Iterature Review Ondieter Rams: 10 Principles of Good Design
WRITTEN ASSIGNMENT17 October 2012
Literature Review onDieter Rams:10 Principles of Good Design
Class: BADCN-1D
Premchand Keith
Tam WaihongTsang YinKwanMah Peiying
Kwok Jiahui
In the early 1980s, Dieter Rams, a prominent industrial designer, was concerned at how in terms of design, the world was becoming “an impenetrable confusion of forms, colours and noises.” Thus, he conceived ten crucial design principles to set the benchmark of good design should possess. In the essay, the validity of each of these ten principles will be examined to determine whether these ten principles indeed are crucial for developing good design.
good design is innovative
The first principle Rams gave was that innovation is a principle of good design. According to Utterback and Abernathy (1975), innovation is “a new technology or combination of technologies introduced commercially to meet a user or a market need.” Which in itself is fundamentally what design is about, creating a piece that fulfills what it's required to perform or communicate in it's respective environment (Ralph, P. and Wand, Y. 2009). Indeed, innovation has led to highly successful designs, such as in novel forms of media today. Many of the wildly popular contemporary advertising campaigns on social media platforms, a relatively new technology in advertising, such as the Old Spice 2010 campaign and Smirnoff's extensive online campaigns (Richards, 2011), are forms of innovative in design.
However, good design need not necessarily be innovative per se. Don Norman writes on how design research is the antithesis of innovation. It focuses on refining and improving existing design rather than conceiving a novel product or concept. Hence, designs which rely on extensive design and marketing research are unlikely to be innovative but can still be highly effective or communicative pieces. An example would be contemporary form of the Digital Single-Lens Reflex camera (DSLR). Since early models in the 2000s, the
Literature Review onDieter Rams:10 Principles of Good Design
Class: BADCN-1D
Premchand Keith
Tam WaihongTsang YinKwanMah Peiying
Kwok Jiahui
In the early 1980s, Dieter Rams, a prominent industrial designer, was concerned at how in terms of design, the world was becoming “an impenetrable confusion of forms, colours and noises.” Thus, he conceived ten crucial design principles to set the benchmark of good design should possess. In the essay, the validity of each of these ten principles will be examined to determine whether these ten principles indeed are crucial for developing good design.
good design is innovative
The first principle Rams gave was that innovation is a principle of good design. According to Utterback and Abernathy (1975), innovation is “a new technology or combination of technologies introduced commercially to meet a user or a market need.” Which in itself is fundamentally what design is about, creating a piece that fulfills what it's required to perform or communicate in it's respective environment (Ralph, P. and Wand, Y. 2009). Indeed, innovation has led to highly successful designs, such as in novel forms of media today. Many of the wildly popular contemporary advertising campaigns on social media platforms, a relatively new technology in advertising, such as the Old Spice 2010 campaign and Smirnoff's extensive online campaigns (Richards, 2011), are forms of innovative in design.
However, good design need not necessarily be innovative per se. Don Norman writes on how design research is the antithesis of innovation. It focuses on refining and improving existing design rather than conceiving a novel product or concept. Hence, designs which rely on extensive design and marketing research are unlikely to be innovative but can still be highly effective or communicative pieces. An example would be contemporary form of the Digital Single-Lens Reflex camera (DSLR). Since early models in the 2000s, the