-

This book had been out of print for a while and I would fall short if I tried to express my excitement when I found out that Gestalten had published a second edition for the exhibition in London. At the time the publisher wasn’t shipping to the US nor was it available on Amazon so I had it shipped to my home in Portugal where I would be spending Christmas holidays. Often times high expectations are followed by disappointment and the fact that the book and I were traveling for an epic rendez-vous in my hometown only added more drama and suspense to the whole thing.

Was this going to be the nerdy Christmas gift I’d hoped to be?

Before I answer to that question let me just admit right away that I have a true admiration – or maybe suffer from a slight fetishism – for most things that relate to Modernism, hence my overexcitement.

Let me explain. There was a substance and seriousness about the role design was going to play in society that I find dignifying, and that perception eventually became narrower and superficial with Post-Modernism.  However, the current state of flux is offering different avenues for redefinition and some of the identity crisis industrial designers are suffering from – which I mentioned in a previous post – are a natural response to the shaping of a new stance for design, one that is perceived to have a broader scope and bigger impact in society.

-

-

From the moment I flipped it open I could tell this is the most thoughtful and comprehensive monograph I ever came across with.  The choice of materials for the binding, the types of paper for different sections, the typeface, color and layout selection, beautiful pictures and thoroughness of the written content all add up to something that looks, feels and behaves like a Braun product from the Rams era.

So, yes. It was what I was expecting and more.

There’s a mountain of information to be learned from this book, namely the broader cultural, social and economical context in which Braun appears, or descriptions of most of the members of the Braun team and their contributions to products, graphics or packaging, and even essays that strengthen the similarities of the Braun approach to that of Japanese design and aesthetics.

Obviously, some things naturally emerged to the foreground as I was reading the book and generated some thoughts in my head. I’ll try to articulate them here.

-

-

The myth of the lone genius

I suffer from the same biased view of the world that most people do. By this I mean that most of us are naturally biased to personify success stories, romanticize reality and think about an exceptional body of work as coming from a single genius. I was not surprisingly surprised as I delve into the content of the book as to how much of the amazing work done at Braun had to do with bigger systemic forces and teamwork than a single person masterminding the whole thing.

Just look at the SK-1 – a product that is as representative of ‘Braun design’ as any other – that was designed even before Rams joined the Braun team. Who designed it? It was the founder’s son Arthur Braun, an engineer with no formal design training and Fritz Eicher, an art historian.  Even some of my favorite products were designed by other people within Braun’s design team (two pictures below). And this happened at a time where the master craftsman and apprentice relationship in a studio had been replaced by a less hierarchical approach to design teams.

This is not to say that Dieter Rams isn’t the key figure in terms of Industrial Design or that he didn’t have a leading instrumental role in the creation of Braun’s legacy, but the single genius concept might be truer in the case of Paul Rand or Richard Sapper.

As Rams puts it best:

In this statement lies the secret of the ability to produce work that is unbelievably consistent across multiple media. The shared ideology and worldview made it so that everyone who contributed anything to the making of things had the same overarching goal and the same priorities in making decisions.

-

-

Dieter Ive and Erwin Jobs?

A lot has been said, included in this book, about similarities between Apple products and Braun products. I’m about to stretch that relationship and share some little known facts about the man at the helm of the German company and how in a lot ways he shares similarities with Steve Jobs.

Much like Steve Jobs at Apple, Erwin Braun was both the spokesperson and creative leader of Braun, and had a sense of ownership that is probably similar to Jobs since he had the company bearing his family name.

They were both young when they saw themselves with the responsibility to lead and craft a vision for the future of their company, Jobs at 24 and Erwin at 30.

We know Jobs is a left and right brain thinker with a passion for music that extends to the style of management but what about EB? This is a guy that in his mid 20’s hangout with young bohemian artists bonded together by Jazz music. To put it context, Jazz was referred in the early 40’s as “the new world” and was consensual among painters, architects and graphic designers. Ah, and he also attended lectures from Bauhaus teachers and even invited them to talk at Braun.

Jobs hired Paul Rand to design the Next logo and Erwin Braun got Otl Aicher to contribute to the corporate image through the partnership with the Ulm school.

They both made a bet on a young designer to lead their studio, Ive when he was 30 and Rams when he was 33.

It’s no small coincidence that the output of these companies share similar traits. If the story of Braun is any good in foreseeing the future of Apple then the stockholders should be ready to sell their shares as soon as Jobs decides to leave.

In many ways, Braun should be today’s Apple, but somehow they missed the boat when they lost their leading role to Sony in the late 70’s. Erwin Braun left the company in 1967 and from that point on Braun gradually stopped having a voice that matters and the products start gettting depressing after 1975.

-

A lot has been said lately about the current state of the union in all things Industrial Design and some of them with a less positive outlook into the future, particularly in a consultancy environment as the one I’m exposed to and live in on a daily basis.  One school of thought says our practice has been loosing focus while the other says that it’s a much-needed reinterpretation of our role that makes us more relevant in facing the way challenges and opportunities present themselves to the world today.

My position in this matter is that of someone who’s agnostic on its way to become an atheist. Design Thinking being the world view supported by atheism and author design being whatever religion you pick. I’ve always seen myself somewhere in the middle and had been trying to counter balance the gravity pull that is definitively sitting on the Design Thinking theories these days. As of late I decided to stop resisting, embrace it and leverage its momentum.

This is a big identity crisis for many Industrial Designers today since embracing process and broadening the scope of action (often times with no physical product as the outcome of a project) detaches us from the physicality of things that is so dear to us. We grow apart from the idea of the craftsman that I believe most Industrial Designers aspire to be.

That being said, I want to anchor the focus of this post to the publishing world taking the ID magazine as a starting point.

Having a fuzzy picture reflected every time we look at ourselves in the mirror, any sign will quickly be elevated to evidence in order to support either worldviews on this subject. “Is this a sign of a troubled discipline or just another indication of how the publishing business is in crisis?” Not surprisingly, this was the question in a lot of industrial designers minds these days.

I agree with the latter.

ID magazine wasn’t as focused on ID as 10 years ago and the categories for the Annual Design Review reflect just that: products, graphics, environments, interaction etc… This seems to be a classic example of heavy weight publications not being able to make a transition to online in a way that explores the unique advantages of the web. ID’s website today offers a web 1.0 experience.

If we look at Core77, Designboom and to a lesser extent Dezeen, it’s fair to say that although broad in their scope the core content is still Industrial Design. These websites managed to capture the mindshare of the design community and became a threat to printed content and eventually, as we now see, deemed it unsustainable.

I don’t believe printed magazines will cease to exist and there are some interesting signs that point to a plot twist in this story. In the future we might see some of these online portals create a printed publication that goes together with their online content. This has started to happen with Design Observer and Dezeen where a few selected posts get translated into a book. This happen maybe once a year today, but if you start increasing seasonality soon enough you’ll have a magazine.

-

-

Monocle is an interesting example of a new paradigm of publishing since it was designed from its inception to be represented at the highest quality in both mediums.  Anyone who holds a Monocle issue in his hands will tell you the magazine was created with a clear set of priorities, design and attention to detail being on top of that list. And this translates perfectly to the online format and a great part of the creative process is described here.

Although there are a lot of things I admire about this magazine, content and positioning is not one of them. I was a subscriber for a year and decided not to renew my subscription. It’s hard to describe the visceral feeling I have for this magazine but I think it could be put as something to do with being too elitist and exclusive for my taste.  I don’t feel, or wish, to be part of the royalty club that descends to peasantown on a private jet with overpriced Monocle branded luggage for a fashion photoshoot in Beirut. I would subscribe to this detailed review of the magazine.

We know the publishing landscape is changing. How does all of this affect the way we try to publish our work?

I think a lot of the power to make our message sticky will come from the medium and format in which we try to distribute it. If we create assets that are aligned with what makes online publications awesome, we’ll be infusing the message with strength of its own.

Think of something like 3 minute videos or microwebsites that tell a story about the project, the product, the people who made it and the people who designed it. I believe there’s an increasing interest in viewing behind the scenes stuff and being transparent about the whole process. Online publications and viewers are eager for this type of material and the traditional three pictures with white background and three pictures in context are still aligned with the decaying paradigm of publishing.

As production for creating these assets becomes cheaper and faster we will be seeing more of it and it’s a matter of how fast designers can develop those capabilities and integrate them into the workflow. Broad bandwidth is prevalent today and the cost of DSLR with HD video capabilities keeps coming down. The convergence of these two elements is setting the stage for new storytelling opportunities.

I recently read an interesting article about the future of photojournalism that points exactly in that direction. You can find it here.