As little rain as possible

Dieter Rams-inspired weather app is the perfect accompaniment for your Phaidon Wallpaper* City Guide

Naturally if you’ve downloaded our wonderful Wallpaper* City Guide apps and have decided on your weekend away you’ll be wanting to know what the weather is going to be like. Now while there’s nothing particularly wrong with the weather app that comes with the iPhone here’s one that really stands up to the style set by our City Guides. We think you’ll agree with us when we suggest that designer David Elgena may have taken more than a passing glance at the work of this guy.

However, while most Dieter Rams copyists usually miss the point of the legend’s 10 Principles of Design, Elgena seems to have taken them properly to heart. WTHR is as minimal as its vowel-free name suggests and follows Dieter’s as little design as possible principle in that it has just two buttons - only one of which needs to be used regularly.

On hitting the update button the dial at the top wobbles pleasingly before settling into place like the dial on an old-fashioned bathroom scale. On it are various weather conditions, ours seems stuck on 'overcast' in London's right now though we suspect it's absolutely baking everywhere else). At the bottom you'll find the conditions and temperature predictions for the coming week, along with a switch to choose Fahrenheit or Celsius. In keeping with its design heritage it looks much better on white rather than black iPhone but for a dollar or 69pence why worry? Get it in the app store then splash out on the best book about the man whose clever designs inspired it.

Dieter Rams: As Little Design as PossibleSophie Lovell

Price AUD$135.00 Price CAD$135.00 Price £69.95 Price T105.00 Price USD$105.00

Dieter Rams is one of the most influential product designers of the twentieth century. Even if you don't immediately recognize his name, you have almost certainly used one of the radios, clocks, lighters, juicers, shelves or hundreds of other products he designed. He is famous not only for this vast array of well-formed products, but for his remarkably prescient ideas about the correct function of design in the messy, out-of-control world we inhabit today. These ideas are summed up in his 'ten principles' of good design: good design is innovative, useful, and aesthetic. Good design should be make a product easily understood. Good design is unobtrusive, honest, durable, thorough, and concerned with the environment. Most of all, good design is as little design as possible.

In that spirit, this monograph is as little book as possible. It is a clear, comprehensive and beautiful presentation of Dieter Rams' life and his work. It is a must-have book for anyone interested in Rams' work, his legacy, and his ideas about how to live.

Specifications:

Format: Hardback
Size: 270 × 205 mm (10 5/8 × 8 1/8 in)
Pages: 400 pp
Illustrations: 320 illustrations
ISBN: 9780714849188

Sophie Lovell was born in London. After graduating from the University of Sussex and Chelsea College of Art & Design, she moved to Berlin in 1994. She is a writer, curator and creative consultant as well as a long-term contributing editor and currently the Germany editor of the international lifestyle magazine Wallpaper*. She has written and edited several books on design and architecture including Limited Edition: Prototypes, One-Offs and Design Art Furniture and Furnish – Furniture and Interior Design for the 21st Century.

"Shines by painting a refreshingly realistic picture of the design process... The easiest way to describe Mr. Rams’s impact on design is to say that he made Braun the “Apple” — in other words the It-brand — of its time."—Alice Rawsthorn, International Herald Tribune

"While many of the books about Dieter Rams are predominantly dry catalogues, Lovell's book examines the relevance of his work from a contemporary design standpoint by featuring interviews with some of today's top industrial designers..."—Apphia Michael, Wallpaper.com

"As Little Design as Possible is well-structured, thorough and provides background context to the many facets of Rams’s career, and also considers the continuation of his Ten Principles of Good Design."—Thomas Phongsathorn, V&A (Victoria and Albert Museum magazine)

"The design bible from the greatest industrial designer of the 20th century." —Tomas Maier, Esquire