Designing a life
October 8, 2011
Apple design was not about Steven Jobs alone, but about Steven Jobs and the lead designer Jonathan Ive. The way I see it, their collaboration in Apple followed a bit the story of another design icon, Braun. The key people then were the industrialist Erwin Braun, his brother and the designer Dieter Rams.
Jonathan Ive has described his first encounter with a Dieter Rams design: “No part appeared to be either hidden or celebrated, just perfectly considered and appropriate in the hierarchy of the product’s details. You knew exactly what it was and how to use it.”
“Good design is as little design as possible” is one of Dieter Rams’ most famous phrases. The meaning behind it was that a well-designed product should be so good that it is barely noticeable. By leaving the unnecessary out, the essential factors rise to the foreground. The challenge is that the design may be simple but the path taken to create it highly complex.
Dieter Rams was one of the first people who made the distinction between consumers and users when he talked about the people at whom his designs were aimed. The term “consumer” corresponds to someone who uses things up. Consumption is then a process of reducing the value that is built into the product. Rams preferred to use the German term “Gebraucher”, which translates as someone who uses something. The consumer is turned into the modern notion of a value-creating customer. If the design is useful, if the product facilitates value creation, it makes sense that it lasts as long as possible. For Rams, the term “Verbraucher”, the consumer, had a negative meaning, implying waste and short-term thinking.
Another concept that Dieter Rams suggested was “re-design”. What he meant was to turn away from an addiction to novelty towards iterations, to improving what we already have.
“Less, but better” was the ultimate motto of Dieter Rams. The motto follows the idea of “less is more” of Mies van der Rohe and Peter Behrens. The original idea of Behrens was improvement through reduction, reducing quantity, waste, and excess and at the same time increasing quality, value and the effort to create a better world in a human centric way.
Dieter Rams formulated his ideas about good design into a set of principles to explain what makes a good product:
The first principle was: good design is innovative. Technological developments always offer new opportunities. Innovative design develops in collaboration with innovative technology.
The second principle: good design is about usefulness. A product is bought to be used. Design is about emphasizing usefulness whilst disregarding everything that could be a detraction from it.
The third principle: good design is beautiful. The aesthetic quality of a product is integral to functionality.
The fourth principle: good design makes a product understandable. At best it is self-explanatory.
The fifth principle: a good design is honest and does not try to make a product more innovative or valuable than it is.
The sixth principle: good designs are neither decorative nor independent works of art. Their design should leave room for interaction and the user’s self-expression.
The seventh principle: a good design lasts many years rather than being short-term and fashionable.
The eighth principle: it is about attention to detail. Nothing should be left to chance.
The ninth principle: good design makes an important contribution to the preservation of the environment. It minimizes waste and it minimizes visual and physical pollution.
The tenth principle: good design is “as little as possible”: it is about less but paradoxically at the same time about better, more valuable.
The principles of a good design may be the principles of a good life.
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Thank you Dieter Rams, Sophie Lovell, Marco Steinberg and his team at Sitra. Thank you also @moia
More: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The Museum of Modern Art New York. Helsinki Design Lab. Guy Kawasaki on Steve Jobs. Jonah Lehrer on Steve Jobs. John Sculley on Steve Jobs. Technology and social change. Fast Company: 50 Most Influential Designers in America.
Learning from Caravaggio
April 2, 2010
We have a curious habit of thinking that what we are accustomed to is the way things should be. We are inclined to accept conventional forms as facts, and as meaningful reference points, when facing novelty.
Artists are often the people who want to see the world afresh. It is not easy to get rid of preconceived ideas, but the artist who best discards accepted notions and prejudices often produces the most remarkable works of art. However, a painting that represents a traditional subject in an unexpected way is often condemned. Normally there is no good reason, apart from the work of art just not following tradition.
There have been a few times in history that a great artist looked carefully at what was visible to everybody, but in fact saw things very different from the way others saw them.
Very few artists have caused as much shock and outrage as Caravaggio. A famous story is told about the commissioning of a painting of Saint Matthew for the altar of a church in Rome. This happened around 1600. The saint was going to be represented writing the gospel that was later going to be named after him. As gospels were the word of God, there was also going to be an angel in the picture, giving guidance to Matthew. Caravaggio read the old texts very carefully and tried to figure out what it must have been like when an old man suddenly had to sit down and do something that he had never done, or never dreamed of doing: writing a book, and being guided by an angel!
Caravaggio painted an elderly workingman, seemingly from a poor background. A man with a bald head and muscular legs, writing awkwardly! Beside him was a child with white wings. A young angel was guiding Matthew’s hand just like a teacher would do to a pupil doing something for the very first time. Caravaggio’s painting was a fantastic portrait of a human being in a very, very special situation. But it was also a completely new way of expressing an old topic. The painting was to be placed on the altar of a church in Rome. This never happened because Caravaggio’s work created a huge scandal. The painting was not accepted because it was claimed that it showed a lack of respect for the topic and the saint! What Caravaggio had done, for the first time in history, was to create a simple expression and give a human face to something that was highly formalized. Caravaggio may have been the first human-centric painter.
People thought that Caravaggio was out to shock them. They also thought that he had no respect for beauty and tradition. In fact, Caravaggio may have been the first artist in known history who was labeled both a rebel and a naturalist at the same time. He was the first painter of the “ugly” true reality. The curious thing is that seeing Caravaggio’s paintings today; one still encounters the same boldness and power that must have shocked people over four hundred years ago.
Caravaggio’s art is very much alive today, although the altar painting described here was never accepted for the altar and was eventually destroyed in Germany during the Second World War.
The question remains whether the human-centric approaches today meet the same kind of opposition as Caravaggio encountered. It is not about challenging the conventions carried forward by the church, or representations of what is holy. Human-centric thinking questions the conventions carried forward by corporate thinking and the idealized representations of leadership/management. The pattern is the same.
Nothing has changed, when it comes to the importance of Caravaggio! Being human-centric is as difficult today as it was in 1602.
Thank you @cshirky
Akram Khan and Sylvie Guillem
January 9, 2010
Paul Cézanne once wrote that beauty in art is not created by the objects that are represented but by the relationships of line and colour. Relationships create tensions: tensions between line and colour, artistic perfection and “émerveillement”, meaning being enchanted like only a child can. Rigidity and fluidity. Shiva and Krishna. Kathak dance and classical ballet, and especially Akram Khan and Sylvie Guillem. To me, Akram Khan is the most gifted choreographer and dancer of his generation. Sylvie Guillem is perhaps the world’s most celebrated ballerina today.
An evening at the Finnish National Opera provided all this. “Sacred Monsters” was the meeting of two superstars (sacred monsters) and two dance forms, two different vocabularies. It was interesting to compare the speech vocabulary with the dance vocabulary: Khan a bit flippantly worrying about losing his hair, Guillem casually reflecting on learning Italian from children’s cartoons. And then the superb dance vocabulary of Khan’s fluid Kathak beat, combined with Guillem’s beauty and balance. Wonderful moments that perhaps only these two dancers can achieve: Guillem with her feet locked behind Khan’s back, leaning back, with both their arms in a flowing wave. A remarkable combination of strength and poetry.
Akram Khan, speaking about this project, said: “I have spent my life studying and performing Kathak (the ancient North Indian dance tradition). It is the source of my creative process. Working with Sylvie Guillem is an exciting new challenge, giving me the opportunity to explore another classical dance language with one of its greatest practitioners, and as a result, creating a situation that will unearth the things that are most often lost between the old and modern world.” When Khan and Guillem danced side by side, it was interesting to note that I was often drawn to Khan’s dance rather than to Guillem’s, despite her beauty and grace. Is it a reminder that elsewhere too, there is inspiration, energy and richness in the things we forget – the sources of our creative process?
