Gerrit Terstiege

In this interview conducted by form magazine editor-in-chief, Gerrit Terstiege, the long-standing chief designer at Braun, Dieter Rams, talks about the development of the Kronberg-based company's design processes. The interview was conducted in February 2009 and included in Gerrit's recently published book "The Making of Design", illustrating the design processes of 21 products designed by renowned international designers.

Above: Dieter Rams with Peter Raacke. Photograph by Gerrit Terstiege

Terstiege Since 2006, form magazine has reported in detail on the development of the design of current products - and it is hard to conceive of such processes today without thinking of computers. Looking back, do you regret working as a designer at a time when computers did not have the possibilities they offer today?

Rams Yes and no. Of course, computers make working as a team in a network far easier these days. Yet on the other hand people often get up to a lot of mischief with computer renderings and they sugarcoat problematic areas wonderfully. I have always loathed renderings and regularly fought against them. My drawings and sketches were generally intuitively to scale and, even if they were really abstract, the team of model builders was able to make them without any problem. Although they were less set-in-stone, less precise, they showed exactly what I wanted. I worked a great deal with sketches.

Terstiege How did you actually find your own particular drawing style, characterised by a great simplicity?

Rams I had a good drawing teacher at my school, the Werkkunstschule in Wiesbaden, his name was Mr. Rotfuchs. He taught illustration, and we aspiring architects regularly had to practice figurative drawing. When I started cross-hatching, as everyone does when they try out freehand drawing for the first time, Mr. Rotfuchs said to me: "Forget that nonsense, you just need to make the line a bit thicker, you can achieve spatiality that way, too !" - Essentially my mode of representation culminates in as simple a line drawing as possible.


Above: Braun HF1 Photograph by Gerrit Terstiege

Terstiege New products are generally created in and by a team; at the end of the day design and technology must go hand in hand. How was the development process at Braun structured under your direction? How did you proceed when you had to find a new form for a particular device?

Rams When I think back to my early years at Braun, in the mid-1950s, I remember lots of problems resulting from insufficient cooperation between designers and engineers. Back then, we first had to explore and develop the types and means of cooperation.

Terstiege Can you give me an example?

Rams For example when Hans Gugelot from the Hochschule für Gestaltung Ulm was at the Braun plant in Frankfurt, he spoke to brothers Erwin and Arthur Braun, the company owners, and Dr. Eichler, who was responsible for the company's design-strategic orientation. Thus Hans Gugelot discussed issues on a level which had nothing to do with the technical side of product development. This could only work as long as all that was required was pure redesign: giving existing technology a makeover. And as we all know, that was not what Gugelot had in mind. He wanted to beat a completely new path. He was not happy that the exterior of these first devices he repackaged promised more than the interior delivered. This deficit had to be corrected. Erwin Braun quickly realised that design at Braun had to take place in house.

Terstiege That must have been a decisive point for you, 1955, since Braun originally hired you as an architect and interior designer not a product designer.

Rams That's right. It soon came about that one of my tasks in the design department was to harmonise the relationship between the designers and engineers, to build trust. To an extent, the design process still had no form then. For example, there was no briefing. Later we formed teams, consisting of designers, marketing people and engineers, who worked together on a product right from the start. Overall conditions like these have a tremendous effect on the design process. The design projects then followed the tasks set by the relevant business areas, i.e., hi-fi, body care, healthcare etc. There was a business director, who was on equal footing with the technical director and design director. I was the only one, thank God, who reported directly to the CEO. That helped a great deal. My successor's situation was different, by the way.


Above: Wall of sound. Photograph by Gerrit Terstiege

Terstiege When did these structures really establish themselves at Braun?

Rams That was in the course of the 1970s. It was necessary, owing to continually increasing sales, to design for international markets and also to always work on a number of different projects simultaneously. You could say that what we now call globalisation started very early at Braun. Also with the help of Gillette AG, which had taken over Braun in 1967.

Terstiege Is there a product that proved to be a particular headache for you in organising its development?

Rams Yes, that would have to be the Atelier system, which would become the "last edition", and which heralded the end of the hi-fi era at Braun. I visited our engineers in Japan several times, because a number of Japanese companies fitted the Atelier components with the corresponding electronic internals. The tuner came from one company, the amplifier from another, the technology for the record player from yet another. Fortunately they were all based in Tokyo, but I couldn't see everything fitting together at the end. Some of the Japanese firms, in turn, had part produced in Singapore, which didn't make things easier. But in the end it all came together.

Terstiege And in the mid-1950s, when Braun design was taking shape, were there no structures or guidelines for the design process?

Rams Back then there was quite simply no definable design process. A great deal was created based on emotion, the result of certain facts, including a consideration of what was actually possible in terms of production etc. An idea came from here, and one from there. Personally I always acknowledged the value of technical innovations suggested by my team.


Above: Braun radio. Photograph by Gerrit Terstiege

Terstiege The word emotion is surprising in this context. So how is it the decision came to be made in the early 1960s to create such a complex and costly device as the T1000 multi-band radio? I bet that wasn't based on a gut feeling?

Rams On the one hand the first small portable radios very quickly faced competition: the Japanese rapidly adapted the transistor technology and then launched similar-sized radios onto the market at half the price. We couldn't beat that. Yet on the other hand the transistor technology offer-ed possibilities we wanted to make use of. So we decided to make a multi-band radio with a build quality and features that could not be copied so easily. Considerations such as these definitely played a role, but the strategies of market-ing teams didn't. Incidentally, when marketing started to rule the roost at Olivetti in the late 1970s, Ettore Sottsass quit the company and turned his attention to creating free designs and experiments. And that then led to the foundation of Memphis. However, this step was easier for him, because he was never what one might call a permanent employee at Olivetti. My situation was quite different.

Terstiege At that time, around 1980, you had been employed at Braun for 25 years and were heading a large team as chief designer. And we can't imag-ine you suddenly leaving to paint vases and exhib-it them in galleries... But how was it that marketing at Braun was able to gain such an influence? After all, you and your design team had shown that you could create outstanding products without input from the marketing department.

Rams It had to do with the ever-larger quantities we had to produce. And following on from that, that a more complex production technique also requires big investments in tool making and production facilities. In the late 1970s, marketing had more influence because it was its respon-sibility to ensure competitiveness and a return on investment.

Terstiege Marketing people started paying more attention to what the competition was doing.

Rams Not only that. Innovations in design and technology suddenly had a more difficult time of it, because they always involve risks, including precisely economic risks. Without fully automated production there came a point when things simply couldn't go on, because without it you couldn't produce the expected quantities. Huge production facilities like these were masterpieces in themselves, but they were just so investment intensive that the question increasingly loomed: when will we get back the money we invest-ed in this or that facility? As a consequence, we were increasingly reluc-tant to give new ideas the green light.


Above: Steuereinheit studio 1. Photograph by Gerrit Terstiege

Terstiege A huge number of photos and drawings have appeared in recent years of Braun products that were never realised. This was how, decades later, we learnt of the concept of a portable television from the early 1960s which was related to the T1000. Why did it never see the light of day?

Rams Here too, the general consensus was that we would not be able to sell enough of those small televisions. Brionvega and others later showed that portable televisions can be a great success on the market. Yet perhaps this is precisely the reason for the current problems: no one wants to admit that at a certain point they have reached the end of the line. You can't always make yet another new shaver, yet another new coffee machine without there really being something new about it - except a slight change in form or a different color. And then you think you can further increase sales with it. It's an illusion! But obviously, most managers still seem to believe that it's just the sheer volume of products sold that counts. The automobile industry is currently experiencing the same problem: For years, the car manufacturers' goal has been to push ever-more cars onto the market, when it's obvious that there are too many cars, that the markets have long been saturated. Yet it is precisely objectives like these that still shape the design process in the design departments of major companies today. But I am sticking with my maxim: Less, but better - that's the way.

This article and images have been republished with permission from the author.

About the author

Gerrit Terstiege is editor in chief of the design journal form, a participant in the International Design Media Network (IDMN), and has worked on some seventy issues of the magazine since 1997. Since 1998 he has also been active as a teacher. He has taught at design schools in Karlsruhe, Zurich, and Basel, and in 2005 he served as visiting professor of design and media history at FH Mainz (the University of Applied Sciences, Mainz). He also sits on the executive committee of the DGTF and is a member of international design juries and the author of numerous essays for books on design and the culture of everyday life. He studied art history and German language and literature at the universities of Bochum and Berlin (FU) and design in Cologne (KISD).