dieter rams: as little design as possible

A few weeks ago I blogged about Dieter Rams, the head designer at the German company Braun from 1955 to 1995. Recently Design Addict blogged about a new book that profiles the products he designed and the philosophy he used to create them.

Dieter Rams is one of the most influential product designers of the twentieth century. Even if you don’t immediately recognize his name, you have almost certainly used one of the radios, clocks, lighters, juicers, shelves or hundreds of other products he designed.

He is famous not only for this vast array of well-formed products, but for his remarkably prescient ideas about the correct function of design in the messy, out-of-control world we inhabit today.

These ideas are summed up in his ‘ten principles’ of good design: Good design is innovative, useful, and aesthetic. Good design should make a product easily understood. Good design is unobtrusive, honest, durable, thorough, and concerned with the environment. Most of all, good design is as little design as possible.

Photographer Florian Böhm was invited to document the archive and Rams' house, providing a previously unseen look at the world of Dieter Rams.

Read more and see more photos at Design Addict.

Read a delightful review of the book in the NY Times here.

Book for sale on Amazon: Dieter Rams: As Little Design as Possible
By Sophie Lovell and Klaus Kemp - Foreword by Jonathan Ive
Edited by Phaidon Press