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Dieter Rams is a German industrial designer who has been involved with the consumer products company Braun, the furniture company Vitsœ, and the functionalist school of industrial design.
He was born in Wiesbaden, Germany, in 1932 and was strongly influenced by his grandfather, a carpenter. Rams's early success in carpentry led him to train as an architect, as Germany was rebuilding in the early 1950s.
His design reflected that practical, human-centered mindset. To Rams, indifference to people and the reality in which they live is the cardinal sin in design.
Throughout his extensive career, Rams distilled his philosophy into the Ten Principles for Good Design. According to him, good design is:
- innovative;
- useful;
- aesthetically pleasing;
- understandable;
- unobtrusive;
- honest;
- long-lasting;
- thorough down to the last detail;
- environmentally friendly;
- as little design as possible.
The designs on this list violate quite a few of Rams' principles!
Tim Keane has led numerous city planning departments in the United States, including Charleston, South Carolina; Atlanta, Georgia; and Baltimore, Maryland.
"Our work in the U.S. to make better neighborhoods, towns and cities is a hapless and obdurate mess," he wrote in Scientific American.
According to Keane, far too often, city planning is approached as an engineering problem rather than a way of connecting people with the land.
"If you've attended a planning meeting anywhere, you have probably witnessed the miserable process in action—unrestrainedly selfish fighting about false choices and seemingly inane procedures," Keane said.
"Rather than designing places for people, we see cities as a collection of mechanical problems with technical and legal solutions. We distract ourselves with the latest rebranded ideas about places—smart growth, resilient cities, complete streets, just cities, 15-minute cities, happy cities—rather than getting down to the actual work of designing the physical place. This lacks a fundamental vision. And it's not succeeding."
Keane believes that in the United States, the flawed approach to city planning started a century ago.
"The first modern city plan was produced for Cincinnati in 1925 by the Technical Advisory Corporation, founded in 1913 by George Burdett Ford and E.P. Goodrich in New York City. New York adopted the country's first comprehensive zoning ordinance in 1916, an effort Ford led," he explained.
"Not coincidentally, the advent of zoning, and then comprehensive planning, corresponded directly with the great migration of six million Black people from the South to Northern, Midwestern, and Western cities. New city planning practices were a technical means to discriminate and exclude."
Keane said that to this day, decision-makers argue for months or years about each project and are never satisfied. "What distinguishes city planning from other pursuits is its concentration on the whole community. We have become dreadful at this."
"Moving from project to project, or zoning case to zoning case, is not what differentiates planning; the administrators and lawyers can handle that. Exceptional solutions to our biggest city planning problems, such as housing affordability and climate resilience, will never be achieved piecemeal," he added.
