How does Rams’ define good design?

1. Good design should be innovative — It does not copy existing product forms, nor does it produce any kind of novelty just for the sake of it. The essence of innovation must clearly be seen in all of a product’s functions. Current technological development keeps offering new chances for innovative solutions.
2. Good design should make a product useful — The product is bought in order to be used. It must serve a defined purpose, in both primary and additional functions. The most important task of design is to optimise the utility of a product’s usability.
3. Good design is aesthetic design — The aesthetic quality of a product is integral to its usefulness because products we use every day affect our well-being. But only well-executed objects can be beautiful.
4. Good design will make a product understandable — It clarifies the product’s structure. Better still, it can make the product talk. At best, it is self-explanatory.
5. Good design is honest — 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.
6. Good design is unobtrusive — Products fulfilling a purpose are like tools. They are neither decorative objects nor works of art. Their design should therefore be both neutral and restrained, to leave room for the user’s self-expression.
7. Good design is long lived — It does not follow trends that become out-dated after a short time. Well designed products differ significantly from short-lived, trivial products in today’s throwaway world.
8. Good design is consistent in every detail — Nothing must be arbitrary. Thoroughness and accuracy in the design process shows respect towards the user.
9. Good design should be environmentally friendly — Design must make contributions towards a stable environment and sensible raw material situation. This does not only include actual pollution, but also visual pollution and destruction of our environment.
10. Good design is as little design as possible — Less is more – because it concentrates on the essential aspects and the products are not burdened with non-essentials. Back to purity, back to simplicity.

Many people say it is obvious that Rams’ designs have been influential on Jonathan Ive of Apple, designer of such products as the iMac, iPod, and iPhone, as can be witnessed particularly in the iPhone’s calculator application, whose design is based on the Braun ET66 calculator designed by Rams.

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The Design Museum in London are holding a Dieter Rams’ exhibition between 19th November 2009 and 9th March 2010. The exhibition will showcase Rams’ landmark designs for Braun and furniture manufacturer Vitsœ, examine how Rams’ design ethos inspired Braun’s entire product range for over 40 years, and assess his lasting influence on today’s design landscape.

(Click on the images to see a larger view)

Cosmic Motors is a must-have book for car fans, designers and artists. Each chapter shows the styling process of a unique vehicle, from the first idea sketches, the stunningly detailed 3-dimensional models to the final photo-realistic full-spread renderings.

Most artist renderings of futuristic vehicles are so outlandish they verge on cartoonish. Simon avoids that trap by incorporating automotive and industrial touchstones — steering wheels, rivets, turbines — everyone can recognise. It feels like you could reach out and touch them.

(Click on the images to see a larger view)

Images: © Daniel Simon

You can find out more on Simon’s Cosmic Motors website.

It includes highly influential figures like Peter Horbury who turned Volvo around, and the maverick designer of Ford of Europe, Martin Smith, as well as Jaguar design chief, Ian Callum. Other graduates include the original Audi TT designer and current head of Kia design, Peter Schreyer and Aston Martin’s design director Marek Reichman.

Competing for the 2008 Pilkington Automotive Vehicle Design Award, the Phoenix concept eco-car is a fresh take on eco-design by the Spaniard Sergio Loureiro Da Silva.

Sergio Loureiro Da Silva wants to regenerate lost energy through movement. The Spanish designer explains: It’s about improving sustainability by designing every element to aspire to less energy consumption. His Pheonix concept car aims for a similar driving sensation as riding a motorbike with a sidecar. Da Silva has also incorporated the technical elements in the design. The beauty of a vehicle comes from the contrast of a fluid shape with precise technical elements, he says.

(Article source IPC wallpaper.com web site)

So what is the big deal? The Adobe marketing team state that:

The Adobe AIR runtime lets developers use proven web technologies to build rich Internet applications that deploy to the desktop and run across operating systems. Adobe AIR offers an exciting new way to engage customers with innovative, branded desktop applications, without requiring changes to existing technology, people, or processes.

What AIR applications should you check out?

What is intriguing is that all the tools I have chosen are generally useful tools for the developer or designer, with the exception of twhirl, which is a social-interaction tool. I’m looking forward to when other, less developer-centric tools become freely available. AgileAgenda has taken the lead with this respect, albeit not freely available, as has eBay desktop, but I would like to see examples from the BBC in the form of a desktop BBC iPlayer or maybe a Flickr image browser, del.icio.us bookmark reader, RSS aggregator and a Picnik image editor.

Analytics Reporting Suite

The Analytics Reporting Suite, by Nicolas Lierman, brings Google Analytics to the desktop. It uses it’s own custom API to interact with Google and nearly implements all the features of Analytics.

For website owners this is a must-have application. Like the twhirl AIR application below, it is a fantastic example of what can be achieved with Flex and AIR. Measuring visitor trends and traffic are essential tasks to managing and improving a websites performance. The Analytics Reporting Suite allows you to configure multiple Google’s Analytics accounts and access the web-based suite’s plethora of features via a desktop application. The application displays integrated graphs and animations via a tabbed interface, which allows you switch between a number of reports. These reports can then be saved as a PDF, Excel or XMLdocument, or printed.

You can download and install the application from the About Nico website.

twhirl twitter Client

twhirl, by Marco Kaiser, is probably the most popular desktop client for the twitter micro-blogging service. Most of the features available on the twitter website are accessible through twhirl, plus, a lot of usability enhancements have been added to make it easier to manage multiple accounts. This is great for those who want to separate business and personal accounts they may have.

The twhirl application is a great example of how AIR can bring web applications to the desktop; it can dock to the system tray, display message alerts and you can configure the applications opacity when not focused (great if you like Mac and Vista-styled themes). The application allows you to search twitter users, view their timelines, add friends, view followers, delete tweets and much much more. Twhirl automatically fetches your friends’ status updates, direct messages and replies, whilst also colour coding different types of messages and alerting you to messages both audibly and visually.

The twhirl application is skinnable and comes with several built in skins with which you can customise the application. All-in-all twhirl is not only one of the best twitter clients, but AIR applications.

You can download and install the application from the twhirl website.

Kuler Desktop

Adobe kuler is the first web-hosted application from Adobe Labs designed both to stand alone and to complement Adobe Creative Suite software. Built using Adobe Flash and ActionScript 3.0, kuler is all about colour: colour for exploration, inspiration, experimentation and sharing. Kuler is clearly targeted at the designer, but anyone interested in colour will benefit from its use.

You can download and install the application from the Adobe Labs website.

WebKut

WebKut is a web screenshot tool that allows you to capture web pages, or parts of them in a very simple way. It provides you with 3 capture options: the entire page, the current view, or only a selection. This little application proves particularly handy for those presentations or projects that need great visuals from the web.

You can download and install the application from the WebKut website.

RichFLV

RichFLV, by Benjamin Dobler, lets you edit FLV files. The key features include reading FLV metadata, read and edit cuepoints, cut FLV files, convert the sound from an FLV to MP3 format, convert an FLV to an SWF … and much more.

You can download and install the application from the Adobe AIR Marketplace website.

SearchCoders Dashboard

This Flex-based chat widget is designed with programmers in mind. The code input feature allows developers to chat about code without disrupting the conversation.

You can download and install the application from the SearchCoders website.

Pownce

Much like twhirl in look, feel and ease-of-use, but with a slant towards productivity rather than micro-blogging, Pownce is a way to keep in touch and share things with your friends or colleagues. You can send people files, links, events, and messages and then have real conversations with the recipients. This is a great collaboration tool and was one of the first services to really embrace AIR as an application architecture, which could realise their service as a desktop client. Everything that is available via the Pownce website is also available via the client application, except and possibly importantly, the ability for the user to amend their account settings and add friends to your network; this still has to be done via the website.

For a small annual amount, Pownce offers a paid-for service which will eliminate adverts from your profile and allow you to send huge file sizes (100MB) and customise the theme of your Pownce.

Pownce also offers Drupal integration and a mobile application, which works with the iPhone, BlackBerries and many more ‘internet-ready’ mobile devices.

You can download and install the application from the Pownce website.

So what is Silverlight and XAML proposition? How does it vary from Flash?

Microsoft Silverlight is a proprietary runtime for browser-based Rich Internet Applications, providing a subset of the animation, vector graphics, and video playback capabilities of Windows Presentation Foundation. The runtime is available for Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X, with Linux support under development via the third-party Moonlight runtime.

Not much difference to Flash so far…

Extensible Application Markup Language (XAML) is a declarative XML-based language used to initialize structured values and objects. XAML is used extensively in the .NET Framework 3.0 technologies, particularly in Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), where it is used as a user interface markup language to define UI elements, data binding, eventing, and other features, and in Windows Workflow Foundation (WWF), in which workflows themselves can be defined using XAML.

Not much difference to Adobes’s MXML…

Browser support…

A frequently asked question is which browsers and operating systems will it run on? If XAML is limited in this area, its usefulness in the web world will also be significantly limited. Previous encarnations of XAML, were limited and justifiably criticised as it would only work with an ActiveX control. However, this has now been resolved with support for Firefox, Opera, Safari and Netscape, Windows and OSX alike. Support is provided by a downloadable plugin, much like Flash!

Like Flash…

Silverlight enables web developers to create visually rich user interfaces and animations, play video clips and stream media within the web page, again, much like Flash! But it is different! The comparison doesn’t end there. Animations are organised using timelines and frames within the tool…how else would you organise an animation without timelines?!

Like Flex…but not!

Where things differ from Flash are the tools used to develop the Silverlight applications. Silverlight is supposed to be a way of designing and building rich user interfaces. However, standard HTML elements are missing. The way you design a particular interface is to build a standard HTML form in your favourite editor, e.g. Dreamweaver CS3, and then open this page in Silverlight to add the visual enhancements that your design requires. This sounds complicated to say the least. In comparison, Flash has a brilliant tool and framework called Flex that does this far more gracefully and with the development of Thermo, designers can really feel comfortable in the web application development mix.

Silverlight applications will also run on mobile devices, but the plan is for the applications to only run within a mobile web browser. This is unlike Adobe who are feaverishly developing the AIR runtime to allow Flash applications to run independently of the browser environment and offline.

So, Web 2.0 and beyond with Silverlight and XAML may be somewhat jumping the gun. You may say that there is nothing new or innovative with the Silverlight offering. It does, however, serve to emphasise how important the Rich Internet arena is becoming or indeed has become.