Like many things in life, design is often talked about in binary terms: it’s either “good” or “bad.”
Unlike “bad design,” something most of us have encountered so often that it needs no introduction, “good design,” the International Council of Design (ICoD) says, is rare. And while identifying bad design is a bit of a you’ll know it when you see it situation, identifying good design—though subjective and immeasurable—is arguably a little more nuanced.
While the ICoD describes it as following “a design methodology that responds to the social, cultural, economic and environmental aspects of the work,” the legendary German industrial designer Dieter Rams distilled a set of 10 now-iconic principles that offer us a fuller, more concrete picture of what good design is and does to earn this label.
According to Rams, good design:
- Is innovative.
- Makes a product useful.
- Is aesthetic.
- Makes a product understandable.
- Is unobtrusive.
- Is honest.
- Is long-lasting.
- Is thorough down to the last detail.
- Is environmentally friendly.
- Is as little design as possible.
A neat trick of this framework is that by defining what good design is, Rams also quietly defined what it refuses to be. Because if we invert these principles, we get a fairly accurate portrait of bad design: derivative, useless, confusing, self-important, dishonest, disposable, careless, wasteful, and cluttered.
But by these definitions, it’s genuinely difficult to know whether the designs featured in this list would qualify as “good” by expert standards—we don’t know what they feel like to use, what it’s like to live with them, or how they hold up over time. That said, that’s not what Interesting Creative Design ever set out to prove. Its name promised interesting, creative designs, and it sure delivered.
Some are a little wacky or slightly surreal—like the mirrored chair by Julia Chiaramonti, which seems to change shape entirely depending on where you’re standing, or Richard Wilson's Turning the Place Over, a chunk of an actual Liverpool building that slowly rotates in midair.
Others are simply visually satisfying, built around clever engineering you can't quite stop looking at. Others are appealing for their sheer novelty, like the fully transparent bathtub.
And then there are the quiet, practical ones: designs that solve a very specific, everyday problem so elegantly that you almost miss the cleverness—like the Dog Hut, a pet bed that doubles as a side table.
What makes each of these designs so enticing isn't whether they'd survive a rigorous durability test or meet a professional's checklist for "good" design. It's the creativity behind them—the willingness to look at an ordinary object and ask, "What if this worked completely differently?"
Take the “magnificently nutty” Lamborghini Marzal. It never made it past the concept stage: only one was built, and it was never intended for production. By Rams’ standards, it fails almost immediately: a car nobody can buy isn’t “useful” in any conventional sense. It doesn’t help that the thing is made with enough glass to earn it comparisons to a greenhouse, or that even Ferruccio Lamborghini himself reportedly balked at the doors, pointing out they left passengers with no privacy whatsoever and that “a lady’s legs would be there for all to see.”
And yet the Marzal shaped the design language of Lamborghinis that came after it—models people did buy and drive for decades.
And this is a good reminder: sometimes a design’s value has nothing to do with whether it works, or even whether it exists in usable form. Sometimes even impractical design is exactly what good design needs in order to happen next.
And perhaps what makes the designs on this list “useful,” to borrow Rams’ term, is precisely this: not that they necessarily solve a problem more efficiently, but that they make us see an ordinary object—a bathtub, a chair, a car—as something worth a second look, or something worth building on.
Rather than catering to conventional notions of what design should or ought to do, they invite us to notice and to imagine. And, sometimes, that’s more than enough.
