A crucial element of good product design is not letting the design get in the way.  Look at Karim Rashid’s designs – they’re stunning formally, but so idiosyncratic and expressive, so “Karim,"  that it’s unlikely they’d find a comfortable place in your home.  The best product design is egoless, and the best-designed products, however precious, fall right into your life.

That’s one remarkable aspect of the work of Dieter Rams, the legendary product designer for Braun.  (His SK4 record player is shown above.)  I have a calculator, coffee pot and coffee grinder that are all Rams’ designs.  And while they’re great-looking that doesn’t interfere with how I use them.  They give me pleasure but they aren’t anything particularly special – I stuff them in the mess of my desk drawer and kitchen cabinets along with everything else.  In a review of the new monograph about Rams’ work, ”As Little Design as Possible,“ I make the obvious comparison between Rams’ work at Braun and Jonathan Ive’s work at Apple.  The devices that Ives has created for Apple (the colored iMacs, the iPod, the iPhone) are seductive, innovative things that, like Rams’, somehow, seem unfussy and instantly familiar.  For product designers, it’s an awfully difficult trick.