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.
These ten principles is the manifesto that has produced many of the household appliances you and I have used, abused and generally taken for granted.
And we do so not because we don’t like our kettles, toasters, stereos, electric shavers or hairdryers, but because they are so wonderfully unobtrusive that we really don’t appreciate their value to us until, exhausted from overuse, we realise they’re no longer working. Then we panic.
These ten principles are what Dieter Rams, design director at Braun for 33 years, lived and worked by; a lexicon via which he would attain what he simply termed “good design”.
And ‘simply’ was very much his style. By rigorously applying his principles to his work, Rams’ products are always simple to operate and possess a beautiful simplicity of elegance –one that belies the meticulousness and attention to detail behind them. For him, it was not just a case of less is more, rather, “less and more”.
This beautiful simplicity is something we here at Albam also strive for. Rams’ approach has inspired numerous other designers and we too consider ourselves students of his visual language, something that we think helps our designs to be just as cogently crafted.
But Rams’ work is not just about clinical methodology and exquisite execution but about heart and soul too.
Indeed, while taken on by Braun as an architect and interior designer of some brilliance, Rams actually broke-off his architecture and interior design course (temporarily) to become an apprentice carpenter, a wholly romantic decision borne from the happy hours he’d spent as a child simply watching his beloved grandfather at work.
By 1965, Rams’ designs were considered the last word in cool, near perfection.
But, like all the people featured in our Legends section, near was not close enough and Rams decided to take his signature glacial style (all whites and greys) and smash it. White became black, grey became anthracite. The End Time had come and the design world had its Rapture.
Never, though, did style supersede substance – nor vice versa. Beauty and technology were his twin pillars and in his capable hands, the two enjoyed a long and glorious unison.
“I think”, said Rams in a speech to the Braun supervisory board in 1980, “that good designers must always be avant-gardists, always one step ahead of the times,” he said. “They should – and must – question everything generally thought to be obvious. They must have an intuition for people’s changing attitudes. For the reality in which they live, for their dreams, their desires, their worries, their needs, their living habits. They must also be able to assess realistically the opportunities and bounds of technology.