The End
Cherry blossoms
Carrying a corpse around
It leaves no sign of its past self behind
He only who has lived with the beautiful
Litany Against Fear
Each ruler commissioned his own garden
Click
When life is over
That anything in this world should be inevitable
Has it begun to sprout?
The smallness of human life
Into the dampness of a grave
He had the sensation of stepping into the dampness of a grave, and it was not much better because he had always known that the grave was there and waiting for him.
Always allow them an escape route
When you surround the enemy
Always allow them an escape route
They must see that there is
An alternative to death.70. Grave Sites
Problem
No people who turn their backs on death can be alive. The presence of the dead among the living will be a daily fact in any society which encourages its people to live.
Solution
Never build massive cemeteries. Instead, allocate pieces of land throughout the community as grave sites—corners of parks, sections of paths, gardens, beside gateways—where memorials to people who have died can be ritually placed with inscriptions and mementos which celebrate their live. Give each grave site an edge, a path, and a quiet corner where people can sit. By custom, this is hallowed ground.
What if I say I shall not wait?
What if I say I shall not wait?
What if I burst the fleshly gate
And pass, escaped, to thee?The morning after death
The bustle in a house
The morning after death
Is solemnest of industries
Enacted upon earth,—The sweeping up the heart,
And putting love away
We shall not want to use again
Until eternity.Because I could not stop for Death
Because I could not stop for Death,
He kindly stopped for me;
The carriage held but just ourselves
And Immortality.Not as a star
But I’m warning you,
this is my last existence.
Not as a swallow, not as a maple,
not as a cat-tail and not as a star.I know all about entropy
Adell: I know as much as you do.
Lupov: Then you know everything's got to run down someday.
Pinkas Synagogue
Names of the Holocaust victims from Czech lands on the synagogue's inner wall.
During reconstruction in 1950–1954, the original floor-level as well as the appearance of the synagogue were restored. In following five years, the walls of the synagogue were covered with names of about 78,000 Bohemian and Moravian Jewish victims of Shoah. The names are arranged by communities where the victims came from and complemented with their birth and death date.
But one thought
All earth was but one thought—and that was death.
In the image of their city
They say that every time they go below they find something changed in the lower Eusapia; the dead make innovations in their city; not many, but surely the fruit of sober reflection, not passing whims. From one year to the next, they say, the Eusapia of the dead becomes unrecognizable. And the living, to keep up with them, also want to do everything that the hooded brothers tell them about the novelties of the dead. So the Eusapia of the living has taken to copying its underground copy.
They say that this has not just now begun to happen: actually it was the dead who built the upper Eusapia, in the image of their city. They say that in the twin cities there is no longer any way of knowing who is alive and who is dead.
Fear of death
He thought that fear of death was perhaps the root of all art.
The alphabet
Yet he would not die lying down; he would find some crag of rock, and there, his eyes fixed on the storm, trying to the end to pierce the darkness, he would die standing. He would never reach R.
Making Death a Victory
Like thee, Man is in part divine,
A troubled stream from a pure source;
And Man in portions can foresee
His own funereal destiny;
His wretchedness, and his resistance,
And his sad unallied existence:
To which his Spirit may oppose
Itself—and equal to all woes,
And a firm will, and a deep sense,
Which even in torture can descry
Its own concenter'd recompense,
Triumphant where it dares defy,
And making Death a Victory.It is going to pass
The character of nature can’t arise without the presence and the consciousness of death.
When we make our own attempt to create nature in the world around us, and succeed, we cannot escape the fact that we are going to die. This quality, when it is reached, in human things, is always sad; it makes us sad; and we can even say that any place where a man tries to make the quality, and be like nature, cannot be true, unless we can feel the slight presence of this haunting sadness there, because we know at the same time we enjoy it, that it is going to pass.
An entrance, an exit
Empty-handed I entered the world
Barefoot I leave it
My coming, my going
Two simple happenings
That got entangledTraces
If I leave
no trace behind
in this fleeting world
what then could you
reproach?Japanese Death Poems
A Book by Yoel HoffmanPrometheus
A Poem by Lord ByronDarkness
A Poem by Lord ByronGraceful Exits: How Great Beings Die
A Book by Sushila BlackmanI've designed it that way
A Quote by Townes Van ZandtI don't envision a very long life for myself.
Like, I think my life will run out before my work does, you know?
I've designed it that way.Phantom Regret by Jim
A Poem by Jim Carrey & The WeekndAnd if your broken heart's heavy when you step on the scale
You'll be lighter than air when they pull back the veil
Consider the flowers, they don't try to look right
They just open their petals and turn to the lightEpitaph to a Dog
A Poem by Lord ByronYe! who behold perchance this simple urn,
Pass on, it honours none you wish to mourn.
To mark a friend's remains these stones arise;
I never knew but one — and here he lies.Micromorts
A Definition by Matt WebbThere’s a standard way to understand the relative danger of any activity. A micromort is "a unit of risk defined as one-in-a-million chance of death." For example:
- skydiving is 8 micromorts per jump
- running a marathon: 26 micromorts
- 1 micromort: walking 17 miles, or driving 230 miles
Generally being alive averages out at 24 micromorts/day.
This place is a message
A FragmentThis place is a message... and part of a system of messages... pay attention to it!
Sending this message was important to us. We considered ourselves to be a powerful culture.
This place is not a place of honor... no highly esteemed deed is commemorated here... nothing valued is here.
What is here was dangerous and repulsive to us. This message is a warning about danger.
The danger is in a particular location... it increases towards a center... the center of danger is here... of a particular size and shape, and below us.
The danger is still present, in your time, as it was in ours.
The danger is to the body, and it can kill.
The form of the danger is an emanation of energy.
The danger is unleashed only if you substantially disturb this place physically. This place is best shunned and left uninhabited.
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.