design in contrast to the W3C web accessibility initiative for web and online products.
