“Indifference towards people and the reality in which they live is actually the one and only cardinal sin in design”
Dieter Rams
During the early stages of working on this book, I travelled to Osaka, Japan, for an exhibition about the work of Dieter Rams in the context of twentieth-century design. On the evening after the opening, we were sitting in a bar at the top of a high-rise hotel, looking out through huge plate-glass windows at the nocturnal panorama of the dense industrial Osaka cityscape. It had been a long day of press conferences, opening speeches and seminars followed by a Japanese banquet in Dieter Rams’s honour, and now I was in the company of a small group of people including Klaus Klemp, the exhibition’s co-curator, Mark Adams and Daniel Nelson from Vitsœ, Dieter Rams and his wife Ingeborg, and Rams’s good friend and advisor Britte Siepenkothen, enjoying a nightcap of Japanese whisky.
We were quietly discussing the day’s events when Dieter Rams, who had worked hard all day and appeared tired, suddenly said, ‘Why on earth do we need another book about me?’ At the age of seventy-six, Rams had been famous as a designer since he was twenty-five and despite acknowledging that having people interested in your work and ideas is no bad thing, he hated all the limelight and media attention. ‘I want nothing to do with this star designer machine,’ he added, suddenly getting rather worked up. We all looked at him. Apart from the fact that, as one of the most respected industrial designers in the world, he was a ‘star’ whether he liked it or not, the reason why the world needed another book had been made absolutely clear earlier in the day in the huge auditorium packed with young designers and design students hanging on to Rams’s every word. A particularly beautiful and precise speech at the symposium by the Japanese designer Naoto Fukasawa, who praised Rams’s oeuvre of what he aptly called ’correct design’, highlighted the level of respect there is for his work among today’s top professionals in the field. Klaus Klemp was the first to speak up: ‘Dieter,’ he said, ‘you still have work to do – to communicate and bring your message across to the young people.’ There was a chorus of assent from all those present.
Mollified, Rams agreed that this was a good reason to do another book. ‘But,’ he added, looking at me very intently, ‘it should be an empty book that says something important.’ In this respect, I have perhaps failed in my task. How do you write an empty book about someone whose working life has covered more than half a century and who has designed well over 500 products, and at the same time transmit all the complex interrelationships and contexts in which these products came into being? It would all be much simpler if one could state that Dieter Rams’s work and principles arose from him alone. But Rams would be the first to say that what constitutes his ‘work’ as an industrial designer is inseparable from the systems and networks through which it was produced. As such, assigning individual authorship to his work is, to some extent, meaningless. He could never have resolved his concepts without the ideas of his predecessors and his contemporaries, in what was an extraordinary era of worldwide growth and change. He could not have produced the things he did without the other designers at Braun, nor without the technicians, the managers, the materials manufacturers, the vision of the company’s original owners and even the marketing department. The same goes for his furniture design with Vitsœ, albeit on a smaller scale. Even beyond this vast network of people required to create his products, the designs themselves were modular and thus system-related. In nearly every instance, there are complex interrelationships within and between his designs: the improvements of individual components, how the products work with one another, how they are related aesthetically and in terms of intent, and how they function in the home. Last but not least, Rams’s products – in fact, his whole attitude and his principles – are geared towards the end user: they have to fit into the social systems, the lives and homes of a multitude of different kinds of people, and serve all of them discretely, reliably and comfortably. It would be wrong to remove the work of Dieter Rams from these contexts and yet trying to explain them has involved many words and many pictures. I trust he will forgive me for not writing an empty book, but there was much that needed to be said about his extraordinary life and work in order to transmit the essence of his message: ‘less but better’.
The world has changed since I wrote this book but the message within it has not. It seems a more fragile place than ever, yet in much more in need of context. It would be even harder to write an empty book that says something important in 2023 than it was in 2011. Dieter is now in his nineties. He moves a little slower but his passion for mending the world through design is undimmed. His wife Ingeborg sadly passed away in 2022, Britte, his manager, who kept the show on the road and secured the sound basis for Dieter’s historical legacy through the Rams Foundation is enjoying her well-earned retirement. Klaus is now running the Foundation. Mark, along with his family and team, continues to put Rams’s principles into practice as well as people and planet first with Vitsœ.
Although design has also moved on a great deal in terms of technology, materials and requirements since Dieter’s heyday, the internet has helped make him into something of an ‘icon’, a synonym for values and principles and the capacity for reflective intelligence in industrial design. Long after most of the products Dieter and his team designed have gone out of production (but not use, there is a thriving vintage market for certain objects) his name remains a benchmark for younger designers in a field flooded with change and responsibility.
Why is that? Of course, it’s true to says that, as a designer of consumer goods, Dieter Rams helped fill the world with more “things” at a time when commercial production exploded towards the resulting environmental tipping points we are faced with today. But it is also true to say that he did this with a passion for quality and usability that was often at odds with the interests of company profits. Dieter has been expounding for years to anyone who would listen about the need to make “less but better” in the face of catastrophic over-consumption. Now, at long last, the world might just be starting to listen.
