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DesignEuropa Awards 2024: DPMA President congratulates Dieter Rams

Long-time Head of Design at Braun honoured with Lifetime Achievement Award – DPMA President Schewior: one of the most important designers – Technological innovations by Rams filed with DPMA as well

Press release of 25 September 2024

Munich/Riga. The President of the German Patent and Trade Mark Office (DPMA), Eva Schewior, congratulates industrial designer Dieter Rams on being honoured for his life's work at the DesignEuropa Awards. “I would like to congratulate Dieter Rams with all my heart on this outstanding achievement,” the DPMA President said. “Dieter Rams is without any doubt one of the most important industrial designers of the last decades. For him, seriousness and lightness, strict functionality and high aesthetics are not opposites, but depend on each other. His intelligent, consistent and sustainable approach shows us that good design is not just beautiful, but that its meaning for society goes far beyond that.” The DPMA President also honoured Rams as inventor as well as author and co-author of many patent and utility model applications. “The fact that some of Dieter Rams’s innovations have been protected by means of patents and utility models demonstrates the great importance technological functionality has in his work.”

At the awards ceremony in Riga (Latvia) the European Union Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO) celebrated the life’s work of the 92-year-old long-time Head of Design of the electronics company Braun and professor of Industrial Design. The EUIPO jury honoured him as a “pioneer of both design and sustainability” who “has designed more than 200 iconic devices and has shaped the look and functionality of consumer products for decades”. Dieter Rams was not able attend the awards ceremony in person; the Managing Director of the Dieter and Ingeborg Rams Foundation, Professor Klaus Klemp, accepted the award instead. The German Patent and Trade Mark Office was represented by Vice-President Bernd Maile.

Dieter Rams was born in Wiesbaden in 1932. He studied architecture and completed an apprenticeship in carpentry. In 1955 he started working for Braun, first as an architect and interior designer, then as designer and head of the design department. From 1981 to 1997 Rams was also a professor for Industrial Design at the University of Fine Arts in Hamburg, and from 1987 onwards he was president of the German Design Council for ten years. Many of his works are world famous; several of his appliances and pieces of furniture are part of the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

You can find a detailed portrait of Dieter Rams on our website.

Die DesignEuropa Awards vergibt das EUIPO jährlich in den Kategorien „größere Unternehmen“, „Unternehmer und kleine Unternehmen“, "Next Generation Design" und für das Lebenswerk.

The German Patent and Trade Mark Office

Inventiveness and creativity need effective protection. The DPMA is the German centre of expertise for all intellectual property rights – patents, utility models, trade marks and designs. As the largest national patent office in Europe and the fifth largest national patent office in the world, our office stands for the future of Germany as a country of inventors in a globalised economy. Its staff of just under 2,800 at three locations – Munich, Jena and Berlin – provide services to inventors and companies. They implement federal innovation strategies and develop the national, European and international protection systems.

Bilder: Guenzel Rademacher Rams Foundation, YouTube-Stream des EUIPO von der Preisverleihung, DPMA

Last updated: 5 November 2024