Deconstructing Product Design

Phonosuper SK 4

Hans Gugelot and Dieter Rams for Braun, 1956

1. After hitting what one could call a “design block” in creating a new generation of low-cost radiograms, Braun designers Fritz Eichler and Dieter Rams called on Hans Gugelot for assistance. Gugelot, a teacher at the Ulm School of Design (HfG) in Ulm, Germany, brought his functionalist aesthetic and mastery of manufacture to bear on the problem, a collaboration that ultimately produced the SK 4, and a philosophy Rams would articulate in his “Ten Commandments of Design” some years later. Dieter Rams’s First Commandment is particularly apropos: “Design is innovative. It does not copy existing product forms, nor does it produce any kind of novelty just for the sake of it. The essence ...