Dieter Rams: The Design Ethos
Dieter Rams is one of the most genius of design, a personality inextricably linked to industrial designer and closely associated with the consumer products company Braun.
Dieter Rams joined the Braun team by starting or following his path as an architect, designing the company’s warehouses and later, becoming one of Braun’s leading product designers, developing numerous objects. In 1961, Dieter Rams was appointed head of the company’s design department and in 1968, general director of design. Rams was the head of the Braun design team for about 40 years, and his functional aesthetic was reduced to all the products he manufactured.
Dieter Rams introduced in Braun a systematic design, linked to form and function, its varied products represented a puritanical and utilitarian aesthetic, coming from the Ulm school. Namely Bernhard E. Bürdek states that “Ulm’s design principles were worked on, in the 60s, by the Braun Brothers and in an exemplary way applied in an industrial context.
In this way, Braun became the center of a “good shape” movement that attracted worldwide attention. This translated, on the one hand, the industrial production modes in an idealized way and on the other hand their application in consumer and production goods made them quickly accepted. “Good design”, “El buen diseño” or “Gute form” have become, over the course of two decades, almost international brands of German design. This concept came to seriously swing, first in the early 1970s (with criticism of functionalism) and more strongly in the early 1980s (postmodernism).
Nevertheless, many companies in Germany have adopted these principles with great success. Braun quickly became a reference company in terms of industrial design, with the awarding of national and international awards, the company achieved remarkable success. Its innovative design revealed a team of interdisciplinary professionals who followed a cooperative identity, faithful to basic design principles, in the pursuit of technological progress.
Dieter Rams has made a significant contribution to Braun’s image, having been the brand’s design director since 1968, driving an aesthetic and a new design approach focused on functionality. His work is characterized in a clinical way, the objects were reduced to the essential and stripped of any distracting elements in order to simplify the product. “The aesthetic clarity of Braun’s products is the result of the logical ordering of the elements and the search for a simple and harmonious totality.”
Dieter Rams has radically changed the way we perceive electronic objects, with his experience and his modular way driven by clean and uncluttered lines. Rams implemented a new aesthetic style that would serve as inspiration for future generations.Its design has as main objective to improve people’s quality of life, thus creating extremely functional, durable and useful products that convey emotions that consumers identify with.
Led by Dieter Rams, Braun maintained the necessary freedom to develop Braun Design. Braun Design’s proven business philosophy was “no solution, but the concept of the fundamental attitude of seeing design as the task … of finding a good solution for each product and not a primary one — for the manufacturer’s coffers”, was like Rams summarized this philosophy later. Under the new leadership, Braun modernized its production engineering and increasingly turned its attention to ecological concerns. New technologies and superior materials have enabled smaller machines and less material consumption.
The design department has become an inspiration for the company, characterized by being collaborative and multidisciplinary. Dieter Rams assumed himself as a leader, having the eminent concern that when something was not right, he guided his team on the right path, revealing behaviors of a good leader. Nothing was left to chance, the graphic design of a product was one of the fundamental aspects for Rams, as only good product communication would be able to express the brand’s values.
In the 1960s, Dieter Rams began his long collaboration with the English furniture manufacturer Vitsoe, designing numerous pieces that were produced from bookcases to tables and chairs. “Rams designed the 606 shelving system and the modular seating ranges 620 and 621 for the furniture manufacturer Vitsoe, which had the same rational purity as their designs for Braun.”
Meike Verne adds that “the projects were initially considered to be cutting edge and the Braun brothers encouraged Rams to design modern furniture so that companies like Vitsoe could bring this new design trend to people’s hearts.” The appearance of the objects that Dieter Rams designed showed a perfect combination between utility and variety of functions, the versatility of his pieces gave the user freedom to create an environment that could be adapted to their lifestyle.
At Vitsoe, Rams designed standardized systems that offered functional, low-cost solutions to a wide variety of people, which reflected Braun’s design environment, where a product’s aesthetics is the pure counterpart of its function. Following this principle, Dieter Rams established ten essential foundations in the late 1970s that summarized his design philosophy, being understood by many as a major contribution to the history of industrial design.
Over the years his work has been recognized with the title of Royal Designer for Industry, by the Royal Society of Arts in London. Also being awarded the SIAD medal by the Society of Industrial Artists and Designers in London and the World Design Medal by the Industrial Designer Society of America. In 1995, he published the book “Less but better” reporting his design philosophy and his main products produced at Braun. His work has a quality that distinguishes it from the vast majority of industrial design in the mid-twentieth century.
Dieter Rams was a pioneer in showing how design can have a strong orientation by creating innovative solutions that respond to everyday problems, so design only works for Rams when looking for a solution for humanity. His attitude towards design has led many people to identify with his philosophy of “less, but better”, about getting rid of excess, visual pollution, and living only with what is necessary. Dieter Rams is an excellent reference in terms of design, but above all a great example of a design leader who revolutionized the history of Braun.
