From their humble beginings
in 1881, Franz Schneider Brakel (FSB) has become one of the most
exclusive manufacturers of architectural ironmongery for doors
and windows in the world today.
10
Design Theses
When Dieter Rams entered our lives 16 years ago as a participant
in FSB’s Design Workshop, he taught us his 10 design theses,
which are now part and parcel of any good designer’s thinking:
1) Good design
needs to be innovative. It must not reiterate existing product
forms.
2) Good design
needs to make a product usable; that’s what products are
bought for,
after all, to be used.
3) Good design
needs to have an aesthetic dimension, since the fascination this
engenders is an integral constituent of a product’s
usability.
4) Good design
needs to enhance a product’s ability to explain itself.
It has to render
the product compellingly eloquent.
5) Good design
is unobtrusive. However, in this, it differs from decorative works
of art.
6) Good design
has got to be honest. It does not attempt to make the product
appear
to be something it is not.
7) Good design
needs to be enduring, since fashion is fickle and encourages a
throwaway approach.
8) Good design
extends to every last detail. Anything else would be disrespectful
towards the consumer, the product and its function.
9) Good design
has to be environmentally benign and must not be a visual pollutant
either.
10) The tenth,
last and most central tenet of our great mentor, to conclude,
states that
good design is a minimum of design. Getting
back to what is pure and straightforward.
Under the
slogan "Multiplicity not Simplicity”, we are once again
attempting to meet Dieter Rams’ exacting demands in the
02|03 edition of our Manual, issued in the 121st year of our company’s
history, and prove that good design does not need to be boring
and monotonous. As ever, it will be the market that determines
how compelling our proof is.
For more
on the genesis of design theses, read:
- general summary in 'Door Handles,
Workshop in Brakel', Cologne 1987
ISBN 3-88375-072-7, pp. 55–57
-
discussion of fundamentals in ‘Vom Mythos des Funktionalismus’
('On the myth of functionalism'),
Cologne 1997
ISBN 3-88375-270-3
-
a proposition by Dieter Rams in 'Less but better' Hamburg 1995
ISBN 3-9803485-1-2
