kaufmann mercantile

I received my newsletter from Kaufmann Mercantile this morning. In it is always a link to their blog highlighting interesting aspects of our consumer world. Here are some of the more enjoyable postings:

Braun Electric Shaver

The company’s excellent reputation for design and quality is mainly due to Dieter Rams. He joined the company in 1956 as one of 16 designers and started overseeing product design in 1961. He kept this position for an incredible 34 years. Rams, who also began designing furniture 1957 – is still an active designer and design consultant today.

Under Rams guidance, the classic Braun shavers appeared on the market. The Sixtant was a thick and solid little piece of machinery whose operating sound would make you believe that inside, a small locomotive was powering the thing. There is an air of myth around the model, as most of them still function perfectly today. And the two parts that require repeated exchange are still widely available – the block of blades and the thin metal foil that wraps around it.

Rams’s credo is “less, but better”. In an interview with Design Boom he is asked to describe his style: “In Japanese they say ‘wabi sabi’. Together these two concepts mean ‘tranquility, simplicity, balance’, but also ‘liveliness’. This is a point of reference for me… I have always been interested in mixing materials, in my earliest furniture designs. I mixed wood with plastic or aluminum”.

About whether form follows function, Rams says “yes, form has to come after function, I can’t conceive of it in any other way. There are certainly psychological functions as well, it is a matter of balancing the aesthetic content with regard to use.” As other designers of influence, he names Jasper Morisson and George Nelson.

After Rams left Braun, the design of their products went downhill. Their current product line is a disaster in my mind. It probably didn’t help much in terms of design and quality when the company was swallowed by Procter and Gamble.

Read more here.

Cricket Trailer

The lightweight, angular trailers were designed by Garrett Finney, an architect who came to camper design by way of NASA, where he worked on the International Space Station’s “Habitation Module” (astronaut-speak for “home”).

Clearly, Space is full of space, but you’re not going all the way out there to hang out in your rec room. The Cricket Trailer is built on a similar concept. Finney believes that small spaces make “the ritual of daily life feel more connected to the outdoors.” In 1999, the sheen of outer space had worn off, and he turned to making another exploring machine, but one meant for lands already charted, that anyone could hope to get to within their lifetimes with little more than a car, a pack of hot dogs and a jar of peanut butter.

Read more here.