The Designer’s Contribution

I recently came across an old speech in the rams foundation archive where Dieter Rams talks about how designers contribute to the success of a company. I’m not sure if this speech came before or after Rams formulated his famous Ten Principles of Good Design, but you see many of the same themes coming through in his words.

This definition of product design stood out to me:

Product design is the organisation of the total configuration of a product (form, surface, colour, labeling) what we term in German overall “Gestalt”—namely the way in which the product fulfils most efficiently the intended purpose. Moreover, at the same time, its overall design should meet the physical requirements and conditions under which the product is manufactured and launched on the market.

A designer who wants to fulfil this task may not conceive himself as an artist who is merely dressing up the product by providing the last-minute garment tailored to the aesthetic criteria of taste.

We could rather say the designer is a Gestalt-engineer. From the various elements—predetermined requirements and specifications provided by engineering, production, marketing etc.—he synthesized the concrete product. His work is largely rational, meaning that the formal decisions are rationalizable, verifiable and ultimately logically conclusive.

This speech was given sometime around 1975. I was fortunate to see Dieter Rams at the opening of Vitsœ’s new London store in 2019. In his remarks that day, Rams continued to press for the importance of designing for the whole and not just aesthetics.

Today more than ever, the world needs Gestalt-engineers.