3. Pick a service with which you are familiar in an educational operation (such as your university, school or college) and evaluate it against Braun’s 10 principles. Which of these 10 principles do you think were the most useful in making your evaluation? Braun, the leading European manufacturer of small appliances, is renowned for the innovative and functional designs of its products (over 60 per cent of the company’s sales are of products that were launched within the last five years). The company has 150 of its products in the permanent collection of the Centre Pompidou in Paris and has 40 products on exhibition at the New York Museum of Modern Art. But Braun’s design principles go beyond the aesthetic. Its designers follow their ‘10 principles of good design’. We will describe the design of the Braun Multimix, the design brief of which was ‘to combine three specialist kitchen appliances

(blender, food processor, kitchen machine) in such a way that the new single product performs, at least, as well in each of the applications as the best equivalent specialized product’.

Braun’s 10 industrial design principles applied to the Multimix 1. Usefulness. The functionality of a product is the central reason for its existence. It was decided to align the motor, gears and attachments in a single vertical direction (competitive products have horizontal motor and vertical attachments, requiring a complex gearbox).

The’form’ of the product then follows its ‘function’.