Designing Your Legacy to Have as Little Design as Possible [Part 10]

This is the final blog in a 10-part series examining how to apply Dieter Rams’ principles of good design to your legacy.

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The tenth and final principle in Dieter Rams’ list of good design principles is that good design is as little design as possible. Akin to good writing, good design is achieved when “less is more.” Mark Twain said, “I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.” Good design takes time and planning. Good writing and good design do not make the consumer work to understand. Extraneous elements force the user to determine whether or not these elements enhance the experience. That is not the goal of design. The time the user wasted in that pursuit is inversely proportional to the time the designer invested in the process. Design and user should interface and interact seamlessly and instinctively.  

With regard to legacy design, do our words and deeds consider the people we interact with? We want our words to be heard initially but also pondered and used with time. If we have excessive verbiage, our message gets diluted, if not lost. There is no legacy if there is no sustainability. Our legacy should impart, influence, and inspire without intruding. We should apply the “less is more” adage to our legacy design; it is less about us and more about others.