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.
Dieter RamsRead
You cannot understand good design if you do not understand people; design is made for people.
Interpretation
Good design requires an understanding of the needs and behaviors of people.
Dieter Rams emphasizes that successful design is fundamentally about people. To create effective designs, one must grasp not only aesthetic elements but also the preferences and behaviors of users, indicating that empathy and human insight are crucial in the design process.
In practice
A designer can use this quote during a presentation on the importance of user-centered design.
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.
My goal is to omit everything superfluous so that the essential is shown to best possible advantage.
Good design emphasises the usefulness of a product whilst disregarding anything that could possibly detract from it.
Design should not dominate things, should not dominate people. It should help people. That's its role.
My heart belongs to the details. I actually always found them to be more important than the big picture. Nothing works without details. They are everything, the baseline of quality.
Things which are different in order simply to be different are seldom better, but that which is made to be better is almost always different.
If you remember the shape of your spoon at lunch, it has to be the wrong shape. The spoon and the letter are tools; one to take food from the bowl, the other to take information off the page... When it is a good design, the reader has to feel comfortable because the letter is both banal and beautiful.
Design principle: Take things away until the design breaks, then put that last thing back in.
Content precedes design. Design in the absence of content is not design, it's decoration.
The role of designers and product makers is to really become much better editors. What kind of functionality is actually needed - and truly delightful - to consumers? Remove all the extraneous stuff.
We won't do something different for different's sake. Designers cave in to marketing, to the corporate agenda, which is sort of, 'Oh, it looks like the last one; can't we make it look different?' Well no, there's no reason to.
I am passionate about what design can do - how far it can support the new ideas and the new ways of living of this 21st Century. Good design accelerates this exciting future where manufacturing is local, materials and processes are cradle to cradle, business models are both socially and financially driven.
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