From the tender age of 14, Oliver Grabes knew that he wanted to pursue industrial design. He liked cars, he liked objects, and wanted to have a hand in shaping these things. "I knew I had to become an industrial designer," Grabes says. "That was lucky in that I didn't have to make up my mind of what to study; it was more a question of which design school to go to and which branch of industrial design to pursue."
After earning a degree in product design from Offenbach College, Grabes spent nearly twenty years working for design consultancies, from his native Germany to Seattle to London. Cutting his teeth on technical products in the '90s, before user experience became a part of the public consciousness, was a good time to learn: "Using a computer was so awful at the time, that I really started to become aware of how design had the potential to help make technology be a great experience for people," Grabes explains. "You saw, fundamentally, why you got into design; you saw there was a real need for making technology more human, giving people an easier, better, more intuitive experience of using it."
In 2006, having done work for the likes of AT&T, Boeing, Bosch, General Electric, Microsoft, Sony, Nike and others, Grabes became a Professor of Industrial Design at the University of Wuppertal, which has one of the highest-ranked ID programs in Germany. And when Braun asked him to become their Head of Design in 2009, the opportunity was too good to pass up. Braun had been aware of Grabes' work for years, but Grabes had admired Braun's work for decades—here he shares his thoughts on growing up with Braun, Dieter Rams' legacy and how to get a job at Braun.
Core77: As a youth, what were some of the earliest objects whose design you became aware of?
This sounds a bit awkward, but it really was many of the Braun products at the time. Growing up in Germany, there were very few families that didn't have at least one Braun product at home, because they made so many household products—we had them in the kitchen, the bathroom, the living room. I was particularly fascinated by Braun audio products at the time, like the famous Atelier stereo system. We didn't have one of those. My friend's family had one and when I would go to their house, I would study it very closely.
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