Week 8: Less is a verb

Dieter Rams's ten principles, Bauhaus functionalism, and the difference between a design that removed something and one that never had it

12 April 2027

Dieter Rams’s tenth principle — “good design is as little design as possible” — gets quoted constantly and read carelessly almost as often, usually as a licence for blankness. Rams’s own products argue otherwise: the Braun T3 radio and the SK4 record player took things out (visible fixings, ornament, unnecessary controls) from designs that used to have them, and the resulting object is legible specifically because you can feel the decision, not because nothing is there.

The lecture’s central distinction: a design that subtracted something still carries the shape of what it removed, the way a scar carries the shape of a wound; a design that simply never had the feature was never making an argument at all. Most bad “minimalist” design is the second kind wearing the first kind’s reputation.

Outline#

• Rams’s tenth principle, and the two ways to misread it
• Braun’s T3/SK4 as objects that show their own subtraction
• telling “removed” from “never there” in your own studio work so far