Every man-made object has a story to tell. There is the story of the people who made it, the materials chosen and the creative motivation. Only when you understand history do you understand the meaning of an object. Or so says Dieter Rams, who headed product design at Braun from 1961 to 1995.
Braun: designed to preserve This is Braun’s story. It is billed as “the most comprehensive history” of the company to date. Telling it requires more than 400 pages and 500 images, including never-before-seen archival material and all-new full-page photographs of Braun’s most iconic products, each infused with Rams’ less, but better approach that would influence directly to the designers. as Naoto Fukasawa and Jony Ive of Apple.
What’s most striking when I flipped through an advanced copy is how desirable many of these early Braun products remain today, some of which were introduced nearly 70 years ago. No surprise, I suppose, given the disposable detritus you’ll find on Amazon and AliExpress, places where product design bows to the gods of mass consumption and devices vary with unnecessary decorative flourishes usually reserved in the Walmart cereal aisle.
I mean, just look at the TP1 (1959) in the picture below, the Walkman’s portable predecessor that worked like a radio and also played records from the bottom like a Miniot vinyl turntableand the T3 transistor radio (1958) which certainly inspired Ive for the iPod. click wheel interface:
Have you ever been stopped in your tracks by a table fan? Just look at the HL1, which appeared in 1961:
Braun truly excelled at Hi-Fi, and this wall-mounted unit designed in the mid-1960s represented the essence of space-age living:
Braun: designed to preserve is published by Phaidon and written by Professor Klaus Klemp, a German design historian and curator who has spent the last two decades carefully documenting the work of Dieter Rams through major exhibitions and books like Dieter Rams: the complete works. If a panel of experts gathered somewhere in the world to discuss the legacy of Braun or the Rams, it’s a safe bet that Klemp was invited.
Another thing I really appreciated while flipping through it was noting the size and placement of the Braun logo — first introduced with the embossed “A” in 1935. In Ramsthe excellent 2018 documentary directed by Gary Hustwit (which also stars Klemp), the famous designer, then on the cusp of his 86th birthday (now 91), says he always wanted the Braun logo to be small and discreet – a battle he fought with at least 10 CEOs, he says, all of whom wanted the wordmark printed loudly on every Braun product.
“When you’re new somewhere and you have to introduce yourself, or walk into a room and say, ‘I’m so-and-so,’ you don’t yell. You should do it quietly,” Rams said in Rams. “If every product shouted ‘I’m Braun!’ It’s going to get irritating. This makes sense when you understand Rams’ dedication to creating a common design language during his four decades with the company.
In addition to endless gadget porn, the book also aims to correct a few things about Braun’s design for the historical record, namely that Rams had help. This is not a controversial position. Although Rams’ identity is so closely tied to the company that he has sometimes been mistakenly (or jokingly) called Mr. Braun, he is the first person to remind people that executing Rams’ strategy The company’s design has always been a team effort. Designed to keep attempts to set the record straight by giving credit where credit is due.
The vast majority of the book is about the Braun we celebrate, that we don’t condone, with plenty of history to reference whenever you want to better understand how the company’s thinking evolved.
Brown : Designed to keep begins after World War I, when Max Braun founded the company in Frankfurt, Germany, in 1921, just as Bauhaus design – and its emphasis on functionality – was taking root and Braun was manufacturing radios and phonographs. Braun’s sons joined the company in 1945 after World War II. Artur Braun was a talented engineer and helped develop the S50 dry electric shaver. It was launched in 1950 and quickly became the company’s most profitable product, making Braun a symbol of postwar reconstruction and expansion efforts.
But it was his brother Erwin Braun who, in the 1950s, began bringing together a group of colleagues to produce devices “in the style of our times,” Klemp says. Lacking skills himself, Erwin established a very successful business partnership with the Hochschule für Gestaltung (HfG) Ulm between 1956 and 1963. Otl Aicher, founder of the Ulm school, and Hans Gugelot, who taught design there of products, were key partners who “undoubtedly greatly influenced the design mindset at Braun in the mid-1950s,” says Klemp. Rams joined Braun on July 15, 1955 as an interior designer, before leading Braun’s first in-house design team in 1961, with Reinhold Weiss as his deputy. But according to Artur, his brother Erwin was “the real father of Braun Design”.
Credit can also be seen on each product photograph, which includes a caption naming the original designer and the date of its first production. Spoiler: not all famous Braun models are Dieter Rams models. The book concludes with 60 biographies in a section titled “Design is made by people.”
The book is presented chronologically, but the full-page photography (and author) encourages the reader to flip casually, bouncing between each designer’s products and profiles, then their influences throughout the 102-year history of the ‘business. Navigation is aided by a comprehensive index that also identifies pages containing illustrations, as well as a glossary that helps readers understand Braun’s enigmatic product names.
Fittingly, Rams’s “Ten Principles of Good Design” – first formulated in 1985 and steeped in Bauhaus traditions, later refined by the Ulm School’s understanding of technology and industrial production – are almost exactly halfway through the book. Whether this is the author’s intention, he clearly divides Braun’s story along a clear line between before and after Dieter Rams. Perhaps his most influential and best-known principle is number 10:
Good design is as little design as possible. Less, but better, because it focuses on the essential aspects and the products are not overloaded with non-essentials. Return to purity, return to simplicity.
In 1995, Dieter Rams was ousted from his design leadership role by an executive at Gillette – which had purchased Braun in 1967 – who demanded more “emotionality” from the product line, according to Klemp. Rams was just two years away from retirement and given an elaborate but meaningless (he had no direct reports) new title of executive director of corporate identity. He left Braun in 1997, just as Braun’s philosophy of “less, but better” was transforming into “more and worse.”
If the house of Braun gave birth to the 10 design principles of the Rams, it was Apple, and more particularly Steve Jobs and Jony Ive, who fully adopted them from the mid-1990s, starting with the iMac (1998 ), the iPod (2001), and yes, the iPhone (2007), which was a marvel of simplicity and usability at launch. In 2009, Rams said, “There are only a few companies today that take design seriously, in my opinion, and, at the moment, it’s an American company.” It’s Apple. Notably, he didn’t say Braun.
Only 41 pages of Braun: designed to preserve are, naturally, dedicated to the Braun of today. After all, it was only in 2010 that Procter & Gamble – which purchased Gillette in 2005 and witnessed Apple’s extraordinary global success – returned to a “Past Forward” approach to Apple’s legacy. Braun in design. Klemp says the 2012 Braun Series 5 razors were one of the first products to embody this reinterpretation. Well, very good.
This 2020 shaver seems to be closely related to the first Braun models:
Designed to keep makes a valiant effort to chronicle today’s Braun, covering mistakes and setbacks and, more recently, reinventions, while suggesting that he could once again influence an industry with his innovations. Perhaps, but the appeal of this book undoubtedly lies in looking back, and that has benefits for Braun and the entire consumer electronics industry.
“The new design always stands on the shoulders of its predecessors and, in the best case, learns not only from the knowledge gleaned during the creative process, but also from the wrong turns taken,” says Klemp. “Only the Gods can create ex nihilo, or produce something from nothing.”
Designed to keep makes sense of Braun’s history by showing how generations of people have drawn inspiration from past and current events to create products with lasting appeal. Such longevity is unheard of today, with fashionable design trends conspiring with software and electronics on a fast track to product obsolescence, planned or unplanned.
The title — Designed to keep — can also be read as an instruction. This is a book you’ll want to keep as a reference for the next time a new product launches and you ask yourself, “Now where have I seen this before?”
Braun: designed to preserve is available to purchase now for $79.95/€69.95.
