Dieter Rams: The apostle of Cool

Interview with Dieter Rams, the crusading German designer of Braun products and much besides

Introduction

Dieter Rams is restless. He gesticulates, interrupts, digresses, is emphatic. For a quarter of a century, he has been head of the product design department of Braun, Frankfurt. Rams says that the small, square black alarm clocks designed by his 16 strong team are now the market leaders in Japan. ‘Through design, not technology’, he waves. ‘I think our critics are wrong maybe they are all a little bit ill’.

Dieter Rams is on a crusade. In a world of affected flamboyance, he is an old fashioned fanatic. When Rams goes for walks, they say, he picks up and later disposes of every single piece of litter he encounters. In products, he wants harmony, sparseness, lightness, compactness. He demands honesty, utilitarianism, simplicity. He insists on the democratic values of the Shakers, the purism of Japanese food arrangements and the longevity that only comes with formal aesthetic restraint. Yes, he is keen on environmental protection too. He is moral; he is rational. ‘The Second World War was short – but look how much bad was done! We don’t realise the chaos. Men were rats, they were underground… Us designers, and the magazines, and the handful of design orientated companies like Erco, Olivetti and Herman Miller – we’ve done a lot to get people out of that rat like existence’.

Rams reports directly to the chairman at Braun. The company, which is now a subsidiary of America’s Gillette, has sales of about £300m, with 75 per cent of revenues coming from abroad. Rams ensures that, though there are two layers of management between him and the top brass at Boston, the Braun look always stays modern yet, across 300 lines, retains an unwavering continuity with past tradition. His pocket calculator, with the coloured, circular, convex buttons, still seems fresh after a decade in production. It is trendy, but the link back to the classic years of the late 1950s and early 1960s is clear enough.

---

To open and download the FULL article, click on this Dieter Rams: The apostle of Cool link.