Braun again

I watched a group of school children swarm over the Less and More exhibition on the work of Dieter Rams, the great industrial designer who spent 40 years designing for German electronics company Braun.

Words Pamela Buxton

They are entertained by the comparative clunkiness of early radios and record players and impressed by his lighter designs. ‘That’s even better than today’s ones” says one boy of one of Rams classic 1970s models.

For them, the work of Rams is another world, and one that you’d expect to find in a museum. While Rams rejected built-in obsolescence and instead built to last, today’s teenagers expect to upgrade their phones and MP3 players regularly, not because they’re broken, but because they don’t have the latest styling or applications.

This must all be very hard for Rams, who has no time for fashion-led, superficial style As this Design Museum exhibition shows, he believed that products should be neutral and restrained to leave room for the user’s self-expression. Colour is used sparingly to highlight information. Everything is perfectly ordered and reduced to the minimum needed for perfect function.

It would have been nice to find out how and why Dieter Rams, who was initially hired by Braun as an architect, turned instead to industrial design. Did he ever miss architecture? How did his training prepare him for the very different changes of designing electronic products? Frustratingly, we don’t ever get to really know. For this is an exhibition that gives centre stage to his design principals and his work, designed from 1955-1995 and laid out neatly on long tables according to product type.

Certainly the work does tell its own story. We learn about the hugely innovative approach to household electrical products. No longer were they designed to look like pieces of furniture. His sleek radio-phonic products didn’t hide their technology but celebrated it. Rams introduced the transparent lids for record players in the late 1950s – dubbed Snow White’s Coffin - that caused a big stir at the time. His portable record players and detachable radios, designed in 1959, predated the Walkman by 20 years. He designed or oversaw the design of around 500 products for Braun, and visitors of a certain age will no doubt recognise a hairdryer, shaver, coffee maker or lighter from their past.

With rapidly evolving technology, its not surprising that hardly any of Rams designs are still in production. One exception is his Vitsoe 606 shelving system, specifically designed for longevity by being compatible with all additions to the core product. But it’s clear from interviews with leading designers of today how influential his work was and still is. Jasper Morrison calls him “the founding father of modern product design” and Sam Hecht reflects how Rams’ commitment to product longevity has been replaced by more temporal approaches to design.

Yet in this way Rams is both out of step and bang up to date. His was a truly sustainable approach to design. As he himself says: “There is no longer room for irrelevant things. We have no longer got the resources. Irrelevance is out.”

Less and More – The Design Ethos of Dieter Rams, until March 7, 2010, Design Museum, Shad Thames, London www.designmuseum.org