Iconeye: Dieter Rams and his team at Braun did more than anyone else to popularise functional, modern mass-produced design. Most designers before him tried to make domestic appliances look like furniture or craft objects, covering up their crude circuitry with varnished woods, veneers, fabrics and decorative plastic mouldings.
Rams rejected all of this. Building on the form-follows-function methodology of the pre-war Bauhaus and the pioneering modernists, he created products that were simple to use, honest in their use of materials and stripped of all visual clutter. His products did for industrial design what the likes of Mies van der Rohe, Berthold Lubetkin and Oscar Niemeyer did for architecture.
Braun was committed to innovation and Rams and his team were encouraged to push their work to its limits. “At Braun they were always willing to take a risk - nobody could tell you if a product would become successful. We as designers cannot work in a vacuum. The entrepreneur has to want it; the people at the top of the company have to want it.” Rams is nostalgic for what he perceives to be a golden age of design: “What’s missing today is that these kind of entrepreneurs are no longer there. Today there is only Apple and to a lesser extent Sony, but not to the same degree as was the case with Olivetti and Braun, or Peter Behrens at AEG, or Herman Miller and Charles Eames, Florence Knoll with Saarinen and so on. These kinds of connections are missing today.”
2008.01.14 at 1:26 pm / design
