Mara had been staring at her screen for three hours. Her brief was simple: Design a smart speaker that doesn't look like a tombstone. But her mood board was a chaos of gradients, bezels, and notifications. She typed into the search bar: less and more the design ethos of dieter rams pdf.

The most famous text excerpted from this ethos (and often included in the book's analysis) is Rams' "Ten Principles." These were developed to answer his own question: "Is my design good design?"