Good design is invisible: why I think in houses
The best design is the one you never notice. Why I use the house as a metaphor for good design, and what Pixar, a Fab Lab and a palace in Barcelona taught me about it.
Good design is invisible.
That is the sentence on the first page of this website, and I mean it quite literally. Dieter Rams put it this way: good design is as little design as possible. When you use something and it simply works, when you never think about the design and never have to talk about it, then the design has become invisible. And most of the time, that is when it is astonishingly good.
Why a house
My last name is Haus. So the metaphor was close at hand. But the longer I think about it, the better it fits.
A house can be a place you walk into and are inspired immediately. It can change how you act and how you think, from the first minute. I am convinced that the act of designing can do exactly that: influence people deeply, and in a good way.
The rooms of my house
My house has rooms of different sizes, and they stand for my focus areas.
- The Observatory is the meta level. Here I look at the bigger picture: people, systems and impact.
- The UI/UX Studio is my main business. I care about details, and they interest me.
- In Motion I make films, because that is something I am good at: quick clips as well as short films that explain a topic.
- The Makerspace is everything physical. Here I live out my passion for craft. I do 3D modelling in Fusion 360, develop products based on 3D printing and know the maker scene well.
- The Lobby is where we meet and talk.
A place built for creativity
In Barcelona I visited a few places that impressed me a lot. One of them is the Fab Lab Barcelona.
During my work at Fab City Hamburg, I had the chance to visit it. Fab Lab Barcelona is one of the most influential Fab Labs worldwide and one of the first. The Fab City movement grew out of it, and at that time I was part of that movement.
It is bursting with creativity. Everywhere you look there are models, prototypes, projects, products, workshops, people, talks and events. A place of maximum creativity. And not by accident: it was thought through and designed to be exactly that.
The floor plan decides
Before I talk about Steve Jobs, a word on where I stand. From what I understand of Steve Jobs’ biography, there are values in him that I would not support. I believe business should never come before people. That said, doing business can create jobs, purpose and much more. But you can feel whether the people behind it are driven by care for others, or by prestige and money. My focus here is on Jobs’ design mindset when he was involved in designing the Pixar campus.
One of the best examples of this idea is the Steve Jobs Building on the Pixar campus in Emeryville.
When Jobs planned it, he wanted a building that “promoted encounters and unplanned collaborations”. The answer was a large central atrium. The mailboxes, the café, the meeting rooms: all of it there. Jobs even wanted the only bathrooms in the building to be in the atrium, so that people would run into each other. In his biography he explains it like this:
“If a building doesn’t encourage [collaboration], you’ll lose a lot of innovation and the magic that’s sparked by serendipity. So we designed the building to make people get out of their offices and mingle in the central atrium with people they might not otherwise see.”
People do not have to think about how to meet. The building does it for them. The design just makes it happen. That is invisible design, built on one insight: how valuable the unplanned is.
I know the opposite from German corporations and research institutes. A boring kitchen at the end of a long corridor. You go there and you are far away from everything. No encounters.
The floor plan decides.
Built for a hundred years
Pixar’s facilities director, Tom Carlisle, described the main criterion for the building like this: no standard office park, no corrugated metal siding, no ribbon windows. “The building had to look good 100 years from now.”
That is a design brief I like a lot. It forces you to think beyond trends.
Beauty is not a luxury
I was lucky to study for a semester at EINA, a design university in Barcelona. Its home in Sarrià is an old palace, white, set in a garden, with Barcelona weather on top. It feels like a villa in a park.
Beauty is a factor that influences and moves us so much. It makes people happy. And happy people learn, think and work differently.
We live in what others designed
What I want to say with all of this: much of what we do, we simply do in the environment we are given. We walk down the corridors, use the products, follow the habits. All of these were designed by someone. And when they are designed really well, our quality of life goes up, and so does the way we live and work together.
Invisible in my own work
When I design user interfaces, invisibility means building on what people already know, and reducing and simplifying as much as possible.
With physical products, it can mean something else. For an inductive charging station for VR headsets, my invisible approach was the choice of technology. Inductive charging is charging you do not see: it disappears behind a cover. That took a lot of work off the staff, because manual charging was no longer needed.
What I want to build
This way of thinking fascinates me. I want to design so that people are happier and have more good encounters, without ever noticing that someone designed it that way on purpose.
Beautiful, isn’t it?
Further reading: Pixar Headquarters and the Legacy of Steve Jobs, Office Snapshots.
