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I have always loathed renderings and fought against them
By Gerrit Terstiege, photos by Dieter Schwer
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The long-standing chief designer at Braun, Dieter Rams, talks about the development of the Kronberg-based company’s design processes. The interview was conducted by Gerrit Terstiege in February 2009.
Since 2006, form magazine has reported in detail on the development of the design of current products – and it is hard to conceive of such processes today without thinking of computers. Looking back, do you regret working as a designer at a time when computers did not have the possibilities they offer today?
Yes and no. Of course, computers make working as a team in a network far easier these days.
| Yet on the other hand people often get up to a lot of mischief with computer renderings and they sugarcoat problematic areas wonderfully. I have always loathed renderings and regularly fought against them. My drawings and sketches were generally intuitively to scale and, even if they were really abstract, the team of model builders was able to make them without any problem. Although they were less set-in-stone, less precise, they showed exactly what I wanted. I worked a great deal with sketches. |  Gerrit Terstiege interviewing Rams at his home in Kronberg. |
How did you actually find your own particular drawing style, characterized by a great simplicity?
I had a good drawing teacher at my school, the Werkkunstschule in Wiesbaden, his name was Mr. Rotfuchs. He taught illustration, and we aspiring architects regularly had to practice figurative drawing. When I started cross-hatching, as everyone does when they try out freehand drawing for the first time, Mr. Rotfuchs said to me: “Forget that nonsense, you just need to make the line a bit thicker, you can achieve spatiality that way, too!” Essentially my mode of representation culminates in as simple a line drawing as possible.
New products are generally created in and by a team; at the end of the day, design and technology must go hand in hand. How was the development process at Braun structured under your direction? How did you proceed when you had to find a new form for a particular device?
When I think back to my early years at Braun, in the mid-1950s, I remember lots of problems resulting from insufficient cooperation between designers and engineers. Back then, we first had to explore and develop the types and means of cooperation.
The Beatles’ “Abbey Road” is revolving on the 1962 PCS5 record player in Dieter Rams’ study
Can you give me an example?
For example when Hans Gugelot from the Hochschule für Gestaltung Ulm was at the Braun plant in Frankfurt, he spoke to brothers Erwin and Arthur Braun, the company owners, and Dr. Eichler, who was responsible for the company’s design-strategic orientation. Thus Hans Gugelot discussed issues on a level which had nothing to do with the technical side of product development. This could only work as long as all that was required was pure redesign: giving existing technology a makeover. And as we all know, that was not what Gugelot had in mind. He wanted to beat a completely new path. He was not happy that the exterior of these first devices he repackaged promised more than the interior delivered. This deficit had to be corrected. Erwin Braun quickly realized that design at Braun had to take place in house.
That must have been a decisive point for you, 1955, since Braun originally hired you as an architect and interior designer not a product designer.
That’s right. It soon came about that one of my tasks in the design department was to harmonize the relationship between the designers and engineers, to build trust. To an extent, the design process still had no form then. For example, there was no briefing. Later we formed teams, consisting of designers, marketing people and engineers, who worked together on a product right from the start. Overall conditions like these have a tremendous effect on the design process. The design projects then followed the tasks set by the relevant business areas, i.e., hi-fi, body care, healthcare etc. There was a business director, who was on equal footing with the technical director and design director. I was the only one, thank God, who reported directly to the CEO. That helped a great deal. My successor’s situation was different, by the way.
Gerrit Terstiege interviewing Rams at his home in Kronberg.
When did these structures really establish themselves at Braun?
That was in the course of the 1970s. It was necessary, owing to continually increasing sales, to design for international markets and also to always work on a number of different projects simultaneously. You could say that what we now call globalization started very early at Braun. Also with the help of Gillette AG, which had taken over Braun in 1967.
Is there a product that proved to be a particular headache for you in organizing its development?
Yes, that would have to be the Atelier system, which would become the “last edition”, and which heralded the end of the hi-fi era at Braun. I visited our engineers in Japan several times, because a number of Japanese companies fitted the Atelier components with the corresponding electronic internals. The tuner came from one company, the amplifier from another, the technology for the record player from yet another. Fortunately they were all based in Tokyo, but I couldn’t see everything fitting together at the end. Some of the Japanese firms, in turn, had parts produced in Singapore, which didn’t make things easier. But in the end it all came together.
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