Less and More | The Design Ethos of Dieter Rams

Posted: January 4th, 2010 | Author: rf | Filed under: Book Review | 3 Comments »

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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.

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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.

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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:

“I certainly don’t see myself as the “inventor” of the Braun design concept. But nor do I think I am the person who put other people’s ideas into practice (…) because in my opinion I always produced “Braun design” even when I knew nothing about Braun”.

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.

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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.

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