Dieter Rams
Less and More

26 February 2016

Between 1955 and 1995, when he was head of the design department at Braun, Dieter Rams created 514 of the over 1,200 products sold by the company. Work on an enormous scale and of the highest quality—rooted in a unique stylistic rigor and coherence of approach—that did not receive the recognition it deserved at the time. It was only later that his lesson was given its rightful place in the history of industrial design, after providing the inspiration for such outstanding figures as Jasper Morrison, Konstantin Grcic, Naoto Fukasawa and Jonathan Ive, who has admitted having drawn on the aesthetics, ergonomics and interfaces of Braun products for his Apple designs. The anointing of Rams’s prolific genius was entrusted, between 2008 and 2012, to a momentous exhibition, Less and More, that traveled to six different cities around the world and was accompanied by a weighty volume of the same name, edited by Klaus Klemp and Keiko Ueki-Polet, of which a new edition has now been brought out by Gestalten. It is a fundamental work, with over 700 illustrations, including drawings, models and prototypes of everything that Rams designed for Braun over the space of 40 years. Equipped with an excellent apparatus criticus, Less and More. The Design Ethos of Dieter Rams is also a manifesto in print of the thinking of the designer, a child of the modernist principle of “less is more,” which he modified to “less but better.” This is attested by the care that has been lavished on its 808 pages, in perfect “Ramsian” style. The cover is soft, made of white PVC, and protected by a sober gray slipcase with white lettering: the title and subtitle are on the front, the designer’s signature on the back. In addition to offering a refined tactile and visual experience, Less is More attests to the topicality of Rams’s design, the force and simplicity of his vision: “Good designers,” declared Rams, “must always be avant-gardists, always one step ahead of the times. They should—and must—question everything generally thought to be obvious. They must have an intuition for people’s changing attitudes. For the reality in which they live, for their dreams, their desires, their worries, their needs, their living habits. They must also be able to assess realistically the opportunities and bounds of technology.”

Dieter Rams Less and More

Dieter Rams Less and More

Less and More. The Design Ethos of Dieter Rams

Less and More. The Design Ethos of Dieter Rams

Less and More. The Design Ethos of Dieter Rams

Less and More. The Design Ethos of Dieter Rams

Less and More. The Design Ethos of Dieter Rams

Less and More. The Design Ethos of Dieter Rams

Less and More. The Design Ethos of Dieter Rams

Less and More. The Design Ethos of Dieter Rams

Dieter Rams Less and More


Loredana Mascheroni

A journalist, she has always been interested in design. Passionate about contemporary art and architecture, she has worked at Domus since 1997, following a decade-long apprenticeship with other magazines in the sector and an early experience as a TV news journalist that left her with a partiality for video interviews. She does yoga and goes running, to loosen up the tensions caused by overuse of the tablet.


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