In celebration of his 80th birthday, Dieter Rams has invited his employer, Vitsœ, to publish the full transcript of the speech on the fundamentals of design he delivered in December 1976 in New York. The text prefigures Rams’ Ten Principles for Good Design formulated a decade later.

The ideas behind my work as a designer have to match with a company’s objectives. This principle applies to my work not only at Braun but also at Vitsoe. I have been working for these two companies for about 20 years and – I like to point out – only for these two companies.

I am convinced that design – at least in the terms I understand it – cannot be performed by someone outside the company. I am absolutely convinced that this is true if products are designed as part of a larger system, like we do at Vitsoe.

In 1957 I began to develop a storage system that formed the basis of the company Vitsoe, which was founded in 1959. Thus the ideology behind my design is engrained within the company.
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Ladies and gentlemen, design is a popular subject today. No wonder because, in the face of increasing competition, design is often the only product differentiation that is truly discernible to the buyer.

I am convinced that a well-thought-out design is decisive to the quality of a product. A poorly-designed product is not only uglier than a well-designed one but it is of less value and use. Worst of all it might be intrusive.

The development and changes that we have initiated with our work at Vitsoe are, I believe, positive for the development of good design as a whole.

The introduction of good design is needed for a company to be successful. However, our definition of success may be different to yours. Striving for good design is of social importance as it means, amongst other things, absolutely avoiding waste.

What is good design? Product design is the total configuration of a product: its form, colour, material and construction. The product must serve its intended purpose efficiently.

A designer who wants to achieve good design must not regard himself as an artist who, according to taste and aesthetics, is merely dressing-up products with a lastminute garment.

The designer must be the gestaltingenieuror creative engineer. They synthesise the completed product from the various elements that make up its design. Their work is largely rational, meaning that aesthetic decisions are justified by an understanding of the product’s purpose.

I am convinced that people have an interest in what we are doing at Vitsoe since our products are useful; I expect they also appreciate the aesthetic that follows. These qualities are the result of progressive and intelligent problem solving. Functionality must be at the centre of good design.

A product must be functional in itself but it also must function as part of a wider system: the home. Vitsoe’s 606 Universal Shelving System is successful due to its high functionality and its ability to adapt to any environment. Vitsoe’s furniture does not shout; it performs its function in relative anonymity alongside furniture from any designer and in homes from any era. We make the effort to produce products like this for the intelligent and responsible users – not consumers – who consciously select products that they can really use. Good design must be able to coexist.

You cannot understand good design if you do not understand people; design is made for people. It must be ergonomically correct, meaning it must harmonise with a human being’s strengths, dimensions, senses and understanding.

Vitsoe’s direct contact with its customers has led to a deep understanding of people. Over the years, our understanding of how you use a shelf or an armchair has increased. We have educated and diligent people worldwide who understand how to plan systems in configurations that our customers may not necessarily have thought of at the beginning.

Order and proportion: only orderliness makes a product useful

All objects that are to be used must be subject to a clear order. The remarkable order of design at Vitsoe has the purpose of communicating the function of the object to the user. The design of a Vitsoe product clearly points out its purpose and its use – and facilitates them.

The order of the elements – their arrangement, their shape, their size and their colour – is based on a thoroughly-planned system. This system is the language of Vitsoe design.

But this order is not self-serving; and I would not call it ideology because it is a practical necessity. For design to be understood by everyone – which good design should strive to do – it should be as simple as possible.

Design at Vitsoe brings all individual elements into proportion. An often-cited feature of the Vitsoe collection is its balance, its harmony, its belonging together. All structures, components and finishes coexist as a well-balanced and harmonious design that gives it usability.

The majority of products that we encounter in our day-to-day lives scream for attention or try to impress us with their magnificence or miniscule size. These objects try to dictate our relationships with them. Good design creates powerful long-lasting relationships with products as good design creates objects with balanced proportions; at Vitsoe we go further by trying to create objects in balanced proportion with people.

Good design means to me: as little design as possible

To use design to impress, to polish things up, to make them chic, is no design at all. This is packaging.

When we concentrate on the essential elements in design, when we omit all superfluous elements, we find forms become: quiet, comfortable, understandable and, most importantly, long lasting.

Vitsoe products are in constant evolution. We do not limit our products to the manufacturing technologies available at the time of their design. Built into the language of Vitsoe products is adaptability – adaptability for the user in the home and adaptability in design and manufacture.

We are constantly looking for new and better technical solutions for our products. As technology and production processes are always advancing, innovations are not only possible but they are necessary for a product to continue to be considered good design.

We have experienced that people are more willing than ever to change their lifestyles; that they accept innovative solutions – not fake ones – and are able to rid themselves of old and cemented habits with our products. They expect such innovative solutions, particularly from Vitsoe.
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Ladies and gentlemen, our environment is changing rapidly. How will these changes affect our design concepts? Can design that claims longer-range validity be reactive to current circumstances or must it be proactive for the future?

In a room where the proportions are noticed we feel better and we think differently. A neglected and uncared-for landscape will have a different effect on our lives than one that is natural and orderly. There is a lot of work to do on the topic of our physical surroundings affecting our psychological functions. This is the work we do at Vitsoe.

But Vitsoe only makes furniture today. There are larger questions that we need to answer about our urban environment and how it affects us as individuals and as a society.

What effects do electricity pylons, skyscrapers, highways, street lighting and car parks, for example, have on our psyche and relationships? We know that the residents of anonymous concrete blocks can become depressed as a result of their surroundings. But who is researching these things systematically? Who takes all of this really seriously?

I imagine our current situation will cause future generations to shudder at the thoughtlessness in the way in which we today fill our homes, our cities and our landscape with a chaos of assorted junk. What a fatalistic apathy we have towards the effect of such things. What atrocities we have to tolerate. Yet we are only half aware of them.

This complex situation is increasing and possibly irreversible: there are no discrete actions anymore. Everything interacts and is dependent on other things; we must think more thoroughly about what we are doing, how we are doing it and why we are doing it.

Indeed, the collapse of the entire system may be impending.

I have spoken of our surroundings but let us look at the wider environment: the world we live in. There is an increasing and irreversible shortage of natural resources: raw materials, energy, food, and land. This must compel us to rationalise, especially in design. The times of thoughtless design, which can only flourish in times of thoughtless production for thoughtless consumption, are over. We cannot afford any more thoughtlessness.

The complexity of systems and shortage of natural resources should compel a change of individual attitudes and attitudes as a society. We learn as individuals and we learn as a group. We are beginning to understand the changes that we are only just seeing. We must take notice with increasing soberness and, hopefully, with growing alertness and rationalism.
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Ladies and gentlemen, if we at Vitsoe have contributed towards intelligent, responsible design and a higher quality of objects, I believe we owe our thanks to a great degree to the unselfish enthusiasm and the always-consequent attitude of one man: Niels Vitsoe. At the same time thanks to all the members of staff, who sense that they have done a little more than just produce another short-lived consumer product.

Good design is a reality!

By ALAN JACOBS  l  The Atlantic Feb.8, 2012

One of the really tough questions to answer in relation to any technology is: When do you make something easy and when do you make it hard? This problem is perhaps most obvious in the realm of game design, since people get bored by games that are too easy and get frustrated by games that are too hard. So game-makers have to learn to split the difference, which in practice means alternating between the easy and the hard. You allow gamers to get some momentum and confidence by completing easy tasks, which helps them to push through the annoyance and even anger that can arise when a nearly intractable challenge comes their way.

But this problem occurs in other technological arenas too. Consider typography, of all things. In his recent book Thinking, Fast and Slow — which is fascinating in more ways than I can tell you right now — Daniel Kahneman explains research that has been done on the cognitive burdens placed on us by various type designs. A well-designed text, with a highly legible typeface and appropriate spacing, places a considerably lighter cognitive burden on us than a badly designed page. It works in conjunction with other factors, of course — but it matters:

A sentence that is printed in a clear font, or has been repeated, or has been primed, will be fluently processed with cognitive ease. Hearing a speaker when you are in a good mood, or even when you have a pencil stuck crosswise in your mouth to make you “smile,” also induces cognitive ease. Conversely, you experience cognitive strain when you read instructions in a poor font, or in faint colors, or worded in complicated language, or when you are in a bad mood, and even when you frown.

Reading a page done right is like sliding on the ice: we just flow right along. Take a look at this smart post by Dan Cohen on how much we value cognitive ease when reading, and how many recent tools provide it for us.

However, as Kahneman also points out, flowing right along isn’t always the best recipe for understanding:

Experimenters recruited 40 Princeton students to take the CRT [Shane Frederick’s Cognitive Reflection Test]. Half of them saw the puzzles in a small font in washed-out gray print. The puzzles were legible, but the font induced cognitive strain. The results tell a clear story: 90% of the students who saw the CRT in normal font made at least one mistake in the test, but the proportion dropped to 35% when the font was barely legible. You read this correctly: performance was better with the bad font. Cognitive strain, whatever its source, mobilizes System 2 [slow, conscious, laborious thinking], which is more likely to reject the intuitive answer suggested by System 1 [the immediate, unreflective thinking by which we make most of our minute-to-minute judgments].

I think about the value of cognitive strain, or as I sometimes call it cognitive friction, when I’m annotating texts. As many people have noted, today’s e-ink readers allow annotation — highlighting and commenting — but in a pretty kludgy fashion. It can take a good many clicks to get a simple job of highlighting done. By contrast, touch-sensitive tablets like the iPad and the Kindle Fire make highlighting very easy: you just draw your finger across the text you want to highlight, and there: you’re done.

Nice. But I prefer the kludge. Why? Because I remember what I’m reading better if the process of highlighting is a tad slow. It may also help that when I highlight on a tablet my hand tends to cover much of the text I’m highlighting, whereas on an e-ink reader my hand is off to one side and I can focus my attention on the text even as I click to draw lines under it. (It’s not relevant to this particular post, but on e-ink Kindles you can highlight across page breaks, which cannot now be done on touchscreen devices. Sometimes I have to shrink the typeface to finish a highlight. Very annoying.)

For the very same reason I prefer underlining in codex books with a pencil rather than a highlighter: the highlighter is just too smooth, whereas I have to take some care to underline accurately when I’m using a pencil: there’s a degree of manual strain that accompanies and encourages the cognitive strain.

E-books are in their infancy now: there’s little textual design to speak of, typography is often terrible, illustrations are limited, errors are shockingly frequent. They’ll get much better. But it would be cool if, when they improve, readers were given means of introducing a bit of cognitive friction when that would make the reading experience a stronger one. Sort of like cranking up the speed and increasing the incline on an elliptical trainer.

By ALICE RAWSTHORN  l  NYTimes Jan.29, 2012

“There is a playfulness in Nendo’s work, and a formal simplicity, which is deceptive, because the birth of the products can be extremely complex,” said Jana Scholze, curator of contemporary furniture and product design at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. “I don’t know many designers who have produced such an astounding number of new works in such a short period. Oki has a curiosity that never stops. He is interested in everything, and always has something to say.”

Prolific though Nendo has been so far, it will be even busier in 2012. The year has barely begun, yet it has already won “Designer of the Year” in Wallpaper* magazine’s design awards and opened two exhibitions in Paris: one at the Carpenters Workshop Gallery (through March 3) and another for Spécimen Editions at Galerie Pierre-Alain Challier (through March 17). Nendo is soon to open new shoe stores in Istanbul and Osaka for Camper, and a project at La Rinascente’s department store in Milan. If all goes to plan, it will also introduce a raft of new products at the Milan Furniture Fair in April.

Nendo was hatched in 2002 when Mr. Sato went to the Milan fair with five friends and fellow architecture graduates from Waseda University in Tokyo. “I’d finished my master’s degree and didn’t have anything to do,” he recalled. “Ten years ago in Japan, architects were only supposed to design houses, interior designers interiors and furniture designers furniture. But in Milan, we noticed that everyone was designing very freely. That was the way we wanted to work.”

Back in Tokyo, he and his friends cofounded Nendo (the Japanese word for children’s modeling clay) as a multidisciplinary design and architecture group. After winning a couple of competitions, they were asked to design a Tokyo restaurant, Canvas, and covered the walls in cheap canvas, then made business cards from the leftovers.

Now run by two of the cofounders, Mr. Sato and Akihiro Ito, who is the managing director, Nendo has 30 employees in its Tokyo office. It has completed scores of projects all over the world, ranging from mass-manufactured products, such as tiny earphones that resemble jellyfish and are packaged in plastic containers that look like scientific specimen jars, to limited editions of objects, including those on show in Paris.

To a foreign eye, the lightness and simplicity of Nendo’s work evokes the minimalist tradition of Japanese design, which dates to the late 1400s and was a defining influence on Western Modernism. But those qualities are softened by its childlike humor, which seems closer in spirit to Japanese popular culture than to the rationalism of modernist grandees, like the late Sori Yanagi and Naoto Fukasawa.

“My designs are very simple and very minimal, but I don’t want them to be too cold,” Mr. Sato explained. “I like them to have a friendliness and playfulness, and a sense of humor. And my starting point is always the story behind the object.”

For the glass pieces at Carpenter’s Workshop, the story began with Mr. Sato’s visit to the Lasvit, a traditional Bohemian glass works in the Czech Republic. “When I saw these huge guys blowing glass inside steel molds, I had an a-ha moment,” he recalled. “I’d thought glass-making was a clinical, controlled process, but it isn’t. The material is so powerful that it is impossible to control. So I asked them to make tables by allowing the glass to spill out over the top of the mold, and for two men to blow glass into a mold at the same time, so the bubbles push against each other.”

The inspiration for the furniture Nendo has designed for the Galerie Pierre-Alain Challier exhibition was our tendency to “redesign” our possessions. “Often, I have noticed that people have stuck little pieces of paper under a leg of a desk to make it stabler,” he said. “I thought it would be interesting to make the paper part of the original desk. Like a lot of my work, it comes from observing daily life, and noticing the strange, slight things that make subtle differences.”

Subtle though Nendo’s stories are, part of their appeal is that everyone can enjoy the joke. There is nothing enigmatic about Mr. Sato’s a-ha moments, yet they are sophisticated enough not to seem trite.

“Oki thrives on confounding expectation,” said Zoë Ryan, chair of architecture and design at the Art Institute of Chicago. “His furniture and objects are always more than the sum of their component parts.”