Dieter Rams, the man who shaped our world

For Rams is revered, as his retrospective opening at the Design Museum next week makes plain. Jonathan Ive, of Apple, Jasper Morrison, Philippe Starck, all bow down before him. This is the man who did the Apple thing four decades before Apple. Ive — the creator of the iPhone and the iMac — wasn’t even born when Rams invented the consumer electronic device we all lust after. His Braun SK4 was the world’s first proper hi-fi, a cool, pale, eerily minimalist box, nicknamed “Snow White’s Coffin”. Rams designed it in 1956. That’s half a decade before the Beatles. Put it beside your average consumer product from 1956 and the SK4 looks as if it has beamed down from Planet Zog.

Before Rams, electical goods — hair dryers, toasters, kettles, radios, phones, record players, etc — were chunky, fruity things. Such mass-market goods were barely two decades old. “They didn’t yet have a language of their own,” he says. Instead they borrowed it from other objects. “Radios, they looked like . . .” he searches, in his thick German accent, for the right word. “Like shiny wooden houses.”

Rams invented that language. He made modern electronic goods look as if they were designed for the electronic age, not the age of steam.

Rams was born in 1932 in Wiesbaden, a prosperous spa city in southwest Germany, into a family of carpenters. As a child, he recalls intently watching his grandfather making cabinets, transfixed by the intricacy, the simplicity. After the war, in the self-improving spirit of the new Germany, he went to art school to study architecture, but couldn’t resist a year’s apprenticeship in the family trade.

When, in 1955, the young graduate arrived at Braun’s HQ in Kronberg, the company was just another local firm. Rams, though, was fired up with the prewar Bauhaus dream of functional, beautiful objects, and the young Braun brothers were ready for a revolution. The great Modernist designer Hans Gugelot was already there. But what Rams brought with him was the foresight of youth. Hepcats such as him were mad for modern jazz, and “this music,” he splutters, “came out of these radios that look like a piece of baroque furniture!”

Already, rejuvenated by the Marshall Plan, Germany’s electronics industry was locked in competition with Japan, which was flooding the market with small radios thanks to the new invention, the transistor. “Braun couldn’t produce cheaper, that was the problem,” Rams recalls. “It had to think in another dimension.” Design. What Apple is to the digital age, Braun was to the age of the transistor. It made electronics approachable.

Some of Rams’s design decisions were based on science — such as detaching the loudspeakers from the body of record players to stop noise interference. Most, though, were as much form as function. Rams had the novel idea of making the consumer goods that Braun produced beautiful and desirable to the new generation of baby boomers. The technicians in the workshops thought he was crazy. “They still didn’t believe people should buy these kinds of things, but we believed that it was a way to the future. A lot of things had to be changed after the war. The feeling was that we had to change everything. That was the principle.” The American postwar consumer boom was just reaching Europe. People were beginning to have a little more money. They were ready to spend. Braun products were rarely cheap, but that didn’t stop people lusting after them.

What followed was a decade of astonishing productivity. In the 1960s no middle-class home was complete without a Braun hi-fi. Even today they are achingly beautiful objects, works of art. I adore how their buttons and dials line up, and the cool palette of colours, dotted with the odd primary. Rams made Braun’s consumer goods things to display beside your Habitat sofa. Televisions no longer had to be hidden in cabinets. He invented the hi-fi separate — tape player, turntable and speakers that you could put on a desk or a shelf or hang on the wall. Most importantly, he made whatever he designed compact — so he could take them when he went sailing. Rams’s portable radios, the T3 (1958) and the T4 (1969), with their circular speaker and transparent dial, are the grandfather of the iPod. Rams even designed the first portable stereo (albeit before “stereo” sound itself), the TP1, a radio and record player combo as big as a laptop today.

For the first time in electronics a company became known for its design as much as its technical performance. The design became the brand. Its only rival was the Italian Olivetti, where Ettore Sottsass was turning out luscious Latin goods in marked contrast to Rams’s thoroughly Teutonic output. (One of the few items in his home not designed by himself is an Olivetti Valentine typewriter in glossy red.) Uniting all was one design principle. Make it simple. The old Bauhaus form and function. “Good design has to be honest. Maybe it comes from my grandfather, who was a carpenter and worked alone,” Rams says. “He hated machines, just as I hate computers to this day. When he made furniture, he made it simple. I was fascinated with Japanese tradition about eliminating unnecessary things,” he stabs the air, “but without losing the fascination. More necessary things come to the foreground. In an empty room you can think better than in a room that is full up with all kinds of things.”

Not everything he designed ended up in the shops. In the 1960s he invented a portable TV, but the marketing men said the time wasn’t right. “OK, I thought,” he says, “as a designer sometimes you have to just lose the game.” That was the thing about Braun in the 1960s: everything was aligned right. There was communication. There’s no point in designing something if the market isn’t right. Likewise, you need a dynamic designer, technical staff and leadership to push the boundaries — “I think it’s a similar connection between Jonathan Ive and Steve Jobs as it was between myself and the brothers Braun.” Rams was the ultimate company man. His whole life seems to have revolved around Braun, personally, socially. He worked intensely for 40 years. He met his wife there and his closest friends. The pair never had children. He still lives in the neighbourhood.

Things were never quite the same when the American company Gillette bought Braun in 1967, hoping to spread Rams’s magic dust on everything from Oral B toothbrushes and Gillette razors to lighters, alarm clocks and calculators. The close connection between designer and chairmen was lost. “There were all these middle managers,” he remembers. But he stayed on for another 30 years, finding that close working relationship by collaborating with other companies on the side, such as the Danish company Vits?e, with whom he started working in the late 1950s and whose Universal Shelving System (1960) is still in production — another design classic. I bought one: it nearly bankrupted me, but every day that I use it I marvel at its crispness. I’ll keep it for life.

But Rams’s electronic goods are in museums these days, long since superseded technologically. Today’s throwaway consumer excess, which, I suppose, he inadvertedly helped to create, pains him. He hates how “design” has come to mean exclusive, just about the look. “It’s a terrible movement. Design has nothing to do with fashion. Philippe Starck is an artist not a designer. He has made some interesting products, OK, but maybe he should think a little bit more!” he laughs. “There’s such a lot of things. Such a lot of unusable things. Most things are unnecessary and overdone. Look around. We cannot send to the Third World all the garbage we don’t need any more. We have to go back to more simplicity, longevity.” A prophet all over again.

Dieter Rams is at the Design Museum, London SE1 (020-7403 6933), from Nov 21. Tom Dyckhoff’s interview with Rams is on The Culture Show, BBC Two, 7pm, Nov 19