It seems important to understand the context that these principles were created from. If, for example, you were to go to a design event at SF Design Week, and w

It seems important to understand the context that these principles were created from. If, for example, you were to go to a design event at SF Design Week, and wondered if you were actually at a fashion event, then we might start to think about the context that the 89-year-old Dieter Rams is coming from. The principles (as stated by the designer) were meant to evolve. And evolve they have. When most tech products were being designed without the input of designers (say, 15 years ago), we started to have many people write books like "Don't Make Me Think." This was because engineers' culture of one-upping each other in the smarts department was spilling over into the design of tech products, and at the same time, tech was becoming more important and more mainstream. A lot of design in tech has felt like it's been finding its way through these principles. When Microsoft started caring about design, people criticized that their products looked like they looked good in a Powerpoint, as opposed to in-person. The last time I used Google's material-ui toolkit, it harshly encoded the very large, wide spacing that is the default for some of their web UIs (like gmail), where a user cares much more about being able to read through a large amount of structured information, rather than making it appear "aesthetic." It's not so much don't make me think, as it is: please respect the task I have at hand.