After doing some research and moodboarding on Pinterest, I decided I really liked the style of Dieter Rams' products for Braun in the 1960s. To me, they're simple, timeless and elegant. After putting together a mood board, I decided to watch the documentary about Dieter Rams and his principles for good design. I learnt a lot of interesting things from that:

Good design is honest – this means that the product shouldn't look like something its not. In most cases for braun (making homeNo flaunty design, no extra gimmick design elements to make the design look flashy.

Good design is sustainable – That means the product should last a long time, be made out of high quality materials and be fixable – a few times he mentions modularity

No instruction manual – The product should explain itself. 99% of the time, nobody bothers to read the instruction manual anyway.

‍Grandma could use it

My personal principles of design are that anyone in the world could walk up to a device and understand how to use it – that doesn't mean they have to understand how it works. Most of the time, design seems magic to the average person – think the iPhone or the car – most people don't understand how they work, they understand which buttons do what, but not what the button actually does, or how a gearbox works.

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'Less, but better' is Dieters famous quote, and it's the approach I'd like to take with my coffee machine – rather than try and think of some elaborate industrial design, I want to solve the problems of current coffee machines, and what holds everyone in the world back from owning a coffee machine. Obviously this approach works well for our brief of making a coffee machine for home use – I think I wouldn't be so concerned with usability if I knew someone who knew how to use a coffee machine was going to use mine.