Simple, ergonomic, artistic and commercial

In Design Museum London I saw fine exhibitions: Less and More – The Design Ethos of Dieter Rams. His ten principles of design are absolutely up to date. Also there was an exhibition Ergonomics – Real Design, which brought up nicely the importance of user perspective in design through real design projects. In Tate Modern (it was huge!) I saw POP LIFE - Art In a Material World, where Andy Warhol and his followers showed the commercial side of art.

Richard Hamilton: Toaster Deluxe 1, 2008 (and Me)


These three exhibitions forms a great combination, that includes the different sides of design and all important. Dieter Rams’ line “Less, but better” evolves Mies van der Rohe’s famous slogan “Less is more” further. In the works of Rams, the esthetics is not the main focus, but the user experience. Normally, people’s life goes from desire followed by boredom followed again by desire and so on. In the design of Dieter Rams the product in a shop is maybe not so desirable, but the desire for it grows in the use of the product and no boredom will follow. A good simplicity needs a lot of work through complexity – achieving the simple is not as easy as the result may look. So simplicity is one desired design character.

Less and More, The Design Ethos of Dieter Rams & Ergonomics - Real Design


In the Ergonomics – Real Design exhibition focus was in the user of the product. There were different kinds of products from Fisco’s Handheld Tape Measures to the CERN Control Room. To understand the user designer may need to build things aiding the understanding, for example a suit that simulates the older age physical abilities. That one was used in designing the first Ford Focus. It can be called ergonomics or user centered design, but I think it’s the same focusing to the end user of the product. A designer is like a novelist or an actor, who has to know the human nature to be able to write or act a person. A designer also has to get into the user's skin – both the mind and the physics, like into the suit in the Ford Focus project. It is the basic of design.

Ergonomics and Safety Research Institute, Loughborough University: Third Age Simulation Suit, 1994.

The user is not always the customer, but the designer has to notice the difference and design for them both. That’s how we move to the third exhibition, POP LIFE – Art In a Material World in Tate Modern. There the shamelessly commercial artists like Andy Warhol, Jeff Koons, Takashi Murakami etc were shown as a self made brands. As Warhol has said “The best business is the best art” they have made their art to successful business. I 'm not worried if they are good art or not, I just see the connection between commercial pop art and good design. Artistic features and semantics give meaning to design so that the user wants to have the product. However to making user to want to keep the product longer the artistic features also have to go deeper in the product – they have to be at the heart of the product in composition of the elements and in true understanding of human nature and its needs. As well the pop art also is more than it first may seem. Anyway, economics is always an important part in design, whether the design is for commercial or non commercial purposes.

As a conclusion: Good Design is simple, includes the human aspects (the thin cover over an ape) and is shamelessly artistic and commercial

Tate Modern in London and POP LIFE