It is perhaps indicative of the differing receptions to and estimations of design in the former West Germany and the former East Germany that while Dieter Rams' Ten Principles of good design are revered as if cast in stone, Karl Clauss Dietel's Five Big Ls of good design have barely seen the light of day since November 1989. A popular focus on the former West which tends to popular understandings of design from West Germany as being valid and authentic and laudable, while design from East
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"In his work the designer seeks to find the constancy of the good", wrote Karl Clauss Dietel in 1973, a lightly articulated yet not so straightforward task for, as he continues, not only is the assessment of such dependent on a myriad varying factors, but "the search for what defines design, what it grows from, where it comes from and where it wants to go, takes on new dimensions against the background of our cultural upheaval".1 With the exhibition Simson, Diamant, Erika. Formgestaltung von
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"I wonder what it would be like to live in a world where it is always June", ponders Anne Shirley in Lucy Maud Montgomery's 1915 novel Anne of the Island. "You'd get tired of it", sighs her adoptive mother Marilla Cuthbert by way of reply. "I daresay", responds Anne, "but just now I feel that it would take me a long time to get tired of it..." Thoughts we very much concur with as we survey and contemplate the varied profusion of new architecture and design exhibitions sprouting forth in June
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