I first met Dieter in 1995, when he was president of the German Design Council. It was a brief encounter. I was young; he was already the great designer. We began working together about 10 years later, when I was asked to help develop an exhibition for the Suntory Museum in Osaka with its design curator, Keiko Ueki. It was intended as a small exhibition. It did not remain one. It became “Less and More,” an international tour and an 808-page catalog. When it ended in 2012, I suggested making an archive from the material. That was the beginning of the work that eventually brought me to the Dieter and Ingeborg Rams Foundation.
Dieter’s career began almost as a game. He had trained as an architect and, in 1955, was working at Otto Apel’s practice in Frankfurt when he and a colleague spotted Braun’s advertisement for an interior architect. They both applied: whoever got the job would win. Dieter did. He has said that otherwise he might have remained a normal architect.
Instead, design became his life. It still is. You can begin a conversation with him on almost any subject, but after five minutes you will be talking about design. Braun would shape his private life too: through the company he met his late wife Ingeborg, who worked there as a photographer.
The Braun language did not appear fully formed from one man’s mind. Nobody knew exactly what this new design should be. Dieter and Gerd Alfred Müller were the young in-house designers. The Ulm-trained designers brought theoretical ideas; technicians and modelmakers brought the realities of production. There was competition. Everyone wanted to be the better one.
Proximity mattered too. The external designers came every few weeks, presented their ideas and left. Dieter and the others were there every day, working door-to-door with the technicians, changing things, making mock-ups, discussing them and beginning again. There was theory, but there were also workshops and stubborn technical problems. There was also a fruitful sense of competition. The new design language came out of this atmosphere. Dieter was the right person to manage it.
“Dieter has never wanted to be a star designer. He is not a showman.”
Dieter has never wanted to be a star designer. He is not a showman. He wants to make solutions for people. He says that what matters in design is not the spectacular, but the unspectacular.
I would not call this a philosophy. Philosophy is Socrates. This is an attitude.
Before he sketches, Dieter asks: Is the object necessary? Is there already something better? How will people use it? “Less, but better” is not a look. It is a way of thinking before making.
That attitude passes through people. Dietrich Lubs called himself Dieter’s first student. Much later, Jony Ive said Apple learned from Dieter and Braun—not by copying products, but by making complicated things simple. When the iPhone appeared, Jony sent Dieter one with a letter. Dieter was very pleased.
At home, Dieter uses his own furniture and keeps some of his designs around him.
They are not relics. They are simply part of his life. That is also how I understand our work at the foundation. We preserve drawings, photographs, letters and speeches to show how the work was made and what attitude lies behind it. The objects are still useful. The archive should be useful too.
