Dieter Rams: Principled Design
Colin Fanning, the former Project Assistant Curator, European Decorative Arts and Sculpture at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, goes in depth with Dieter Rams.
Dieter Rams.
Dieter Rams gave shape to daily life in the second half of the 20th century, designing everything from coffee grinders to hi-fi systems for the German corporation Braun, in a relationship that spanned four decades. His Ten Principles for Good Design, developed during the 1970s and 1980s, when he was teaching at the Ulm School of Design in Germany, have become a kind of shorthand for the virtues of minimalism. The most famous of these, “good design is as little design as possible,” was adopted as the title of the definitive monograph on Rams’s life and work, written by Sophie Lovell for Phaidon Press in 2011. Rams designed the Universal Shelving System for Vitsœ in 1960. Today, it’s an everyday icon: it’s collected by museums, and its durability and flexibility have kept it relevant for generations of users. Rams’s aesthetic, a kind of accessible modernism in which uncomplicated shapes blend devices visually into any space and intuitive interfaces make them effortless to use, became the blueprint for much of our technological world today. Rams’s legacy is all around us—so much so that it’s too easy to forget how much he has done to design our world. In 2018, Collab honored Rams’s distinguished career as a designer and educator with the Design Excellence Award, and an exhibition in the Collab Gallery at the Perelman Building, was on view from November 18, 2018 through April 14, 2019.
The last time Dieter Rams came to the Philadelphia Museum of Art—in 1983—the world of design and technology was a very different place.
Apple’s Macintosh computer was still months away from its commercial release, when it would begin to permanently reshape the landscape of personal computing; the digital compact disc was barely a year old and had yet to displace its analog peers in audio and data storage; and the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s exhibition Design Since 1945, curated by Kathryn B. Hiesinger—for which Rams attended the opening symposium and contributed to the catalogue—was the first design-focused museum exhibition to get major backing from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Though the Museum had been collecting and exhibiting contemporary works of design and decorative arts since its 1876 founding, the NEH’s weighty federal-agency stamp of approval signaled that design was here to stay as a topic of both serious humanistic study and national importance.
620 Sesselprogramm Chair and Ottoman. Designed by Dieter Rams. Designed 1962. Made by Vitsœ. Lent by Vitsœ, Royal Leamington Spa, England.
Fast-forward from 1983 (VHS: only seven years old) to 2018, and we can see just how deeply embedded design has become as both a professional and cultural value in that thirty-five-year span. Businesses of every stripe increasingly embrace design as a requisite feature of good practice—a fundamental methodology rather than an additive process of style-making. This was one of the cores ideas Rams sought to articulate during his forty-year career with German manufacturer Braun and his ongoing, six-decade relationship with Vitsœ, the furniture company he co-founded in 1959. With both companies, Rams’s work made the case that well-designed, long-lasting products, distilled down to their essential functions, were good for both companies and consumers. Arguing against the planned obsolescence of products and the rapid shifts of styles that aimed to inflate profits, he advocated the notion of corporate responsibility before there was even a common term for it or a broadly shared understanding of its value.
Dieter Rams returns to a Philadelphia that has seen its own dramatic changes since 1983, but given the long and influential life of his philosophies—as attested by Glenn Adamson’s and Joe Gebbia’s contributions to this Journal—a retrospective exhibition of his work not only narrates an important chapter in the history of design, but also provides the opportunity to take stock of our designed present. Dieter Rams: Principled Design takes a narrower approach than Design Since 1945, which covered a broad sweep of postwar design across cultural and geographic boundaries. Instead, with the luxury of focus, it hones in on Rams’s prolific career at Braun and Vitsœ, exploring how his work for these progressive companies developed into a persuasive philosophy for rational, responsible industrial design.
The prologue of Principled Design details the origins of Dieter’s collaboration with Braun and his important role in liaising between the company and the recently founded Ulm School of Design—whose faculty, including prominent modernists like Max Bill and Otl Aicher, brought their training in Bauhaus principles to bear on design in the postwar decades. Turning from these beginnings, the exhibition’s central spine highlights Rams’s most recognizable designs: the turntables, portable radios, and hi-fi stereo components produced by Braun from the mid-1950s into the 1980s. Audio-visual equipment served as a testing ground for Rams as he developed his manifesto for the clarity of user interfaces, precision engineering, and fine attention to detail in materials and fabrication. This enduring approach helped Braun navigate the rapid pace of change in media technologies over the course of four decades.
606 Universal Shelving System. Designed by Dieter Rams. Designed 1960. Made by Vitsœ. Lent by Vitsœ, Royal Leamington Spa, England.
Further sections of the exhibition are dedicated to home appliances, many of which found near-global ubiquity in the lives of middle-class consumers as Braun expanded into a multinational corporation; small-scale objects related to grooming, personal style, or the workplace; and his modular, flexible furniture for Vitsœ. In many cases, the objects on view were designed by other members of the Braun design team, illustrating the necessity of collaboration in the corporate setting, and Rams’s firm insistence on crediting his junior colleagues. Throughout the exhibition, archival objects and documents—design models, sketches, corporate ephemera—illustrate the depth of intellectual and technical effort required to bring these products from concept to production to the marketplace. Seen as a totality, the designs make a clear statement against what Rams perceives as a throwaway culture of poorly made goods.
In the details and backstories of these seemingly understated objects, the attentive looker can read larger stories about the shifting social, economic, and technological landscape of the twentieth century. The acrylic cover of Rams’s iconic “Snow White’s Coffin” (the SK 4 Radio-Phonograph), a radical statement of modernity enabled by wartime science, points to the delicate postwar balance between optimism and anxiety; Vitsœ’s modular 606 Shelving System, along with its carefully considered packaging and distribution, charts the growth of a broader understanding of systems design; and a humble travel alarm clock reveals the increased sense of mobility and widening desires for travel in the late twentieth century. Principled Design offers the Museum’s visitors a glimpse of the ways in which design both reflects and transforms a wider reality.
Despite the depth to which Ramsian rhetoric has penetrated the design profession, today we face a welter of rapidly obsolescing devices, addiction-courting digital interfaces, and the ever-changing terrain of the Internet and its unpredictable effects. But perhaps this is precisely why Rams’s work remains so seductive. Self-effacing in form but confident in philosophy, the objects he designed reveal a set of strong convictions about the human-made world and our obligation to shape it for the better.
More than ever, we need to heed his message of collective responsibility, ecological awareness, and systems thinking if we hope to provide for ourselves a future as seamless, functional, and principled as a Dieter Rams design.
Ten Principles for Good Design
Good Design Is Innovative
Good Design Makes a Product Useful
Good Design Is Aesthetic
Good Design Makes a Product Understandable
Good Design Is Unobtrusive
Good Design Is Honest
Good Design Is Long-Lasting
Good Design Is Thorough Down to the Last Detail
Good Design Is Environmentally Friendly
Good Design Is as Little Design as Possible
