A Braun designer's ten rules of good design live on in Apple's gadgets.
Dieter Rams, head of design at Braun for decades, summed up his philosophy as 'less, but better'. His ten principles of good design became a creed for product designers. Apple's Jony Ive was a devotee, and Apple's old iOS calculator closely echoed Rams's 1987 Braun ET66.
Dieter Rams trained as an architect and joined the German electrical company Braun in 1955 at 23. Six years later he was head of design, a role he held until 1997. Working alongside designers from the Ulm School of Design, he helped make Braun a household name with electronics that were austere, clear and easy to use. The SK 4 radiogram, nicknamed 'Snow White's coffin' and is seen as revolutionary because it moved appliance design away from looking like traditional furniture.
In the 1970s, worried about waste and planned obsolescence, Rams asked himself whether his own designs were good, and answered with ten principles. Good design, he wrote, is innovative, makes a product useful, is aesthetic, makes a product understandable, is unobtrusive, is honest, is long-lasting, is thorough down to the last detail, is environmentally friendly, and is as little design as possible. The last is his motto: 'Weniger, aber besser', less, but better.
He lived the long-lasting principle. The 606 Universal Shelving System he designed for Vitsœ around 1960 is still sold with only minor changes. He also famously declared that indifference towards people and the reality they live in is the one cardinal sin in design.
His influence on modern technology is easy to see. Apple's designer Jony Ive acknowledged it openly, sending Rams an iPhone with a thank-you letter and writing the foreword to a Rams monograph. The early iOS calculator app referenced the Braun ET66, and the original iPod resembled Braun's T3 pocket radio. In the 2009 documentary Objectified, Rams named Apple as one of the few companies designing by his principles.
Source: Wikipedia — Dieter Rams · Text summarised from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)
