Each object made by people has a narrative to inform. There’s the story of the individuals who made it, of the supplies chosen, and the inventive motivation. Solely if you perceive the story do you perceive an object’s which means. Or so says Dieter Rams, who headed up product design at Braun from 1961 to 1995.
Braun: Designed to Keep is the story of Braun. It’s billed as “the most comprehensive history” of the corporate up to now. Telling it requires greater than 400 pages and 500 pictures, together with never-before-published archival supplies and brand-new full-page pictures of Braun’s most iconic merchandise, every instilled with Rams’ “less, but better” strategy that might instantly affect designers like Naoto Fukasawa and Apple’s Jony Ive.
What’s most placing as I thumbed by way of a complicated copy is how fascinating lots of these early Braun merchandise stay right this moment, a few of which had been launched nearly 70 years in the past. No shock, I suppose, given the disposable detritus you’ll discover on Amazon and AliExpress, locations the place product design prostrates itself to the gods of mass consumption and gadgets differ with prospers of ineffective ornament normally reserved for the Walmart cereal aisle.
I imply, simply take a look at the TP1 (1959) within the picture under, the moveable predecessor to the Walkman that labored as a radio and in addition performed data from the underside like a Miniot turntable, and the T3 transistor radio (1958) that actually offered Ive with some inspiration for the iPod’s click wheel interface:
Have you ever ever been stopped in your tracks by a desk fan? Simply take a look at the HL1, which first made its look in 1961:
Braun actually excelled at Hello-Fi, and this wall unit designed within the mid-Sixties was what space-age residing was all about:
Braun: Designed to Maintain is revealed by Phaidon and written by Professor Klaus Klemp, the German design historian and curator who has spent the final twenty years fastidiously documenting the work of Dieter Rams by way of main exhibitions and books like Dieter Rams: The Full Works. If a gaggle of specialists has gathered someplace on the globe to debate the legacy of Braun or Rams, you’ll be able to guess that Klemp was invited.
One other factor I actually loved whereas flipping by way of it was noting the dimensions and placement of the Braun brand — first launched with the raised “A” in 1935. In Rams, the superb 2018 documentary directed by Gary Hustwit (which additionally options Klemp), the acclaimed designer, then on the cusp of his 86th birthday (now 91), says he at all times needed the Braun brand to be small and unobtrusive — a battle he fought with at the very least 10 CEOs, by his account, all of whom needed the wordmark printed loudly on each Braun product.
“When you’re new someplace and you have to introduce yourself, or enter a room and say ‘I’m so and so,’ you don’t shout. You should do it quietly,” mentioned Rams in Rams. “If every product shouts ‘I am Braun!’ it will get irritating.” This is smart if you perceive Rams’ dedication to the creation of a standard design language throughout his 4 a long time on the firm.
Along with countless gadget porn, the guide additionally goals to right just a few issues about Braun design for the historic report — particularly, that Rams had assist. That’s not a controversial place. Though Rams’ identification is so intertwined with the corporate that he’s been mistakenly (or jokingly) known as Mr. Braun at occasions, he’s the primary particular person to remind folks that executing the corporate’s design technique was at all times a staff effort. Designed to Maintain makes an attempt to set the report straight by giving credit score the place credit score is due.
The overwhelming majority of the guide offers with the Braun we rejoice, not tolerate, with loads of historical past to reference anytime you wish to higher perceive how the corporate’s pondering developed.
Braun: Designed to Maintain begins after World Battle I, when Max Braun based the corporate in Frankfurt, Germany, in 1921, simply as Bauhaus design — and its emphasis on perform — was taking root and Braun was making radios and phonographs. Braun’s sons joined the corporate in 1945 after World Battle II. Artur Braun was a gifted engineer and offered enter on the S50 electrical dry shaver. It launched in 1950 and rapidly turned the corporate’s most worthwhile product, lifting Braun as a logo of post-war reconstruction and growth efforts.
But it surely was his brother, Erwin Braun, who, within the Nineteen Fifties, started gathering a gaggle of colleagues to provide home equipment “in the style of our times,” says Klemp. Missing the talents himself, Erwin entered into a really profitable industrial partnership with the Hochschule für Gestaltung (HfG) Ulm between 1956 and 1963. Otl Aicher, an Ulm college founder, and Hans Gugelot, who taught product design there, had been key companions who “without a doubt greatly influenced the design mindset at Braun in the mid-1950s,” says Klemp. Rams joined Braun on July fifteenth, 1955, as an inside designer, earlier than rising to steer Braun’s first inside design staff in 1961, with Reinhold Weiss as his deputy. However in keeping with Artur, his brother Erwin was “the true father of Braun Design.”
Credit score can be seen on each product {photograph}, which features a caption naming the unique designer and the date it was first produced. Spoiler: not each well-known Braun design is a Dieter Rams design. The guide ends with 60 biographies in a piece titled “Design is made by people.”
The guide is laid out chronologically, however the full-page pictures (and the writer) encourages the reader to flip round casually, bouncing between merchandise and the profiles of every designer after which their influences all through the corporate’s 102-year historical past. Navigation will get an help with a complete index that additionally identifies which pages have illustrations, alongside a glossary that helps readers make sense of Braun’s cryptic product names.
Fittingly, Rams’ “Ten Principles of Good Design” — first articulated in 1985 and steeped in Bauhaus traditions later refined by the Ulm college’s understanding of expertise and industrial manufacturing — fall nearly precisely midway into the guide. Whether or not it was the writer’s intent, it neatly divides the historical past of Braun alongside a transparent demarcation of earlier than and after Dieter Rams. Maybe his single most influential and well-known precept is quantity 10:
Good design is as little design as doable. Much less, however higher — as a result of it concentrates on the important facets, and the merchandise usually are not burdened with non-essentials. Again to purity, again to simplicity.
In 1995, Dieter Rams was pushed out of his design management function by a supervisor from Gillette — which had bought Braun in 1967 — who demanded extra “emotionalization” from the product portfolio, in keeping with Klemp. Rams was simply two years away from retirement and given an elaborate but meaningless (he had no direct reviews) new title of govt director of company identification. He left Braun in 1997, simply as Braun’s “less, but better” ethos morphed into “more, and worse.”
Whereas the home of Braun gave start to Rams’ 10 design rules, it was Apple, and extra particularly Steve Jobs and Jony Ive, who totally embraced them from the mid-Nineteen Nineties onward, beginning with the iMac (1998), iPod (2001), and sure, the iPhone (2007), which was a marvel of simplicity and value at launch. In 2009, Rams mentioned, “Today you find only a few companies that take design seriously, as I see it, and, at the moment that is an American company. It is Apple.” Notably, he didn’t say Braun.
Simply 41 pages of Braun: Designed to Maintain are, understandably, devoted to the Braun of right this moment. In spite of everything, it wasn’t till 2010 that Procter & Gamble — which bought Gillette in 2005 and had witnessed Apple’s extraordinary world success — reverted to a “Past Forward” embrace of Braun’s personal design legacy. Klemp says that 2012’s Braun Sequence 5 shavers had been one of many first merchandise to embody this reinterpretation. Which, effectively, nice.
This shaver from 2020 does appear to hew intently to early Braun designs:
Designed to Maintain makes a valiant effort to chronicle the Braun of right this moment, overlaying errors and setbacks and, extra not too long ago, reinventions, whereas suggesting it might once more affect an trade with its improvements. Perhaps, however the guide’s enchantment is certainly in wanting backward, and there are advantages in doing that for Braun and the whole shopper electronics trade.
“New design always stands on the shoulders of its predecessors and, in the best cases, learns not only from insights gleaned during the creative process but also from the wrong turns taken,” contends Klemp. “Only Gods can perform ‘creation ex nihilo,’ or produce something from nothing.”
Designed to Maintain offers which means to the story of Braun by displaying how generations of individuals drew inspiration from each previous and present occasions to create merchandise with sustained enchantment. Such longevity is unprecedented right this moment, with modern design tendencies conspiring with software program and electronics on a quick observe to product obsolescence, deliberate or not.
The title — Designed to Maintain — can be learn as an instruction. It’s a guide you’ll wish to preserve round as a reference for the following time a brand new product launches and also you assume, “Now where have I seen that before?”
Braun: Designed to Maintain is on the market to buy now for $79.95 /€69.95.
