[HN Gopher] The Dark Side of Minimalist Design: Updating Dieter ...
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The Dark Side of Minimalist Design: Updating Dieter Rams' Ten
Principles [video]
Author : zdw
Score : 56 points
Date : 2022-03-28 18:30 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.youtube.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.youtube.com)
| lambdasquirrel wrote:
| It seems important to understand the context that these
| principles were created from. If, for example, you were to go to
| a design event at SF Design Week, and wondered if you were
| actually at a fashion event, then we might start to think about
| the context that the 89-year-old Dieter Rams is coming from.
|
| The principles (as stated by the designer) were meant to evolve.
| And evolve they have. When most tech products were being designed
| without the input of designers (say, 15 years ago), we started to
| have many people write books like "Don't Make Me Think." This was
| because engineers' culture of one-upping each other in the smarts
| department was spilling over into the design of tech products,
| and at the same time, tech was becoming more important and more
| mainstream.
|
| A lot of design in tech has felt like it's been finding its way
| through these principles. When Microsoft started caring about
| design, people criticized that their products looked like they
| looked good in a Powerpoint, as opposed to in-person. The last
| time I used Google's material-ui toolkit, it harshly encoded the
| very large, wide spacing that is the default for some of their
| web UIs (like gmail), where a user cares much more about being
| able to read through a large amount of structured information,
| rather than making it appear "aesthetic." It's not so much don't
| make me think, as it is: please respect the task I have at hand.
| mitchdoogle wrote:
| I feel like "Don't make me think" is geared more towards
| designers who want the things they design to look different or
| unique or new. The main thesis of that book is to follow
| established conventions in web design. To me, it seems like
| engineers following conventions is what they'd prefer so that
| they don't have to think about how things look too much.
| DeadMouseFive wrote:
| My favorite trick is putting sand or scrap metal inside something
| to make it seem more expensive. Works every time.
| mitchdoogle wrote:
| What's the digital equivalent of this?
| gwern wrote:
| Deliberately adding latency. Although sometimes you need to
| because users are so accustomed to slow software that 'fast'
| reads as 'broken' to them.
| petermcneeley wrote:
| I did appreciate the heavy burn when he pointed out that Dieter
| is himself wearing eyewear that is a fake material emulation of
| real tortoise shell.
| eternityforest wrote:
| Most of his principles seem great, it's just the less is more,
| and the idea of honestly(Which sounds great taken literally but
| has problems when interpreted as truth to materials).
|
| We have the tech to make dishonest things durable now. We can
| make plastic look like whatever we want. We can make something
| hollow and still stand up, because we can use software to
| optimize the reinforcements.
|
| It might not always look or feel "high quality" on close
| inspection, but it will look great sitting on a desk, and won't
| break itself or your foot if you drop it, for 1/10th of the price
| of "Luxury" stuff designers like to make, full of glass and
| metal.
|
| The luxury stuff will be destroyed if not very well cared
| for(Which seems to be considered almost a feature by fancy
| designers who want design to reflect the stability and resources
| of the owner more than the accuracy of some industry guy's FEM
| model).
|
| And we can do things in software rather than hardware on many
| devices.
|
| Software, and new forms of manufacturing, also let us pack in
| features without making things heavy or delicate, often saving
| the need for multiple separate devices, which saves space,
| resources, and money, and makes redundancy easier(You'll probably
| always have a USB charger at home they're randomly built into
| everything these days, everything online has a clock, etc).
|
| It definitely takes more effort to get highly feature dense and
| low-substance design right, but it's amazing when they do. You
| can have something that costs nothing, looks great, and lasts a
| decade, almost like the real defining element is the structure,
| with the physical material just kind of supporting it the way a
| computer supports software.
| thrav wrote:
| "There's no functional purpose for wearing a watch anymore."
|
| This could not be further from the truth. If anything, the advent
| of tech watches has made it even more clear to me how valuable a
| watch that runs forever and never needs to be removed is. To have
| certainty that 24/7/365, I can look down and immediately know
| what time it is has been tremendously helpful, and the design of
| that watch is incredibly important to that end.
|
| I wear a dive watch with a nato strap, because it's light,
| durable, and comfortable enough to have completely disappeared
| years ago. It never comes off.
|
| I disagree with most of this video. He uses incredibly minimalist
| high heels as an example of counter-minimalism, presumably
| asserting that they should be flats, which ignores the entire
| purpose of heels. Heels are a tool used to achieve a certain
| posture, appearance, and an associated response. They're designed
| to do a job, as are the basketball shoes he keeps showing, which
| are functionally reinforced in certain areas, but otherwise
| fairly minimalist too.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Yeah, when he argues that a marble sculpture is "dishonest" it
| started to look like he was grasping for outlandish examples to
| make a point.
|
| I generally eschew videos like this anyway -- fall into the
| "writing about music is like dancing about architecture"
| category.
|
| I prefer not to expound on and on about what is good design and
| what makes it good design. I know it when I see it.
| dkarl wrote:
| He's saying it's dishonest according to the principle that
| the materials used to build something should not be hidden or
| made to look like other materials. I think it's a bad
| example, because, as he admits, it's art and not design, but
| his next example about Dieter Rams wearing plastic glasses
| made to look like tortoise shell is more persuasive.
|
| I think his point is that each of the "principles" is one
| side of a coin, and that Dieter Rams might be famous for one
| side of each coin, but he deals in both sides, because the
| preference for one over the other is not absolute. It's a
| fair point.
| mitchdoogle wrote:
| > I know it when I see it.
|
| Design is not only about how things look. In most cases,
| design is about function as well, so you need to actually use
| the thing to have a clue whether it's a good design. The most
| aesthetically pleasing design is completely useless if it
| inhibits the users' ability to do what they want. I'll take
| something without any aesthetic qualities if its easier to
| use
| hirundo wrote:
| I saw an employee at a hardware store yesterday with a full
| sized iPhone strapped to his wrist like a watch. It's just such
| a convenient place for information that people are going to
| keep using it, whether we design products for that or not. I
| bet that people keep using virtual watches on their wrists in
| AR.
| rspoerri wrote:
| it's actually already a pretty common method to place
| important information for the user on his virtual wrist in
| VR.
|
| Examples: - Half Life Alyx - Lone Echo - Fallout VR
| wongarsu wrote:
| And Fallout's PipBoy is pretty much a smartphone strapped
| to the wrist, just with a bulkiness and physical interface
| that seemed realistic when the first game released in 1997
| greggsy wrote:
| Not to mention the Wrist Link used throughout the galaxy in
| Star Wars.
|
| https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Wrist_link
| acomms wrote:
| He's saying that heels and basketball shoes are great because
| they do not adhere to minimalism. If they strictly adhered to
| just doing their job they would be less decorative than they
| are. We want these objects to also be expressive, and so we
| design them to be so. He's suggesting this expression is good,
| and shouldn't be constrained by an adherence to minimalistic
| design.
| karaterobot wrote:
| This was a nice video, and I'm glad I watched it.
|
| I could not help but notice, though, that (with one exception) he
| did not try to update the ten principles, as is claimed in the
| title. Instead, he just brought up counter-examples to poke holes
| in many of them.
|
| It's really easy to come up with gotchas for almost anything.
|
| It's like if I wanted to poke holes in a different set of ten
| commandments, and I said: "Thou shalt not kill? Really? What
| about killing a virus? What about killing a tree that's about to
| fall on your house? This rule makes no sense!"
|
| But it does, basically. It's certainly better than the negation.
| If by coming up with edge cases where the rule doesn't make sense
| leads you to believe the rule is wrong in most cases, or even
| that you should do the opposite, then it's not a useful
| criticism.
|
| It's much harder, but more useful, to make a positive declaration
| like: "this is what I believe is true" and then put it into
| practice.
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