Dieter Rams and the Fresh Prince

Design

I was chuckling over this Fresh Prince photo at Design Dare the other day. "Now they all look dumb," wrote Design Dare's Jon Bell of Will Smith's fresh eighties entourage. "Oh, fashion."

Got me thinking about the difficulty of truly timeless design, whether for fashion or objects or software interfaces. Designers and their creations are captive to their times, and notions of "good design" constantly shift under our feet. I tweeted that...