Dieter Rams Quotes

Design must reflect the practical and aesthetic in business but above all... good design must primarily serve people.

You are not designing for yourself, and shouldn't be. Most people using the Web don't understand (most of) what makes it work and don't want to. Design for those people. There are many more of them than you.

Design is directed toward human beings. To design is to solve human problems by identifying them and executing the best solution.

Accessible design is good design.

Design should not dominate things, should not dominate people. It should help people. That's its role.

Design is people.

As designers, we are the interface. Trying to make things understandable. That requires involving oneself with what's going on in the world. One must understand what people are, what they're up to, what they care about, how they feel.

Good design makes a product understandable.

Good design is good business.

Most people make the mistake of thinking design is what it looks like. People think it's this veneer - that the designers are handed this box and told, 'Make it look good!' That's not what we think design is. It's not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.

Design has to work. Art does not.

User experience is everything. It always has been, but it's undervalued and underinvested in. If you don't know user-centered design, study it. Hire people who know it. Obsess over it. Live and breathe it. Get your whole company on board.

My mantra is: 'Good design accelerates the adoption of new ideas.'

That was always my frustration with so many of these shows, because design is not an ambush... it's a relationship. You have to know how people move and live and work to be able to design for them.

I think it's really important to design things with a kind of personality.

If we want users to like our software, we should design it to behave like a likeable person.

I think taking design out of the studio and really having a relationship with the people that you're making it for really convinced me of how powerful a thing design is. It's not just an aesthetic decoration.

I fervently believe in research as a necessity for good design, and I teach it that way.

The point is that I don't design stuff for myself. I'm a toolmaker. I design things that other people want to use.

For much of its existence, design was all about convenience. We wanted to hide technology so that users are not distracted into thinking about the tools they use.

Design is a funny word. Some people think design means how it looks. But of course, if you dig deeper, it's really how it works.

The only important thing about design is how it relates to people.

Integrating breakthrough technology into everyday products is always a challenge; at the same time, this is exactly how design makes tech products easily adoptable in life.

You must have the ability to recognize good design and good user experience. These are core things at Airbnb. It doesn't matter which department you're in.

We have always thought about design as being so much more than just the way something looks. It's the whole thing: the way something works on so many different levels. Ultimately, of course, design defines so much of our experience.