Less, But Better

Dieter Rams had a rule he applied to everything: if you're not sure whether something belongs, it doesn't. Ten principles, and the last one is the only one that matters, good design is as little design as possible.

I think about this constantly, and not just when I'm looking at a chair or a radio. Most of the work I do at Bluetide is subtraction. A process with fourteen steps that should have five. A reporting structure built for a company that stopped existing three reorganizations ago. An org chart nobody has the courage to simplify because simplifying feels like admitting the old version was wrong.

Removing what doesn't belong is not a neutral act. It's a decision, and decisions require someone willing to be responsible for them.

The instinct in most organizations is additive. A new problem shows up, so you add a new rule, a new committee, a new field in the form. Nobody ever gets promoted for deleting a policy. But the accumulation is what kills clarity, not the absence of enough rules, but the presence of too many that no longer serve a purpose.

The same is true of a well-made object. A Braun calculator from 1987 still looks correct today, not because it was minimal for the sake of being minimal, but because every element on it has a reason to exist. Nothing was left in out of habit. That's the harder discipline, not starting simple, but staying simple as the pressure to add things never lets up.

I try to apply the same test to my own work. Before I sign off on a structure, a proposal, a slide, I ask what happens if I remove this. If nothing breaks, it wasn't load-bearing. It was decoration, and decoration is what accumulates when nobody's asking the question.