Principles

The possibilities for innovation are not, by any means, exhausted. Technological development is always offering new opportunities for innovative design. But innovative design always develops in tandem with innovative technology, and can never be an end in itself.

A product is bought to be used. It has to satisfy certain criteria, not only functional, but also psychological and aesthetic. Good design emphasizes the usefulness of a product whilst disregarding anything that could possibly detract from it.

The aesthetic quality of a product is integral to its usefulness because products we use every day affect our person and our well-being. But only well-executed objects can be beautiful.

It clarifies the product's structure. Better still, it can make the product talk. At best, it is self-explanatory.

Products fulfilling a purpose are like tools. They are neither decorative objects nor works of art. Their design should therefore be both neutral and restrained, to leave room for the user's self-expression.

It does not make a product more innovative, powerful or valuable than it really is. It does not attempt to manipulate the consumer with promises that cannot be kept.

It avoids being fashionable and therefore never appears antiquated. Unlike fashionable design, it lasts many years – even in today's throwaway society.

Nothing must be arbitrary or left to chance. Care and accuracy in the design process show respect towards the user.

Design makes an important contribution to the preservation of the environment. It conserves resources and minimizes physical and visual pollution throughout the lifecycle of the product.

Less, but better – because it concentrates on the essential aspects, and the products are not burdened with non-essentials. Back to purity, back to simplicity.

The larger the share of a graphic's ink devoted to data, the better. Erase non-data-ink within reason. Erase redundant data-ink within reason.

Chartjunk does not achieve the goals of its propagators. The overwhelming fact of data graphics is that they stand or fall on their content, their associative quality, and their design. Chartjunk can turn bores into disasters, but it can never rescue a thin data set.

Small multiples are economical: once viewers understand the design of one slice, they have immediate access to the data in all the other slices. Small multiples reveal patterns through repetition.

Confusion and clutter are failures of design, not attributes of information. Effective layering of information establishes a visual hierarchy that leads the eye.

Graphics reveal data. Indeed graphics can be more precise and revealing than conventional statistical computations. The best graphics tell a story about the data.

Reduction is not absence but distillation. By removing the unnecessary, we reveal the essential structure. Every element that remains must justify its presence.

Excellence emerges from attention to the smallest elements. A building's character depends on the precision of its joints, the alignment of its surfaces, the proportion of its spaces. Nothing is too small to matter.

A building should express how it works. The structure should be visible, not hidden behind decoration. Materials should appear as themselves, not disguised as something else.

Architecture should create spaces that can serve multiple purposes over time. Open floor plans and flexible partitions allow buildings to adapt to changing needs without structural modification.

When we use equipment effectively, it withdraws from our attention. The hammer disappears when we hammer; we attend to the nail. Tools that work well become invisible, transparent to the task at hand. This is the ideal state of designed objects.

When equipment breaks or fails, it becomes conspicuous—present-at-hand rather than ready-to-hand. We suddenly see the hammer as an object. This breakdown reveals assumptions and enables reflection, but is not the mode of effective use.

We do not begin from nothing. We are thrown into languages, tools, systems, and histories we did not choose. Design never starts from zero—it inherits. Acknowledging thrownness means working with the given rather than pretending pure invention. The constraint is not obstacle but material.

Understanding moves in a circle: we understand the whole through its parts and the parts through the whole. Neither has logical priority. This circle is not vicious but productive—understanding deepens through iteration.

Truth is not correspondence between statement and fact but unconcealment—the revealing of what was hidden. Design as truth-telling brings forth what matters while letting peripheral elements recede.

A thing is not an object. The handmade jug gathers—it holds meaning, connects maker to user, ritual to material. Mass-produced containers merely function. Systems can create things or process objects. A database that becomes the living memory of a practice is a thing. One that merely stores records is an object with a pulse.

To dwell is not merely to occupy space but to be at home in the world. Authentic dwelling involves care, preservation, and the cultivation of things that matter. Design should enable dwelling, not just occupation.

Modern technology reveals the world as standing-reserve—resources to be ordered, optimized, extracted. This is not evil but danger: when everything becomes material for processing, we lose the capacity to encounter things as they are. Yet "where danger is, grows the saving power also"—confronting enframing honestly opens the possibility of other modes of being. The question for design is not whether to use technology but whether our systems enable dwelling or merely accelerate consumption.

Neither rejection nor submission but a third way: using technology while remaining inwardly free of it. Releasement says yes to tools and simultaneously no to their claim on our being. Calculative thinking has its place; meditative thinking dwells, remains open, lets things be. The danger is not calculation but its monopoly. Systems should accelerate the calculative so that meditative thinking becomes possible again.

We fall into doing what "one does"—the anonymous they. Average opinions, standard workflows, best practices borrowed wholesale. Inauthenticity is not moral failure but gravitational default. Authentic systems surface your priorities, not generic productivity theater. The question is not "what do people do?" but "what does this work demand?"

Creation is the discipline of removing what obscures. Apply three questions in order: DRY (Have I built this before? → Unify), Rams (Does this earn its existence? → Remove), Heidegger (Does this serve the whole? → Reconnect).

.ltd provides standards for .io, which validates through .space, which is tested by .agency, which feeds back to .ltd. Nothing is canonical until it survives this full cycle.

Each property is a mode of being: .ltd (Being-as-Canon), .io (Being-as-Research), .space (Being-as-Practice), .agency (Being-as-Service). Together they form a complete ontology of creation.