Dieter Rams designed objects meant to disappear into your life quietly and last forever. His ten principles for good design are less a rulebook than an act of conscience.

There is a famous photograph of Dieter Rams's apartment. It contains almost nothing. What is there is placed with extraordinary care — a few objects, each one chosen, each one earning its presence. It is the home of a man who spent fifty years thinking about what objects should and shouldn't do, and who arrived, gradually, at the conviction that most of what gets made shouldn't exist at all.

Rams spent the bulk of his career at Braun, the German consumer electronics company, where from the late 1950s onward he developed a design language that became one of the most influential of the twentieth century. The products he shaped — radios, shavers, calculators, speakers, coffee makers — were characterised by restraint, clarity, and a kind of visual honesty that was almost polemical in its rejection of decoration. They were also, paradoxically, deeply beautiful. Rams had understood something that most designers of his era had not: that beauty and usefulness were not in tension. An object that did exactly what it needed to do, with nothing added and nothing missing, had its own austere elegance. Less, but better.

Gary Hustwit's documentary Rams (2018) follows the designer in his later years, and what gives the film its emotional weight is the discomfort it finds in its subject. Rams is not a man at peace with his legacy. He looks at the contemporary landscape of consumer products — the proliferation, the disposability, the relentless visual noise — and he sees a world that absorbed his aesthetic without absorbing his values. His principles called for honesty, longevity, environmental responsibility, restraint. What the market took from him was the look: clean lines, neutral surfaces, the appearance of simplicity deployed in the service of desire. The irony is not lost on him. He helped make modern consumer objects desirable, and desirability, it turned out, was a more powerful engine.

Hustwit, who also made Helvetica and Objectified, is skilled at finding the philosophical stakes in design decisions that might otherwise seem purely technical. He gives Rams room to sit with this tension, and the result is a portrait of an innovator who understood, perhaps earlier than most, that innovation without restraint is just acceleration — and that acceleration, in a finite world, has consequences. Rams himself put it with characteristic economy. His tenth principle reads: Good design is as little design as possible.