10 Design Theses When Dieter Rams entered our lives 16 years ago as a participant in FSB’s Design Workshop, he taught us his 10 design theses, which are now part and parcel of any good designer’s thinking:

	Good design needs to be innovative. It must not reiterate existing product forms
	Good design needs to make a product usable; that’s what products are bought for, after all, to be used
	Good design needs to have an aesthetic dimension, since the fascination this engenders is an integral constituent of a product’s usability
	Good design needs to enhance a product’s ability to explain itself. It has to render the product compellingly eloquent
	Good design is unobtrusive. However, in this, it differs from decorative works of art
	Good design has got to be honest. It does not attempt to make the product appear to be something it is not
	Good design needs to be enduring, since fashion is fickle and encourages a throwaway approach
	Good design extends to every last detail. Anything else would be disrespectful towards the consumer, the product and its function
	Good design has to be environmentally benign and must not be a visual pollutant either
	The tenth, last and most central tenet of our great mentor, to conclude, states that good design is a minimum of design. Getting back to what is pure and straightforward

For more on the genesis of design theses, read:
     - general summary in 'Door Handles, Workshop in Brakel', Cologne 1987
       ISBN 3-88375-072-7, pp. 55–57

     - discussion of fundamentals in ‘Vom Mythos des Funktionalismus’
       ('On the myth of functionalism'), Cologne 1997
       ISBN 3-88375-270-3

     - a proposition by Dieter Rams in 'Less but better' Hamburg 1995
       ISBN 3-9803485-1-2