Good design incorporated into a product makes the user’s life easier by allowing the user to benefit from less labor, less time, and less waste when using the product. There is often a trade-off between good design and price: the better the design, the higher the price. Nevertheless, companies like IKEA and Target are successful businesses because their vision is to bring good design to the consumer at relatively lower prices. The following list of nine characteristics which help assess good design was inspired by a list of ten principles of good design created by Dieter Rams, a designer from Braun, in the 1980’s (Dieter’s original list):
1. Good design makes a product useful – It means that a product or service does what it’s supposed to do and does it well. A product is bought to be used. Good design emphasizes the usefulness of a product while disregarding anything that could possibly detract from its usefulness.
2. Good Design is innovative – Innovation does not only imply inventing a product or service that hasn’t been done before, it also includes refinement. Good design usually comes from resourceful and creative people who take inventions and refine them, and perfect them, to make them work better. In 1779, Samuel Crompton, of Lancashire, invented the spinning mule, which made possible the mechanization of cotton manufacture. Yet the innovation was continued by Henry Stones, of Horwich, who added metal rollers to the mule; and James Hargreaves, of Tottington, who figured out how to smooth the acceleration and deceleration of the spinning wheel; and William Kelly, of Glasgow, who worked out how to add water power to the draw stroke; and John Kennedy, of Manchester, who adapted the wheel to turn out fine counts; and, finally, Richard Roberts, also of Manchester, a master of precision machine tooling who created the “automatic” spinning mule: an exacting, high-speed, reliable rethinking of Crompton’s original creation. Such men provided the micro inventions necessary to make macro inventions highly productive.
3. Good design makes a product understandable – Good design emphasizes simplicity and clarifies the product’s structure and use. At best, it is self-explanatory and intuitive. No one likes things that are tricky to operate. Good design typically provides a high quality user manual, instructions, or user interface.
4. Good design is aesthetic – The aesthetic quality of a product is integral to its usefulness because products we use every day affect our person and our well-being. Objects of beauty generate feelings of delight and pleasure when they are seen, but only well-executed objects can be beautiful.
5. Good design makes products easy to transport, store, and maintain – Good design reduces or eliminates tedious drudgery associated with the maintenance of a product (i.e.,the cleaning of the object is designed to be quick and easy). Good design packages a product in a way that is small, stackable, standardized, easy to load on a truck or train and therefore easy to transport.
6. Good design is long-lasting – Unlike fashionable design, products with good design are built to last many years. Planned obsolescence is when a product or part is made that is designed to fail, or become less desirable over time or after a certain amount of use. Our culture is trending toward a throwaway society based on over-consumption and excessive production of short-lived or disposable items. Non-durable goods (products used less than three years) make up 27% of all municipal solid waste, with durable goods making up 16%. Economic growth built on made-to-break products, planned obsolescence, and fashion is wasteful.
7. Good design is environmentally friendly – The planet’s human population is 7 billion. Projections indicate the world’s human population will reach 9.2 billion by 2050. This expansion of humans consumes more resources and, if these additional humans are as unsustainable as Americans, this will be a huge strain on the environment. The planet is naturally able to absorb and cleanse a certain amount of pollution, but contaminating more than the planet can handle leads to environmental degradation. Good design makes an important contribution to the preservation of the environment. It conserves resources and minimizes physical and visual pollution throughout the lifecycle of the product. Products that take into account the environment are easy to recycle, made sustainably, and use materials with optimal properties. Architects are now designing buildings and communities using green architecture techniques. Architects and designers need to take a leadership role in designing buildings and communities that encourage the cultural change required to restore environmental sustainability. Poor design is responsible for many, if not most, of our environmental problems. Good design minimizes a product’s packaging; containers and packaging now represent 32% of all municipal solid waste.
8. Good design is as little design as possible – Less but better, because it concentrates on the essential aspects, and the products are not burdened with non-essentials. Everything superfluous is omitted so that the essential is shown to best possible advantage. Good design produces products that are neither decorative objects nor works of art. Good design is honest in that it does not make a product more innovative, powerful or valuable than it really is. It does not attempt to manipulate the consumer with promises that cannot be kept.
9. Good design is thorough, down to the last detail – Nothing must be arbitrary or left to chance. Care and accuracy in the design process show respect towards the consumer.
The word “goodness” is synonymous with the word “virtue” which implies that good design is virtuous or morally correct and therefore bad design is wrong-headed or evil.

Blog - 6/23/12 - What is Good Design?