Richard Sapper: Fifty Years at the Drawing Board

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A small studio in his apartment overlooks Milan's sprawling, tree-dotted Parco Sempione plaza. There, he sits at a large table lit by lamps of his own design and cluttered with models, drawings, and notes to himself. At a meeting last fall, he wore his usual uniform of denim shirt and jeans and spoke in careful English. From time to time, he jumped up to grab an item off a shelf, or, in one case, to roll a Zoombike into the room to show how it folds up like an umbrella.

Sapper is something of a Renaissance Man. He grew up in Munich and Stuttgart and studied engineering, philosophy, and economics before shifting to design. There's a twinkle in his eye as he describes his first job at Daimler. "I made a whole series of proposals about how Mercedes should change the way it designs cars," he recalls. "I gave it to my boss. After two weeks he called me and said: Your proposals are very interesting, but naturally, Mercedes will never make cars like this.'"

Sapper decided on the spot that he didn't want to work in a large bureaucracy. He quit and moved to Milan. Over the next 18 years, he worked with famed architect and designer Marco Zanuso on a series of products, including the Grillo phone for Siemens (SI) in 1965, which presaged the clamshell design of today's mobile phones. Then he ventured out on his own. Says Paola Antonelli, curator of architecture and design in New York's Museum of Modern Art: "This is one of the rare instances when you can say that a master designer has designed consumer products that go everywhere."

His facility with technology and strong, simple forms led IBM to hire him as its principal industrial design consultant in 1980. Even though Big Blue then was an old-line company selling most of its big computers to corporations, it had a long history of using design to bolster its brand, beginning with its distinctive blue-striped logo. Sapper made his mark with the ThinkPad, which he conceived as an elegant plain black box with a surprise inside: a small red button for controlling the cursor on the display screen.

Before the ThinkPad came out in 1992, IBM's internal design team had done extensive research and even asked customers to draw what they thought a portable computer should look like. "Richard thought this was absurd," says Sam Lucente, who was an IBM designer then and is now vice-president for design at Hewlett-Packard (HPQ). "He was a purist."

These days, Sapper continues to push his craft in new directions. He worked with industrial designers at Lenovo this year to create a twist on the ThinkPad theme—the ThinkPad Reserve Edition, a limited-edition notebook computer clad in tan French leather. It's the first ThinkPad ever that wasn't black. A stylish new outdoor chair from Italy's Magis, called Tosca, is made of injection-molded plastic and stands up in any weather. A set of kitchen knives is coming from Italy's Alessi next year.

Alessi typifies the kind of client that hires brand-name designers. The company, whose products are sold in stores such as Macy's and Nordstrom, has built its reputation for fine kitchen utensils and appliances on the creativity of such designers as Achille Castiglioni, Michael Graves, and Philippe Starck. Sapper has done nine projects for Alessi, starting in 1977. The goal is to produce items that combine the designer's vision with the company's brand image. "Richard gets into long and hotly contested arguments with our engineers, but, at the end, the results are stunning and our technical skills are stronger," Managing Director Alberto Alessi says.

Sapper's opinions are as pointed today as they were back when he was first defining the industrial design profession. He's an enemy of fad and the throwaway culture. "I'm interested in fashion, but only as long as things stand up," he says. "It must stand up to time."

In his studio, at the end of a leisurely chat, he leans back in one of the Tosca chairs and ruminates when asked how his thinking has changed over the years. Finally, he says: "The most significant change is I see things clearer. I know more exactly what I want than I did when I was young." No room for a committee here.

Hamm is a senior writer for BusinessWeek in New York.