Every record player before 1956 tried to disappear into the living room, boxed up in varnished wood, dressed like furniture that happened to make sound. Dieter Rams and Hans Gugelot looked at that convention and did the opposite. Their SK4, built for the German electronics maker Braun, housed its turntable in painted white metal with pale wood side panels, and instead of hiding the mechanism under a solid lid, they covered it in clear acrylic. You could watch the record spin. Critics at the time thought that was a little morbid, exposed machinery under glass, and nicknamed it Schneewittchensarg, Snow White's Coffin. The name was meant as an insult. It's the only thing about the SK4 that didn't survive as praise.
What survived is the idea underneath it: a product doesn't need to pretend to be something else to be beautiful; function displayed honestly is its own kind of elegant. Rams became Braun's head of design a few years later and spent the next two decades applying that same logic to shavers, radios, calculators, speakers, entire product lines, distilling it eventually into his own ten principles of good design, the most quoted of which boils down to weniger, aber besser, less, but better. It's a genuinely strange thing for a design philosophy from a mid-century German appliance company to have become one of the most cited influences in consumer technology fifty years later, but that's what happened. Jony Ive has said directly that Apple's design language, the iPod's click wheel graphics, the iMac's restraint, the whole instinct toward removing rather than adding, traces back to Rams and specifically to that SK4 impulse of letting a product be exactly what it is.
Rams is 93 now, and in 2018 the filmmaker Gary Hustwit finally got him to sit for a full documentary after years of trying, a film scored, fittingly for a story that keeps circling back to ambient and electronic music on this site, by Brian Eno. What comes through in it isn't triumph. It's something closer to regret. Rams has said plainly that if he had it to do again, he isn't sure he'd choose to be a designer at all, that the world is drowning in products nobody needed made by people who understood his ten principles only as a style to copy rather than a discipline to practice. The SK4 wasn't supposed to start a trend of clear plastic and honest materials as decoration. It was supposed to end the practice of dressing up machines as something they weren't. Most of what borrowed its look missed that part entirely.
