When Less Stopped Being a Decision: Product-Design Minimalism After the Smartphone Plateau

The world's leading consumer-technology fair, IFA Berlin, opens on 4 September 2026 with hundreds of product world-premieres spread across the Messe halls. Here is a safe prediction: most of them will look like variations on the same object — a reduced, seamless, screen-forward slab in matte grey or black. Not because designers ran out of ideas, but because minimalism has quietly become the thing you reach for when you haven't yet decided what a product should be.

That is the paradox worth examining at the concept phase. Minimalism began as one of the most demanding decisions in design, not the easiest. When Dieter Rams distilled four decades at Braun into the phrase "Weniger, aber besser" — less, but better, the operative word was better. His Ten Principles of Good Design treat reduction as the residue of a hundred hard choices about function, honesty and restraint — "good design is as little design as possible" is the last principle, earned by the nine before it. Rams's Braun work so thoroughly shaped Apple that the iPod's face is a direct descendant of the Braun T3 radio. That lineage is minimalism as conviction: decide what a thing is for, then remove everything that isn't.

Somewhere between the T3 and the thousandth identical touchscreen appliance, the order reversed. The smartphone form plateaued — a glass rectangle whose silhouette hasn't meaningfully changed in a decade — and its template quietly became the template for everything: the same rounded rectangle, the same seamless shell, the same disappearance of physical controls. Reduction stopped being the conclusion of a design argument and became the opening move — a way to skip the concept-phase question entirely. "Clean and simple" is now the phrase you use to avoid saying what the product actually is.

Designers have noticed. Creative Boom's roundup of trends creatives are "so over" in 2026 puts generic minimalism near the top, and brand strategists are openly debating minimalism versus maximalism as the aesthetic of 2026. But framing it as a style war — clean versus bold, white space versus dense pattern — misses the design-intelligence point. Maximalism practised as a reflex is exactly as empty as minimalism practised as a reflex. More-of-everything is not braver than less-of-everything if neither is a decision. Minimalism is a movement; the slab on the shelf is a habit.

Nowhere is the default more visible than the category IFA is built on: home appliances. The smart speaker, the thermostat, the air purifier, the robot vacuum — a decade ago each carried a distinct product language; today they converge on the same soft-cornered white or grey pebble, controls buried in an app, identity sanded off in the name of "blending in." Blending in is a legitimate design decision. But it is rarely made as one — it is inherited, because a featureless puck is the safest thing to sign off and the hardest thing to argue with.

The useful counterexamples aren't the loud ones. Nothing, designed with founding partner Teenage Engineering, makes phones that are still visually spare — and yet unmistakable, because the spareness carries a position: a transparent inside-out shell, a monochrome glyph interface, a refusal to look like the anonymous slab. Its Special Edition colour detours read as a deliberate stance against the monochrome smartphone landscape, not a garnish. Teenage Engineering's own products — the OP-1 synthesizer and its five-colour, tightly-constrained palette — are the clearest proof that constraint is only powerful when it is chosen. That is still minimalism. It is just minimalism that made a decision first.

This is the fork that matters, and it happens upstream of any surface. Default minimalism defers the hard question — what should this be, who is it for, what single thing must it express — and fills the vacuum with erasure, hoping seamlessness will read as intent. Conviction minimalism answers the question at the concept phase, commits to one idea, and then removes everything that dilutes it. The two can produce objects that look superficially similar in a render. Only one of them survives contact with a shelf full of competitors, because only one of them is about something.

So the real test at IFA won't be how much or how little sits on each product. It will be whether you can feel that a decision was made — whether the reduction points somewhere, or just hides that no one chose. After the smartphone plateau, the next move in product design isn't more minimalism or less. It's intent. At Depix, that is the whole argument for taking the concept phase seriously: reduction is a verdict you earn, never a default you inherit.

Sources:

• ●IFA Berlin — the world's leading consumer-electronics fair (Wikipedia)
• ●IFA Berlin 2026 — dates and details (Berlin.de)
• ●Vitsoe — Good design: Dieter Rams and "less, but better"
• ●Design Museum — Dieter Rams' Ten Principles of Good Design
• ●Interaction Design Foundation — Dieter Rams' 10 timeless commandments
• ●Dieter Rams — Braun, and the influence on Apple (Wikipedia)
• ●Creative Boom — 10 trends creatives are so over in 2026
• ●Free the Birds — Brand trends 2026: minimalism vs maximalism
• ●Minimalism as a design movement (Wikipedia)
• ●Inverse — Nothing's Phone (1) is betting on design
• ●Teenage Engineering — founding partner of Nothing (Wikipedia)
• ●Design Milk — Nothing's colour detour in a monochrome smartphone landscape
• ●TechRadar — Nothing and Teenage Engineering on design
• ●Teenage Engineering OP-1 — constraint as aesthetic (Wikipedia)