Celebrating the original crazy misfit rebels of Bauhaus on their 100th birthday
80 years before Apple’s ‘Think Different’ celebrated The Crazy Ones, Bauhaus’s rebels transformed design in ways we still feel today.
Six months after Steve Jobs returned to Apple, he led the launch of their iconic Think Different campaign. More manifesto than campaign, it was a call to arms to the market and to staff alike to believe in and pursue difficult crazy goals.
To this day the call to arms would give goosebumps to a stone.
Here's to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They're not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can't do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.
Almost eight decades before Jobs celebrated the misfits and rebels, another collection of crazy ones was gathering in Germany. The artists, architects and thinkers of the Staatliches Bauhaus (more commonly referred to as simply Bauhaus) were also challenging convention, breaking down boundaries between disciplines and imagining a radically different relationship between design, technology and everyday life.
They were messy, misrepresented and misunderstood. Certainly, they were too controversial and political for the Nazi’s liking and they were closed after 14 years. Yet in that short period, Bauhaus changed how the world thought about buildings, furniture, typography, art and design. Their legacy suggests that if you’re crazy enough to believe you can change the world, you might just do it. A century after the school was founded, its principles remain remarkably relevant to those of us designing the products, services and experiences of today.
Let’s raise our steins to the original design misfits. They made useful things beautiful and beautiful things useful. Let’s celebrate them, not by imitating their aesthetic, but by inheriting their attitude
Consider the following design principles:
No border between artist and craftsman – design is a team sport which includes everyone involved in designing and building something
The artist is an exalted craftsman – design is everyone’s job, not just that of people whose job title says “designer”
Form follows function – design is not just how it looks, it is how it works too
Gesamtkunstwerk or the ‘complete work of art’ – the best design can be both highly practical and very beautiful
True materials – the materials on which design is carried out should mimic the real world as closely as possible
Minimalism – obvious always wins
Emphasis on technology – advances in technology regularly provide us with opportunity for transformation and doing things better so we must always be alert to those possibilities
Smart use of resources – importance of working to lean methodologies, to time and budget parameters
Simplicity and effectiveness – make the solution as simple as it can be, but no simpler
Constant development – everything can always get better all the time, so constantly pursue measurement and improvement
They were written just over a century ago, by Walter Gropius, the founder of Bauhaus. You could be forgiven for thinking “Smart use of resources” came from Jeff Gothelf’s “Lean UX” book or that minimalism is a summary of Luke Wroblewski’s “obvious always wins” mantra or that “form follows function” is a Steve Jobs legacy.
But no, these principles, like all of the others listed, pre-date our modern-day design leaders by many decades.
The school lived its principles by striving to combine aesthetics with everyday function. It is credited with inventing graphic design (by merging photography, illustration and typography for the first time), with designing furniture which is still instantly recognisable today and for those of a certain vintage, Top of the Pops motion graphics are instantly recognisable as Bauhaus-inspired.
So let’s raise our steins to the original design misfits. They made useful things beautiful and beautiful things useful. Let’s celebrate them, not by imitating their aesthetic, but by inheriting their attitude.
They lasted just over a decade, but more than a century later, we’re still designing in their shadow.
