'Less but better' with Dieter Rams

MANILA, Philippines - Household appliances are the domain of newlyweds. If you are browsing through a bridal registry, you may select for the happy couple some lifetime tools for the kitchen or sala. Industrial designer Dieter Rams’ sublime “quality of life” may make the shelf life of his domestic designs seem onerous, but later on we see how they are not just collectibles from a bygone era. A new book, As Little Design As Possible by Sophie Lovell, is a 40-year documentary of Rams’ obsessive and arduous, albeit slow, path to the “good” way of life.

An apple a day

Cassette player: Dieter Ram fiddles with an elaborate tape recoder control unit to archive sound.

Some of Rams’ contributions have become dated, for sure. Certainly not by design, or visual language, but by the creation of new technologies. Even Jonathan Ives of Apple has reproduced Ram’s first-ever Braun pocket calculator, once a face as familiar as the first-generation iPhone; Ives recreates it as a mobile device tap-screen app with every millimeter perfectly radiused. As homage, Ram’s ethos of “less is more’’ can be seen in every Apple iPod design. (The foreword in Lovell’s book, we find, was written by Ives).

Kindle spirits

In Rams’ time, it was reassuring to pin down how everyday rituals from shaving to smoking were already seen as art directed with quiet slickness. Fascination with the puritanical becomes a quest for the most authentic; for the record, there is calming reassurance in buying the most plate-like plate or the simplest glass. The compulsion for the puritannical is perhaps a result of our 21st-century visual pollution and the high-speed manufacture of very cheap and disposable goods. But in the book, we find Rams was also part of the industry himself, creating inexpensive “domestic butlers.’’

Working independently, he has created the “end game” among bookshelves. His 606 Shelving for Vitsoe is a complex and precise system of shelving that has no front, no back, and is very mobile — so is its upwardly mobile price tag. (Although, Amazon’s Kindle may have made this all obsolete.) Rams has created everyday objects that are inexpensive, but, as revealed in the book, he also created lemons that retailed for as much as a luxury car.

Cuisinart: Rams design is not equal to Braun design — well, not always. Collaborator Gerd Muller’s works, also for Braun

Master and commandments

Rams’ simplicity is in thoughtful reduction: of extracting the very essence of why we do things into a physical object that is experientially gratifying. Trained as an interior architect working for Otto Van Apel — a renowned designer of his time in the dogma of Internationilism — he was hand-picked to become an accidental product designer.

Designer Konstantin Grcic (one of Germany’s self-confessed followers of Italian maestro Ettore Sottsass, who is the opposite of Rams) has only begun to understand the too by-the-book reservations of the “old guard.” Rams’ “rigidness’’ is articulated in his 10 tenets of good design (which can be deceptively simple but resonate more than ever):

1. Good design is innovative.

2. Good design makes a product useful.

3. Good design is aesthetic.

4. Good design makes a product understandable.

5. Good design is unobtrusive.

6. Good design is honest.

Minimal knowledge: Writer Sophie Lovell follows designer Dieter Rams’ path to slow “good” design in Dieter Rams: As Little Design As Possible published by Phaidon.

7. Good design is long-lasting.

8. Good design is thorough down to the last detail.

9. Good design is environmentally friendly.

10. Good design is as little design as possible.

As Little Design As Possible isn’t a monograph for iconic hero worship, which renders the book a bit sober (or unobstrusive, in the 10 tenets’ articulation) like the citrus juicers and mixers we find inside the book. The very minimal book jacket’s dotted texture and mild sheen, like powder coating, later on reveals itself as an exact scale of an electronic shaver’s grip he had previously designed (some of us may be too young to come across the original one).

Manual team labor

None of Rams’ biographical achievements could have been possible without the collaboration of a producer like Braun, who understood the value of design to differentiate itself in the long-term. For Braun’s ethos, design is not the purposeless, unimagined storytelling that could be complacent in today’s racks competing only in price wars. So the issue of authorship will not be misconstrued, proper credits have been laid out: Braun design = Rams’ design.

“The engineers did not how to do it, the industrial designer did not want to do the graphic design, so I formed a separate department,” says Rams on creating a unique language for Braun. “Nobody reads manuals,” Rams adds, so he made it a point that the products be self-explanatory through details like “demanding” red-colored switches.

High-end, high fidelity: Some flights of fancy for audio buffs

In conversation with the late Erwin Braun (founder and owner of Braun) we learn: “The reasoning behind the muted palette is not to have inconspicuous coloration through loud colors which could have been designed to attract a young, trendy crowd.” But later on we find in Braun history that impulses toward the colorful and loud (and no in-between or timid-loud) were a signal that the contemporary fashion had won over. Because you need not be a Forex trader to understand the relationship of skirt length to financial states, these moments of brief ephemera with color were in fact necessary and symbolic.

Home and beyond

His only one-off designed house sits on a rather modest lot with large panoramic windows opening to a modest pool and garden with small bonsai trees. Rams likes the calm compose of these miniature trees, bearing life on its own with grace. We also catch a glimpse how all his designs fit in one home, meant to be lived in.

Shakedown 1979: A “Sixtant” shaver authored by Rams, and two more collaborators, Robert Oberheim and Rolland Ullman, in 1979

While at work, we also learn of Rams’ fondness for jazz music. A sax is a solitary instrument on which one can play music so elegant and calming; with a band, it’s all the more alluring. Perhaps the same music churns out quietly with every daily object he has created. But perhaps the design principle best exemplified by Rams is his own lifestyle choice, which he has practically applied to any and every scale.