How can market, design and innovation interact?

This year we will celebrate two anniversaries. Two events that are connected in a kind of spiritual community, and where one is a prerequisite for the other. Both anniversaries have significantly impacted how the market, design, and innovation can play together.

The first anniversary is when Steve Jobs showed off the iPhone fifteen years ago, the world's first smartphone. We do not know if this event caused a dent in the universe, using Apple employees' own words, but it felt that way to us, who stood outside watching as it happened. By combining the internet, an iPod and a phone into one and the same product, Apple set the agenda for the entire tech industry in the years to come. The fact that the product also had an aesthetic, simple, intuitive and very user-friendly design did not in any way dampen the enthusiasm at the time.

Steve Jobs was an interesting, charismatic, and contradictory type of leader. The English design critic, Stephen Bayley, characterised him as a Buddhist bully, a hippie billionaire and a sensitive sadist. He was bold, brilliant and brutal. Despite this, it still does not deprive him of the honour and ability of visionary action. In the movie "Steve Jobs" (2015), there is a scene where his very neglected daughter verbally attacks him. "You ask people to think differently, talk about the Bauhaus movement and Braun, and that simplicity is the sophisticated," she says, pointing to the 1998 version of the iMac, "but that looks like a play-oven from children's TV."

This scene was the film's move to link Apple to German design history. Neither Steve Jobs nor his chief designer, Jonathan Ive, hid their primary source of inspiration. Both the Bauhaus movement (1919 - 1933) and the electronics company Braun's chief designer, Dieter Rams, were well placed on their mental pedestal. And it is precisely Dieter Rams who leads the way to our next anniversary. In May, he turns ninety. Rams is still active as a designer and speaker. He played a significant role in the "Wirtschaftswunder" of the German post-war period. He was educated as an architect, but is best known for his work as an industrial designer at Braun from 1961 to 1995. Since then, he has worked with the furniture manufacturer Vitsoe.

In addition to serving as a source of inspiration, Rams is also known for his universal principles of good design. There are hardly any serious designers who are not familiar with and influenced by these. Good design, he wrote, should be innovative, useful, understandable, but not intrusive. It should be honest, last a long time and be carried out to the smallest detail. It should be environmentally friendly, aesthetically pleasing and otherwise have as little design as possible. Design is always best when the shape does not override the utility value. We must, according to Rams, live better unless it lasts longer. The products he created are a manifestation of these principles. It is often the case that strong ideas shine through and give lifeless products a distinctive and emotional appeal.

It is, therefore, fascinating to see how generations of creative people stand on each other's shoulders. From the Bauhaus movement, we got the principle of "Gesamtkunstwerk", the idea of the total art experience. This can be easily transferred to the iPhone's intuitive design, aesthetics and flexible applications. Some have described it as the phone's answer to the Swiss Army Knife. From Dieter Rams, we got the ideas about design as a problem solver, everyday structure and as a humanistic discipline. If we put Braun's calculator ET-66 from 1987 next to the iPhone from 2007, the relationship will be evident to anyone who can see it. Therefore, it is difficult to imagine Apple products without this spark from this German design force.

Steve Jobs was worshipped as a messiah in his heydays and lives on as a mythical figure in the minds of most creatives. After his death in 2011, he is still Apple's undisputed source of inspiration. The core of this source is three small German words first formulated by Dieter Rams: "Weniger, aber besser". These words are the very rationale for the design profession. Less, but better, is the mantra that puts the designer into the user's point of view. The products must be understood immediately and do not need any instructions for use. This can be formulated equally elegantly in all languages where such humanistic ideals are upheld. And considering Apple's success story, not least in the native language of Steve Jobs:

Less, but better.