IN GERMAN:
Dieter started designing in the early '50s.
It was after the war, after enormous upheaval.
It was also a time of great precariousness,
in a way, and a great change and people wanting change,
and change happening, technologically.
I'm trying to think, why is he so interesting
for people now? And I think,
maybe, maybe there is also a kind of precarious phase that we're going
through, also great technological change,
also great social change.
Dieter met Ingeborg when he was at Braun.
She was a photographer working in the photography department.
They're a very private couple.
They're not out in the limelight, they're not out together
at the big red-carpet dos.
They've been together for over 50 years,
the two of them.
It's quite lovely, actually.
He keeps himself in a very tranquil bubble.
I mean, he's lived in the same house for almost 50 years.
You know, he hasn't moved.
You know, he goes, he gives talks, he gives lectures,
he travels, there are shows about his work,
he talks to people, he's very generous with his time.
But he doesn't have hobbies.
His work is his life, his life's his work,
and he's not really interested in anything else.
There was huge change going on.
It was about rebuilding Germany, it was about rethinking who people
were, what they were, how they were living.
And a lot of that thinking came from Ulm.
Ulm School was set up after the war in the '50s,
the follower from Bauhaus, even more kind of restrained
and puritan, in a way.
Dieter picked it up very quickly and then made it his own
very quickly as well.
The SK4 was a turning point in design, and it was especially
a turning point for Braun.
Radio was a kind of a furniture in this time,
and Braun designers wanted to go away from the furniture.
The first SK4 sketches were made by Dieter,
with a wooden case with a record player on the top and with a radio
on the top, but this really didn't work.
So they asked Gugelot if he can find a solution.
He was one of the very important designers in the mid-century,
and Gugelot very quickly found the solution to make it with metal,
fully in metal, with these wooden parts on the left and right side.
And the last problem was how to cover it on the top,
so first they make a metal one, but this didn't work.
OPERATIC MUSIC PLAYS
Because it was a clear lid,
that allowed them to put all of the controls on top.
Whereas previously they had been on the front,
now they could be on top and seen through the lid for the first time.
INTERVIEWER: Were there any women in the design department?
IN JAPANESE:
Actually, I...
..I have seen this product photo,
but I have never touched.
So, very good.
There's a reason that Erwin Braun pushed Rams forward and put him
in the limelight for his designs.
He looks the part, he's super-photogenic.
But there's this fixation that the press tends to do of saying
that all responsible, utilitarian, reduced design is Dieter Rams.
And it's not, and he keeps saying it.
A lot of his designs are co-designs, a lot of stuff that's attributed
to him was actually done by other members of his team,
but people just want to put one face, one name to this whole
aesthetic and this whole design position.
When you talk to anybody who grew up between the '50s and,
say, the '90s, just about anyone will remember having a Braun product
of some kind.
You know, when I first encountered Rams's work,
I found it very difficult, very masculine.
It was quite clinical, in a way.
It was not until I went to visit him at his house,
and there I saw him living with all his products,
I began to really appreciate and really understand the skill
involved with them, and the quality.
There was this idea that domestic appliances are there to serve
the user, therefore it has to stay in the background, it mustn't...
..it mustn't push to the front, it mustn't insist on its own
presence, it just had to do its job and be out of the way.
And that was absolutely fundamental to the ten principles.
In the 1950s, Rams was at a trade exhibition and is introduced
by Otto Zapf, a furniture maker,
to this Danish guy called Niels Vitsoe.
Over the next couple of years, they developed the ideas so that,
in 1959, Vitsoe was formed.
As they're developing these ideas, Rams realises that he's moonlighting
on the side from his full-time employment at Braun,
that he has to go to Irwin and say, "Well, can I continue doing
"this work in any formal way?"
But I like this!
And children like it too!
Yes!
And I like the feeling, it's really good.
It's very compliment of all of you.
APPLAUSE
We probably have one or two of the original Rams back catalogue
that we would like to put back into production.
The one that, personally, I have always felt we should bring
back from the early '60s was this chair called 601.
A very simple outline profile with a T-shape aluminium leg.
I've observed the way in which its form and profile and method of
upholstery have found their way into some other products on the market.
But I think it was probably 40 or 50 years ahead of its time.
This is the one where... OK.
..we've looked at increasing the height slightly.
I don't like increasing the height.
I would prefer the arm length.
If you get some...
..steel part, screwed together with the leg... Yeah?
Dieter, should we offer this chair in fabric or...
No! Only in leather? No! In leather.
Only in leather. Same procedure as with 620.
Same procedure as every year.
The things should speak the same language.
That makes sense.
It was always what I'm trying with the...
..with the Braun products.
Even a kitchen machine is different from a radio or from a hi-fi,
but altogether it makes one family.
And same should happen to... It's people...
"Oh, that comes from Vitsoe, no question."
Dieter's a man with incredible sensitivity and understanding
and appreciation of the natural world.
In the 1970s, he was one of the early voices saying,
"What are we doing to our planet?"
And he woke up sort of mid-'70s and went,
"Whoa, am I part of the problem?
"I'm making all of this injection-moulded plastic stuff."
And that was where the ten principles for good design came from,
because he was questioning himself,
saying, "Well, actually, are we producing something
"that is adding value to the planet, that is not just depleting
"the resources?"
The challenge is how we can take Dieter's very strongly held belief
forward in another generation.
We have now been spending many years designing a new building for Vitsoe,
a new headquarters and production building,
but equally will be a residential building.
That building, and so many of the ideas and techniques
that we're deploying in it, are completely formed
by his principles for good design.
We're seeing it as being a living experiment.
So, Dieter, there you have...
Yeah.
..you have our little building.
A lot of space. A lot of space.
Yeah.
And so you're walking now into the main assembly area.
We will be making the chairs right here.
So we have five bedrooms, because we have people come for six
or eight weeks from Los Angeles or New York or Munich.
I know. Yes.
When they are newly recruited, then they can come and stay here,
live in the building.
Got the good windows, so lovely, natural light.
We've designed it that we should have no lights on
during daylight hours.
This is beech.
And then this is birch.
Yeah, yeah.
In the '50s and '60s, there was this drive for modern
and new, but then came the '70s. Rams's type of design was rejected
by a lot of designers, they were looking for colours
and shapes and swells and statements.
It's only later, as designers got really sick of that and said,
"There must be something more to this," they realised
that the directions we were going had become very decadent.
Then this interest in Rams began to grow again.
And I think it also had a lot to do with Mark Adams and Vitsoe,
and going to this effort to spread the message.
We do not need all of this space immediately.
Ground space?
Yeah.
Absolutely, oh, yeah. Yeah.
Only.
Only. That's the number one on the list.
And if we can't achieve it, we won't do it.
I think the world is going where you just try to create one rigid
culture in a space, and I think we, working at Vitsoe,
would benefit from other people around, as other people
would from us, but they have to be the right people.
We'll go and get some,
we'll go and get some food and drink.
We'll just go and walk over...
Can we leave... I normally don't wear a hat!
No, I understand!
Still now I have little problems.
Is it too tight?
I have the feeling I have to...
Is it too much pressure? Yeah. No.
But there's an English word of, "Es juckt mir im Kopf."
Ja, he needs to scratch his head.
Oh, he needs to scratch his head, OK, yeah.
Because he's unused...
Now you can scratch the hair.
Much better!
I need fresh air on the... on my hair!
He is very clear about the people he likes.
He is also from that generation where designers dared to say,
"This, to my opinion, is bad design."
Today you will more often hear, "This is interesting," you know?
And you never know what does that mean,
"interesting" - yes, of course.
I think the whole world is interesting.
But I'm going to be asking myself whether we're not entering a time
where this question, "Is it good or not good?"
is maybe becoming more important again.
We just can't afford to be so indifferent.
What Dieter Rams once told us when we prepared the exhibition
was that he wants to design not only a single object,
but he wants to design a whole environment,
or also, philosophically, a world in which people
could live in.
Rams has always been Rams. You can recognise it,
it has this look of a certain colour palette,
certain formal approach.
That is what makes his design work so convincing,
today especially, when things change so quickly.
And I think Rams shows that design can have a very strong orientation,
and it's not that there is no evolution, he is still working
on things, but he's working on details.
But he's not questioning his general approach.
Is it not nice? Mm-hm.
OK, you can say it's a hobby,
but I like this hobby!
APPLAUSE
I think Dieter is surprisingly pessimistic about the future,
but then I think he's also maybe not so aware of how much his principles
have influenced people.
Because Rams's design is not just design,
it's a whole attitude.
And it incorporates everything about how you live.
It's about getting rid of excess, visual clutter, and just living
with what you need.
"Less but better" is quite an amazing legacy.
What better thing could you want than that?