For designers, it’s easy to forget how important it is to apply Ram’s ten principles to work. No matter what role you play in any design field, you will affect this world, and it may not always be positive. I’ve learned it doesn’t take a radical life-changing design to be relevant, innovative, and long-lasting. For Charles and Ray Eames, simple products like plywood would dramatically change their designs. It wasn’t the materials they had that made them good designers. It was how they use them. I now understand that just because you have something doesn’t mean you must use it. Design is best kept simple and as needed rather than being over-complicated and unnecessary, like so much of what we use today.
And in Dreyfuss’s design process, the first step in any design in Dreyfuss’s office was to create a collage board with all the competition. If you’re going to design a phone, you need to see what every existing phone already looks like. And then there was a crazy amount of iteration: get your design into as many people’s hands as possible and get as much feedback as possible and do that in repeated cycles.
