We Killed the Room
The most recognisable thing I had made was a rectangle of my own furniture sitting on top of somebody else's belongings. Having a justification is not the same as belonging in the work.
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There is a Braun T3 pocket radio on a shelf in our studio. It is not ours originally, it came with the space, and for two years I have walked past it several times a day.
What I notice about it now, having spent a year building an interface, is what Rams left out. There is no logo on the front. There is no decorative element anywhere on the object. The perforated grille is functional. The wheel is a wheel. Every part of it is either doing a job or absent.
Fig. 1. Braun T3 pocket radio, 1958. Photograph by PeterAjtony, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
I killed the most recognisable thing in my product this month, and the radio is part of why.
What the room was
For most of this product's life, the first thing you saw on opening it was a room. A pixel room, drawn in a warm palette, with a cat in it. It was the identity of the thing. People who saw screenshots remembered the room.
It is gone, and removing it returned an entire screen.
When it was right
I want to be fair to it, because it was not a mistake at the time and I do not want to perform a tidy conversion narrative.
When the product was conceived as a place you visit, the room was the place. It answered the first question any spatial product has to answer, where am I, instantly and without a word of copy. You opened it and you were somewhere. That is genuinely hard to achieve and the room achieved it on the first screen, with no onboarding.
The room was correct for the product that existed when it was drawn.
What changed underneath it
The product stopped being a room you visit and became a field of your own things.
Once real material was in it, images, documents, links, recordings, contracts, screenshots, all of it belonging to one person, the first screen had a different job. It had to show you what was there.
And in that product, the room is a rectangle of somebody else's furniture occupying the most valuable real estate on the screen.
Read that as harshly as it deserves. I drew that furniture. It is my taste, my palette, my idea of a cosy space. And it was sitting above a person's own belongings, taking the first thing they see, contributing nothing to the question they arrived with.
In a space that belongs to someone else, your decoration is clutter with a good backstory.
The rule that made the decision
There is a line in our studio notes that has survived every revision of the document it lives in:
Having a justification for an element does not mean it belongs in the work.
The room had a justification. A good one, written down, several paragraphs long, with a coherent philosophy behind it. It connected to the brand. It made the product recognisable. It was the thing people described when they described the product to other people.
All of that was true and none of it was the same question as should this be on this screen.
Question | What it establishes | Passed by the room? |
|---|---|---|
Is there a reason for it? | The element is not arbitrary | Yes |
Is it well made? | The execution is competent | Yes |
Is it recognisable? | It contributes to identity | Yes |
Does it earn this position against everything else competing for it? | It belongs here | No |
Table 1. We habitually answer the first three and skip the fourth, especially for elements we are proud of, because that is where the reasoning is invested.
A justification explains why something could exist. It does not establish that it has earned its position. Those are different tests, and the gap between them is where most visual clutter lives, fully defended by good arguments.
The cat survived. The room did not.
This distinction is the whole judgement and it is worth being precise about.
The room was a destination. It asked for screen space, for a place in the information architecture, for attention. It was a thing you looked at.
The cat is a presence. It now walks a rule above the collection, costs a single line of vertical space, leans toward the pointer on hover and squashes when pressed. It occupies no path. Nothing must be dismissed to get past it. You can work for an hour without registering it and lose nothing at all.
Apple's principles put the test precisely, under Delight: "don't let pursuit of delight for its own sake get in the way of your product's core purpose."
The room sat between. The cat sits beside.
Rams, and the part of the ten principles nobody quotes
Everybody can recite good design is as little design as possible. It has been printed on enough posters to become invisible.
The one I keep returning to is less quotable: good design is unobtrusive. Rams' expansion is that products fulfilling a purpose are like tools, they are neither decorative objects nor works of art, and their design should therefore be neutral and restrained to leave room for the user's self-expression.
That last clause is the operative one and it is almost never quoted. To leave room for the user's self-expression.
A radio is restrained so that the music is the event. A shelving system is neutral so that your books are the event. And an interface holding a person's own material should be neutral so that their things are the event.
The room failed that test completely. It was a designer's self-expression placed above a user's, in the literal sense of vertical position on a screen.
Fig. 2. Photograph by Jennifer Balaco, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
The harder version of the lesson
The thing that made this difficult was not the reasoning. The reasoning took an afternoon and was not close.
It was that the room was the most recognisable thing I had made. It was the screenshot. It was what the product looked like in my own head when I thought about it. Removing it felt like removing the identity.
What I found afterwards is that the identity was never in the furniture. It is in the restraint: the refusal to file, the refusal to rank, the refusal to claim more than the record supports, the refusal to interrupt. Those are invisible in a screenshot and they are the actual brand.
Which is an uncomfortable thing for a visual studio to conclude, and I think it is true anyway. The elements of an identity that can be photographed are usually the least durable parts of it. A signature that no longer serves the work is not an identity. It is a habit with good art direction.
The radio is still on the shelf. It has outlasted several visual languages by refusing to have one.
Sources
Braun T3 pocket radio, designed by Dieter Rams and Ulm HfG, 1958. Photograph by PeterAjtony, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:RadioT3-4-41.jpg
Cassette recorder designed by Dieter Rams. Photograph by Jennifer Balaco, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons. commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cassette_recorder,_Dieter_Rams_(6098613465).jpg
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