As designers become as recognizable as their products, 86-year-old Dieter Rams looms large—and uneasily—over the world he helped create. First at Braun, then Vitsoe, Rams and his teams generated countless items—from shavers, watches, and kitchen appliances to stereos, shelving, and furniture—that shaped the postwar experience for generations of international consumers. Rams also became a kind of polestar for aspiring designers who revered the German’s work and his 10 Principles for Good Design. (Good luck seeing Rams’s Braun T3 pocket radio, with its tuning wheel and square-grid speaker, and not mistaking it for a prototype of Jony Ive’s original iPod.)
Surprisingly, Rams has never been the focus of a documentary. But that changes with Rams, currently playing the film festival circuit with a limited theatrical run scheduled this month followed by a video-on-demand release.
Director Gary Hustwit (of Helvetica acclaim) featured Rams in his 2009 film Objectified, just as the designer-as-superstar movement took flight. They remained in touch, and while Rams wasn’t necessarily keen on the idea of a documentary portrait Hustwit leveraged his relationship with the designer to convince him of its merit.
Still, there was more to Rams’s decision than his rapport with the director. “I think he looks at most designers who are in the public eye and is a little bit saddened about the devaluation of design,” Hustwit tells Metropolis. “He’s not somebody who pushes himself out there as this thought leader or celebrity. He’s a design engineer trying to make things better. I think one of the reasons he agreed to do the film was to stay a part of that conversation.”
Rams is an ideal megaphone. The designer is still the dashing, koan-dropping iconoclast idolized around the world. But Hustwit restores Rams’s three-dimensionality with a warm and humanistic, at times clinical and fetishistic, yet always affecting cinematic portrait. We’re given intimate access to Rams at his home in Germany, where, surrounded by five decades of his designs, he works and blisses out to Oscar Peterson. We’re along for his visits to Vitsoe’s London offices and, later, the company’s under-construction eco-friendly, Rams-inspired new headquarters in Royal Leamington Spa. We’re at his side as he participates in exhibitions, panels, and celebrations. Insight and memories from Rams’ Braun colleague and collaborator Dietrich Lubs, Vitsoe managing director Mark Adams, designer Naoto Fukasawa, and Dieter Rams: As Little Design as Possible author Sophie Lovell, among others, fill in the 73-minute documentary. But we never stray far from the designer for long.