Richard Sapper: Fifty Years at the Drawing Board

At 75, design pioneer Richard Sapper continues to push his craft in new directions

by Steve Hamm

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To get to Richard Sapper's studio in central Milan, you have to take a creaking, 100-year-old elevator to the fourth floor of the apartment building where he and his wife have lived for decades. The elevator has the original dark wood paneling, and the ancient gears and pulleys hoist it upward at a glacial pace. So the feeling on approaching Sapper's lair is that you're traveling back in time. But Sapper, a pioneer of industrial design who got his start at Daimler-Benz in the mid-1950s, is not stuck in the past. Even at 75, he is still experimenting.

A German who adopted the world's fashion capital as his home, Sapper designs singular products that people keep for years and companies sell for decades—for example, the ThinkPad laptop for IBM (IBM) (Lenovo now owns the ThinkPad brand) or the Tizio Lamp for Italy's Artemide. A Sapper design often combines advanced technology, simplicity of form, and surprise. "The most important thing for me is to give everything I do a form that expresses something," he says. "It's not neutral. It has a point of view and a personality."

Which, to some, can be a problem. Corporations have awoken to the importance of industrial design to their marketplace performance, yet there's a heated debate over what's the best approach. On one side are the iconic designers, whether old like Sapper or young like Yves Béhar of San Francisco's Fuseproject, known for Birkenstock's trendy Footprints line. They create products the way painters create art—using their individual taste, skill, and intuition. Apple Inc.'s (AAPL) CEO Steve Jobs and chief designer Jon Ive belong to this camp. The alternative tack, represented by firms such as Boston's Continuum and Silicon Valley's IDEO, is all about using teams of designers, engineers, business strategists, ethnographers, and human factors specialists to produce more predictable sales results.

Each side has its proponents. "We need breakthroughs. They don't come from an experimental process. They come from the mind of a great designer," says Don Norman, professor at Northwestern University and author of the book The Design of Future Things. Gianfranco Zaccai, Continuum's president, fires back: "Real design is seldom done by one person, but rather it is best done by a group of people, with different skills and sensibilities, working together." Continuum boasts a long list of clients including American Express (AXP),American Greetings (AM), and Procter & Gamble (PG).

The fate of one of Sapper's most recent projects shows the risks a company takes when it relies too much on bold design to win in the marketplace. The Halley lamp, which Sapper created in 2005 for Lucesco, won awards but sold poorly. The lamp has a distinctive look, with long, graceful spindles and a fan-cooled light that looks a bit like a small aircraft. The Halley was too expensive to build, however, and there simply wasn't enough demand for lamps that cost $510 to $640. Lucesco co-founder Curtis Abbott doesn't blame Sapper. "Going for an iconic designer and for Richard was not a mistake," says Abbott. "Our mistake was we didn't have the market research to help us understand the sales potential for this product."

Sapper has plenty of satisfied customers. Over a career spanning 50 years, he has designed more than 200 products—everything from the rearview mirror on the 1956 Mercedes 300SL Roadster to the 1998 Zoombike foldable bicycle for Elettromontaggi. "I think that I have proved through my work that you do not need big teams to create innovation. As a matter of fact, big teams often act as brakes to innovation," he says. "However, you need big teams to translate innovative ideas into mass-produced products."

As you might expect, Sapper often works alone.