bureaucracy
A segment of the enormous file
As office buildings grew taller, and flammability became a problem, steel file cabinets replaced wooden ones – the tall cabinets mimicking the shape of the skyscraper, such that the “file” seemed to be a metaphorical stand-in for the office itself. “Each office within the skyscraper,” C. Wright Mills would argue some years later, “is a segment of the enormous file, a part of the symbolic factory that produces the billion slips of paper that gear modern society into its daily shape.” Aldous Huxley, in his dystopian novel Brave New World, could imagine no more powerful symbol of a totally bureaucratized world than the idea of each person having his or her name on a file.
Each fascinating crisis
The problems themselves, though they once obsessed you, and kept you working late night after night, and made you talk in your sleep, turn out to have been hollow: two weeks after your last day they already have contracted into inert pellets one-fiftieth of their former size; you find yourself unable to recreate the sense of what was really at stake, for it seems to have been the Hungarian 5/2 rhythm of the lived workweek alone that kept each fascinating crisis inflated to its full interdepartmental complexity.
An enormous machine
The couple of years in question here saw one of the largest bureaucracies anywhere undergo a convulsion in which it tried to reconceive itself as a non- or even anti-bureaucracy, which at first might sound like nothing more than an amusing bit of bureaucratic folly. In fact, it was frightening; it was a little like watching an enormous machine come to consciousness and start trying to think and feel like a real human.
Unborable
The underlying bureaucratic key is the ability to deal with boredom. To function effectively in an environment that precludes everything vital and human. To breathe, so to speak, without air.
The key is the ability, whether innate or conditioned, to find the other side of the rote, the picayune, the meaningless, the repetitive, the pointlessly complex. To be, in a word, unborable. I met, in the years 1984 and '85, two such men.
It is the key to modern life. If you are immune to boredom, there is literally nothing you cannot accomplish.
Institutional structure
'That was all he said it seemed like I needed, just to talk to somebody with no bullshit, which was what the Zeller Center doctors didn't realize, or like they couldn't realize it because then the whole structure would come down, that here the doctors had spent four million years in medical school and residency and the insurance companies were paying all this money for diagnosis and OT and therapy protocols, it was all an institutional structure, and once things became institutionalized then it all became this artificial, like, organism and started trying to survive and serve its own needs just like a person, only it wasn't a person, it was the opposite of a person, because there was nothing inside it except the will to survive and grow as an institution.'
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Dolor
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Dieter Rams: As Little Design as Possible
Beyond improvement
In so many ways Dieter Rams’s work is beyond improvement. Although new technologies have since offered new opportunities, his designs are not undermined by the limits of the technologies of their time. The concave button top, designed to stop your finger from slipping as it made the long travel necessary for earlier mechanical switches, does not point to obsolete mechanisms. Instead, it reminds us how immediately and intuitively form alone can describe what an object does and suggest how we should use it.
Cardinal sin
Indifference towards people and the reality in which they live is actually the one and only cardinal sin in design.
The duty of industrial design is first and foremost to users and the users are, generally, human beings, with all their complexities, habits, ideas and idiosyncrasies.
On display
The SK4 record player, aka 'Snow White's Coffin'.
Instead of being hidden away in a piece of furniture, the controls and the functional aspects of the device were not only on display, but they were the predominant feature of the design.
Rams suggested making a transparent lid from a new plastic that had just come on the market and was being used for advertising displays. It was an inspired thought and lent the phonograph just the lightness needed to balance the metal and wood of the base, as well as helping to define the acoustics. It also set the standard for all record players that followed - a turntable without a Perspex dust cover is now almost unthinkable.
Long-term
"Apart from his own design work, this is the second greatest achievement of Dieter Rams: establishing a design department within a company, which succeeded for decades in preserving its own individual approach and rigorously advancing it, without really being influenced by changing market interests." — Klaus Kemp
He is right; it was a remarkable feat. It takes a considerable degree of doggedness and conviction to follow the ungratifying and difficult path of insisting on a consistently long-term view in a corporate world that is constantly shifting and full of short-term decisions.
Humble servants
Our electrical appliances should be humble servants, to be seen and heard as little as possible. They should ideally stay in the background, like a valet in the old days, that one hardly noticed. — Erwin Braun
They should accompany an individual over a long period of time without hindering or disturbing through ‘extravagant forms, loud colors or flashy proportions’.
Restrained beauty
Braun design had a beauty that was more than skin deep. It would be wrong to say that because the Braun approach spurned fashion in an ongoing quest for functional and useable perfection, it ended up with this beauty by accident. There is a very strong aesthetic sense in both the proportion and materials of nearly all the products of the Rams era. They have a ‘restrained beauty’, he admits.
Braun products designed by Rams and his team have a haptic aesthetic as well: when you pick them up, handle them, and use them as the tools they are supposed to be, you become aware of the effort that has gone into making them sit comfortably in the hand, of the texture, weight and balance they possess, and of the satisfying click of the control buttons.
Camels
When you look at the consumer products generated by many other manufacturers, and even by Braun today, there seem to be an awful lot of camels around. Maybe these companies are too diffuse, have the decision-makers in the wrong places or are continually making the wrong decisions and have no one to stop them. They make products with short-term goals in mind, seducing the eye of the buyer with fashionable colors, sensational curves or exotic surfaces. They may have external designers and, perhaps most significantly, the brand identity is defined by external marketing concerns, rather than design or user-related issues.
The lesson to learn from Braun is that allowing a consistent philanthropic design approach to define a company can be extremely successful if it is executed with discipline, flexibility and good timing combined with hard work and, not least, great talent.
A timeless quality
Of all Rams’s products, the 606 Universal Shelving System is perhaps his most successful in fulfilling his own principles of good design. It is still in production today, some fifty years after its conception. The system is distinctive yet unobtrusive, and when the shelves and cabinets are filled, its slim profile allows it to fade quietly into the background.
Its ‘plainness’ lends it a timeless quality that has transcended the vagaries of fashion like no other of Rams’s designs. It was conceived in such a way as to optimize its function as simply and in as many different situations as possible, while still permitting upgrades and alterations without falling into obsolescence: all later adaptations and additions could still be integrated into the original structure and sizes.
"Fashion objects are not capable of being long-lived," said Rams in 2007. "We simply cannot afford this throw-away mentality anymore. Good design has to have built-in longevity. I believe that the secret of the longevity of my furniture lies in its simplicity and restraint. Furniture should not dominate, it should be quiet, pleasant, understandable and durable."
A certain kind of world
Perhaps more directly than with the Braun products, my furniture arose from a belief in how the world should be ‘furnished’ and how man should live in this artificial environment. In this respect, each piece of furniture is also a design for a certain kind of world and way of living, they reflect a specific vision of mankind.
Designing detail
My heart belongs to the details.
I actually always found them to be more important than the big picture.
Nothing works without details.
They are everything, the baseline of quality.Truly functional design only comes from the most careful and intense attention to detail.
Although he did not directly design all products and even had very little to do with some of them, he constantly encouraged tiny improvements that could make a good design better. This attention to detail ranged from the acuteness of angles in forms; the size, feels and distances between switches; the integration of handle fixings; the placement and nature of graphic elements on the products themselves and extended to product photography and packaging.
Designing detail is about achieving a fine balance in all aspects and areas of the product, including those external to the object.
Controlled!
Braun design is greatly reduced - stripped of all that is unnecessary. Nevertheless, there is a strong aesthetic characterized by balance, order and harmony.
Self-control is very important. Although my own taste is involved it always has to be under control. Not suppressed though! Controlled!
Chromatic mutiny
Nevertheless there were a number of colorful appliances produced by Braun, particularly from the late 1960s onwards, when plastics in bright primary colors became fashionable and available.
T3 domino lighter
KMM 2 coffee grinder
HLD 4 hairdryer
KF 145 coffee maker
HT 95 pop-up toasterWhen Rams’s team used color in such a way, it was uncompromising in its intensity: loud and demanding. The highly reduced forms of the products that it clothed, which had gently rounded edges, smooth opaque surfaces and discreet (usually black) detailing only served to increase this intensity.
"The intention was to create product alternatives for people who wished for strong color highlights in their living environments. This impulse came from marketing - not from design,” says Rams, dissociating himself from this approach. This was one instance where marketing got the upper hand in the decision-making process and the design team had to bow to contemporary fashion.
Indeed, there is a defiant aspect to these chromatic exceptions; they are not so much compromises as mutinous responses. Nevertheless, the resulting products are beautiful objects in their stand-alone way.
Color codes
When not compelled to do otherwise, the Braun design team’s use of color in products was reduced to highly specific areas such as control switches. Restricting the use of color to small points on an otherwise neutral object concentrates its effect, which is shifted away from decoration and towards function, especially when each color is assigned a signal role such as green for ‘on / off' switches, red for ‘fm’ and yellow for ‘phono’ on hi-fis or yellow for the second hand on clocks and watches.
This color coding of operating details is a primary example of the self-explanatory nature of Braun products.
Shorten the wings
The labile tastes of certain decision-makers in a company are often a great burden for designers. Too many feel themselves qualified to pass judgment. And how insensitive, how superficial these judgments often are.
Taste, believes Rams, is something that needs to be trained, since the aesthetic decisions at this level in product design are intrinsically bound to the entire form and function of the object. It would be unimaginable, for example, that the management of an aerospace company would ask the designers of a new plane to shorten the wings because they think it would make it look prettier.
The evolution of Braun design principles
1975
Three general rules govern every Braun design - a rule of order, a rule of harmony and a rule of economy.1976
The function for us is the starting point and the target of every design.
Experience with design is experience with people.
Only orderliness makes design useful to us.
Our design attempts to bring all individual elements into their proper proportions.
Good design means to us: as little design as possible.
Our design is innovative because the behavior patterns of people change.1983
Good design is innovative.
Good design renders utility to a product.
Good design is aesthetic design.
Good design makes a product easy to understand.
Good design is unobtrusive.
Good design is honest.1985
Good design is innovative.
Good design makes a product useful.
Good design is aesthetic.
Good design makes a product understandable.
Good design is honest.
Good design is unobtrusive.
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.Less, but better
There must be millions less of things, less words, less gestures, less of everything. But every word and every gesture will become more valuable. If we can put it all into perspective we will need less things as a result.