

The 11th Principle of Good Design - skyfallsin
http://blog.wells.ee/design-11

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calinet6
I disagree with the triviality of the 11th point.

You'll note that in exactly none of Rams' original points does he tell _how_
one is to go about designing.

In fact, I could even go so far as to say "Good design doesn't tell you how to
go about creating it." It's difficult, and it lends itself to many different
processes and methods depending on the situation.

It is _not_ necessarily iterative, sometimes iterative design _detracts._

What's more, it contradicts point 7: "Good design is long-lasting." How can
something be iterative and forever improving, and also long-lasting? You could
go into the details and argue with me, but if you do I'll just say you're
missing the greater picture.

The "good design" Rams' was talking about is not a process or a means or even
a specific thing. It is a static idea of quality, one which is intended to be
achievable, and a final product. Iterative might lead to that quality, or it
might not. But adding an "11th point" so trivial and insignificant alongside
the others dirties the entire collection. It deserves better.

~~~
eevilspock
I completely agree. Wells's proposal also contradicts "Good design is
thorough."

If a design is thorough and long lasting, then why would you need to iterate,
much less "ship every day"? Sure, iteration might _eventually_ lead to a good
design, but the intervening designs by Rams's definition are not good.

The exception would be when each iteration is thorough and each successive
iteration represents a _new_ innovation (principal 1). But most iterative
development is not a sequence of distinct innovations. It is a sequence of
partial or tentative designs either because there is a business need to ship
prior to arriving at a complete design or because the complete design hasn't
yet been figured out.

Wells says that the design of physical things can't be updated often, if ever.
He says, "This doesn’t work for software anymore." But perhaps that is the
problem with much of the software we produce these days. Quantity (of updates,
frequency of new features) supercedes quality (of both function and design).

Wells does not seem to quite get Rams.

------
ericdykstra
I'll just contrast two quotes from the article:

\- _Good design is iterative_

\- _Vitsoe 606 Shelving system, designed in 1960 by Dieter Rams. They still
make them today, and to the same spec._

~~~
dredmorbius
The fact that the 1960 design is still used doesn't make it non-iterative.

It simply makes it the final iteration in that development branch.

Edit: and it has in fact been improved in several regards, mostly materials:
[http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/08/garden/dieter-
ramss-606-sh...](http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/08/garden/dieter-
ramss-606-shelving-system-is-reissued.html)

I'll add another quote: "Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing
more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away." - Antoine de Saint
Exupéry.

Eventually you get there. Or close to it.

Too: Rams worked in physical media. Eventually you've _got_ to ship, and in
his case, he couldn't push updates twice a day. This happens even in software
and web design. The "bones" of Linux were layed down in AT&T's labs over 40
years ago. For mainframe computing, history starts over 50 years back.

Even today's major websites have their own mass and inertia in the form of
their code base -- you can push changes every 12 hours, if you like but things
have to work together, and _either_ modularity _or_ fragility will impose
limits on what you can reasonably change and expect to have functioning,
stable code.

~~~
eevilspock
"Good design is arrived at iteratively" != "Good design is iterative"

See also calinet6's comment.

~~~
001sky
Do good designs ever evolve?

~~~
dredmorbius
So far as I'm concerned they _always_ do.

Given that reality changes (change is the only constant), it's a must.

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Detrus
Dieter Rams as any other designer would do lots of iteration before coming up
with a design to meet the 10 principles. At some point with hardware you have
to settle on something for the long haul. Somehow people managed in that A/B
testing free world.

And would users say that the constant UI rearrangements in modern apps are
good design? Absolutely not. The UI paradigm of putting buttons in set places
on screen doesn't jive with constantly changing their positions, because you
memorize the UI by those positions. This is particularly annoying with rarely
used features because every time you use them it's a totally different UI.

Depending on constant iteration is not good design. It is a crutch permitted
you by software. You can still come up with long lasting solutions if you give
them some thought.

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dsr_
If you spend all your time repositioning the trees, you'll never grow a
forest.

Not everything needs to be shipped every day. Or built. Or tweaked.

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kevinpet
Rams' 10 principles of good design are properties of the design. This proposed
11th is a property of the process to produce that design. The giveaway is that
his question is "how can we do iterative design?" rather than "how can achieve
a design that is X?"

~~~
eevilspock
I also think Wells is confusing the end product with the architecture, the
latter being a product whose consumers are the developers themselves.

An architecture that supports iteration may be deemed good design per Rams if
the support for iteration is more _useful_ than if it did not. To developers,
that architecture could also be more _aesthetic_ , _innovative_ , _long
lasting_ and even _environmentally friendly_ (consuming less resources).
Sometimes agile architectures are more _understandable_ , but often they are
less so.

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rglover
_The “agency mindset” is also to blame. Once the project is ‘done’ the
designer delivers assets and get paid. From then on, the startup can put them
on retainer or hand off the project to the in-house designer – or the…
engineers._

This is an interesting point. Does the "agency mindset" really dictate that
once a project is finished, it's finished? Even more, what's the difference
between having an agency/designer on retainer as opposed to employed? The only
difference I see is the amount of time/effort it takes to get an idea
implemented (which is wholly based on that company or individual). Moreover,
that chasm creates time to let an idea develop (and no, I'm not saying over
thinking but at least considering the value/utility of the change or
addition).

I think it's a matter of identifying _your_ company's needs. Some can get away
with a one and done approach; startups, too. It really depends on what you're
making.

A solid agency will help to identify any caveats and get the design to a point
where it doesn't _have_ to be iterated on. There's always room for
improvement, though, it's possible to make something excellent happen on the
first swing.

~~~
mikeryan
I'll answer since I run an agency - note we're a design and dev shop and this
is affects both sides of the coin.

First I take a bit of umbrage at the term the "agency" mindset because it
seems to indicate its _our_ fault. Its more of the "agency relationship*
mindset.

Unfortunately despite that its a bit true. We generally are in the business of
getting things done and out the door so we can go onto the next project. Its
very much the nature of the business. But a lot of this is also driven by our
clients. The best clients realize this is a phased a approach and build in
separate phases to accomodate user testing A/B testing and realize that the
work isn't done after the work is dropped. Its great when we get clients such
as these, because we get to really focus on the product. Unfortunately they
are few and far between. Most are much more budget focused and when we bring
things up like A/B testing and phased approaches, they get excited, when we
show them the costs for this kind of work, most of the time these kinds of
"extras" are what gets dropped.

Now part of this problem also comes from larger agencies. There's some folks
out there who won't do a project thats not $500k or larger. Trying to tack on
an additional $100k of improvements post delivery isn't something they're
interested in doing. This isn't just hubris, if you're running a shop of 100
folks a "small" 100k project presents problems, it utilizes resources better
used elsewhere, and you'd be running your sales and account folks ragged
managing 4 or 5 of these small projects (One account manager on one 500k
project is a lot better then one on five 100k projects).

This tends to get worse on the dev side, for dev we do the best we can to get
a nice clean codebase out the door, but frankly once it "works" its done.
Unlike design which actually does have some iterations and polish built into
the design process dev is more "does it work to spec" and done.

 _A solid agency will help to identify any caveats and get the design to a
point where it doesn't have to be iterated on._

I'm not sure this is true, the better the creatives working on a project the
closer you'll get to it, but its always a tradeoff against budget and time.

~~~
rglover
Thanks for the response. I'm working toward building out an agency and your
thoughts are really helpful in thinking about a solid approach.

I suppose I should have said that a good agency will be able to get a design
to a point where it doesn't _need_ to be iterated on but can be. It's
certainly an important thing to acknowledge that getting a 100% perfect
release is difficult with budget and time constraints.

A lot to think about.

------
dylanrw
[http://dyli.sh/2012/08/28/On-the-11th-Principle-of-Good-
Desi...](http://dyli.sh/2012/08/28/On-the-11th-Principle-of-Good-Design.html)

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einhverfr
I don't think there is such a thing as an iterative design. A design is a
design as it exists at a single point. You iterate because the design has some
issues that are worth addressing.

The nice thing about iterative development is you can build amazingly complex
systems that way, systems that are so complex they have no obvious
deficiencies. Of course that's also the not-so-nice thing about iterative
development too. But either way iteration is a development process. It isn't
something that is a design characteristic.

I do think however that _good design is flexible._ It tolerates changes on all
sides. Users can repurpose it. Developers can improve on it. Good design is
robust in that it handles these changes. If you want to use that to iterate
the design, go ahead, but that's the design principle.

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Sakes
It seems to me that this 11th point is in direct conflict with the 7th point.
Good design is long-lasting. Iteration suggests change, and long-lasting
suggests finality.

Software is tricky, the needs of the users can change over time, and the
developers understanding of the project will most likely change over time as
well. If not for any other reason than keeping up with competing technologies,
or the introduction of new technologies.

So I would agree, iterating your application's design is very important. But
ideally, if it was designed in strict adherence to the 10 principles of
design, the essence of the application would be long-lasting. This would mean
any needed changes would be intuitive.

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state
Good design has always been iterative, but now design is never finished.

The 606 Shelving system certainly went through many iterations, tweaks and
changes. At the time of its inception the method of production doesn't allow
for the continuous deployment and testing of changes. To me, design from that
period is monumental by definition because of this. You had to build something
perfect because it only happened once.

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morewillie
It's a great article and definitely outlines the need for iterative design,
but I don't agree that it should be a principle. More thoughts if anyone
cares:

[http://williemorris.tumblr.com/post/30410924657/no-need-
for-...](http://williemorris.tumblr.com/post/30410924657/no-need-for-11)

Can you imagine the user experience if everything was constantly changing.
Yikes.

~~~
Teapot
The best designs copies nature. Nature is lazy (energy-efficient) and elegant.
Example. Soap bubbles quickly settles in shapes that are most efficient.

For us humans we're not as intuitive with nature. We have many distractions
and conflicting goals. It takes us more, and longer, iterations to figure out
these things. We're just not lazy-enough.

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ekianjo
"Good Design is Iterative" ? Nope, you reach good design by iteration, but
once you reach that point there is not need to keep iterating.

If it's iterative then you never have a final design by definition, so how can
you judge anything? You can just say "it's beta, it's not finished" to avoid
criticism. That's the typical BS we hear from poor software developers all the
time.

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ricardobeat
A peeve of mine is the dismissal of engineers who are also good designers -
there are plenty of them. Sorry to burst that bubble, but one of branch.com's
designers is a CS graduate, the other specialized in HCI, both could be called
front-end engineers if you wanted.

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K2h
I hadn't seen the blog before. I just gotta say, that Kudos button is awesome.

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001sky
_Good design is iterative_

I can't help but feel this when i look at architecture. Medeival stone
masonry, for example. When it takes decades to build, you can tweak the
design. In particular, this is evident to with respect to "human scale,"
3-dimensionality, volumetric balance, and proportionality. Much early modern
architecture, was just designed to look cool as a model; or to photgraph well
in publication. Much of this architecture has a _PRE_FAB_ feel to it
(brutalist, etc). Ironically this emerged in the context of (a) more powerul
modeling tools; and (b) more degrees of freedom in plastic materiel (ie,
modern materials, RC etc).

Edited: brevity

