Form Is an Attitude

Picture a kitchen drawer on an ordinary Monday. Between the takeaway menus and a charger for a phone nobody owns any more lies an old potato peeler, its handle worn pale where thumbs have pressed for years. Nobody bought it for its looks. Yet it is the one object in the drawer that everyone in the house reaches for first. We rarely put it into words, but we can feel when a thing has been made with care. The hand notices before the mind forms an opinion.

That feeling is not nostalgia. It is information. The way an object is made is a statement about how long its maker expects us to keep it, which is why form, before it becomes a style, is an attitude.

Ten principles, one direction

In the late 1970s the German designer Dieter Rams set down ten principles of good design.¹ Paraphrased, they ask that a product be innovative, useful, understandable and honest; that it stay quietly out of the way; that it be thorough to the last detail; that it avoid fashion so that it never looks dated; that it conserve resources across its whole life; and that it carry as little design as possible. Read today, the list sounds less like an aesthetic manifesto than an environmental one, written long before sustainability became a department. Rams described good design as lasting many years “even in today’s throwaway society”, which is about as angry as a Braun radio ever sounded.

Beauty that is used

Japan arrived at a similar place by another road. In January 1926 the critic Yanagi Sōetsu and the potters Hamada Shōji and Kawai Kanjirō coined the word mingei, craft of the people, for everyday objects made by nameless hands.² Their point was that beautiful things need not be rare or expensive: a rice bowl earns its beauty by being used. Kintsugi goes a step further. The practice of joining broken ceramics with natural lacquer and dusting the seam with gold took shape in the Muromachi period, when tea culture flourished, and it treats the break as part of the object’s biography rather than a flaw to be hidden.³ Mingei honours the thing that lasts. Kintsugi honours the thing that was allowed to keep lasting after it failed.

Form is an attitude because it answers a question most products never ask aloud: how long do you intend to stay?

The weight of what we discard

Our own habits point the other way, and they can be weighed. According to the Global E-waste Monitor 2024, published by the UN agencies ITU and UNITAR, the world generated 62 million tonnes of electronic waste in 2022. Only 22.3% of it was documented as properly collected and recycled, and the authors expect 82 million tonnes by 2030.⁴ The burden is unevenly spread. Europe produced 17.6 kilograms per person, Oceania 16.1 and the Americas 14.1, against 6.4 in Asia and 2.5 in Africa, with a world average of 7.8.⁵ Europe formally recycled 42.8% of its e-waste; in Africa the documented share was below 1%. Asia, simply by the size of its population, produced about half of the global total.

The law discovers the screwdriver

Legislators have begun to write Rams’ seventh principle, longevity, into statute. The EU adopted its right to repair directive on 13 June 2024 and gave member states until 31 July 2026 to turn it into national law.⁶ For products such as washing machines, dishwashers, refrigerators, displays, phones and tablets, manufacturers must offer repair at a reasonable price, and anyone who chooses repair over replacement under the legal guarantee gains an extra year of cover.⁷ Germany’s draft implementing law, published in early 2026, adds a telling detail: a product that cannot be repaired may be treated as defective.⁸ Since June 2025, phones and tablets sold in the EU must have spare parts available for seven years after a model leaves the market, receive operating system updates for at least five years after the last unit is sold and carry a repairability grade from A to E.⁹ In the USA, California’s Right to Repair Act, in force since July 2024, requires parts, tools and documentation for seven years on devices priced at 100 dollars or more.¹⁰

None of this makes a toaster beautiful. It does change the brief a designer receives. A phone that must be opened, mended and updated for years has to be designed to be opened. The screw returns where the glue used to be, and with it a quiet admission that the object may outlive its first owner’s enthusiasm.

A photographer learns a version of this early. The camera one keeps is seldom the one with the longest list of features; it is the one that disappears in the hand and still works when the fashion for it has passed. Form is an attitude because it answers a question most products never ask aloud: how long do you intend to stay? The peeler in the drawer has been answering it for years. The phone beside it now carries a repairability grade, which is a start. Whether it ever earns a worn patch where the thumb goes is up to its maker, and a little up to us.

Sources

1. Vitsoe: Good design: Dieter Rams’ ten principles for good design, accessed 2026-09-29
2. The Conversation (republished by The Wire), Penny Bailey: Beauty in ordinary things: why this Japanese folk craft movement still matters 100 years on, 2026-01-21
3. Web Japan, Japan Up Close: Golden Cracks: The Traditional Japanese Art of Kintsugi, 2024-03-26
4. UNITAR / ITU: Global E-waste Monitor 2024: Electronic Waste Rising Five Times Faster than Documented E-waste Recycling, 2024-03-20
5. ITU / UNITAR: The Global E-waste Monitor 2024 (report), 2024-03-20
6. EUR-Lex, European Union: Directive (EU) 2024/1799 on common rules promoting the repair of goods, 2024-06-13
7. Right to Repair Europe: The Right to Repair Directive: what changes on 31 July?, 2026-07-30
8. Freshfields: Repair instead of replace: Germany moves to implement the EU Right to Repair Directive, 2026-02-04
9. European Commission: New EU rules for durable, energy-efficient and repairable smartphones and tablets start applying, 2025-06-20
10. iFixit: California Right to Repair Signed into Law, 2023-10-10