Almost kicked out of Design School over Dieter Rams

Well, not exactly, but I thought it was a catchy headline – more on that later.

Dieter Rams is considered on of the greats in the realm of Industrial Design. He’s most often associated with the global consumer products company Braun and the Functionalist school of design. There is no doubt that he has influenced a great number of today’s product designers.

In fact, according to a Gizmodo article, there is an amazing resemblance between products designed by Dieter Rams to the now iconic design by Jonathan Ive, Senior Vice President of Industrial Design for Apple. In the image below, you can see products by Rams along the top with seemingly influenced Apple product counterparts, below.

Image Credit: Gizmodo

It’s fair to say that, in the least, Ive’s dedication to “honesty” and “simplicity” in his Apple product designs follow Ram’s ten principles to “good design” (sometimes referred to as the Design Ten Commandments):

Good design:

1. is innovative
2. makes a product useful
3. is aesthetic
4. makes a product understandable
5. is unobtrusive
6. is honest
7. is long-lasting
8. is thorough down to the last detail
9. is environmentally friendly
10. is as little design as possible

I encourage you to head over to Uzi Shmilovici’s post What Every Entrepreneur and Product Manager Should Learn from Dieter Rams at Future Simple, where he shares his thoughts on Rams and how PipeJump applies the 10 principles in their web product design.

As a designer or product manager, it’s easy to lose track of these core principles when fielding the overload of “feature requests”. It’s good to be reminded that one should step back and remember to meet basic objectives, first.

This is also the foundation of the Minimal Viable Product theory popularized by Eric Ries. Ries has been blogging about this concept on his Lesson Learned blog for years and has been spreading the word via the Lean Startup movement which is catching on with many technology-based product companies.

Now for that story: As an Industrial Design undergrad, I certainly spent some time studying Dieter Rams.  Our 3rd year class was even assigned a project in which we were to “redesign” a shaver and pair of shears for Braun.  I’d like to think that I asked for an alternate product because I had already developed a respect for Braun’s design (established by Rams), but I think I just didn’t want to design a shaver or pair of shears…  I ended up designing an airbrush concept.

In our 4th year, as a follow-up to the Braun project, we were given another small appliance product design assignment – such as a hairdryer.  Although I had (and still have) a tremendous appreciation for physical product design, by this time I was frustrated that our program was too focused on physical products. So again, I humbly asked for an alternate assignment (at least I recall the request being humble).

Our new professor, who had just joined our school that year, took my asking as rebellious and denied the request.  After some “heated” discussion, I was “asked” to leave his class.  Well, there was only one 4th year Industrial Design session.  After taking up the issue with the ID School Director, the professor and I reached a compromise.  While my classmates were designing another small appliance, I worked on a project of my own choice – an exhibit display system (mostly developed, and presented itself, in 3D graphics and animation).

That’s the story about how I was almost kicked out of Design School over Dieter Rams… (sort of).

Image at the top of this blog is a poster of Ram’s ten principles created by design firm Bibliotheque that is available for purchase here.