Being a designer has given me a different perspective on objects, materials, and the world that we live in. It’s fascinating how our technology progress at such a fast pace, and it’s a marriage of both design and engineering. One of the few standard question that people asked me was, “What is design?” While there are many good answers, the one that’s the simplest would be Herbert Simon’s “A transformation of existing conditions into preferred ones.” Now that we know what “design” is, how can we consider that the design is “good”? Unfortunately, there is no simple answer. But thanks to Apple and Muji, they’ve been persistent on advocating good design for such a long time that it’s safe to say that everyone agrees they produce good work, and people are educated on it too. However, the “good design” culture is still young and it’s at a point where people are not sure how to fully utilise it. If I were to list out all the criteria that make “good design” then it would be a long and boring blog post. Instead, I’ll write multiple blog posts about different products, and explain why I would consider them “good design” or why not. But when in doubt, we can always refer to the design master Dieter Ram’s 10 principles for good design.
