活動消息
1) Hello, you are often called a Renaissance man, can you elaborate why?
My friends call me that. I do a lot of very modern things routed with the long and diverse experience of an older man. Raised in an entrepreneurial family, I was exposed to a wide band humanistic education including nine years of Latin, much classical music,various instruments, and composing.
Jesuit holistic thinking drives my brain,and in the end I became a broad range experimental scientistworking with particle accelerators, nuclear reactors, and NASA space stations, but also with factory automation and mining of materials as ingrained in my personal family genes.
Along the way, my nomadic behavior mademy various hobbies center around things I can do alone:Cooking, sailing, piano, photography,horse riding, flying, but also art collecting,composing of music on the spot, and studying wines.
Last not least, I have a passion for simple calm designs from Roman cathedrals
to Bauhaus factories and Tadao Ando’smuseums and houses.
The biggest ‘damage’ was inflicted on me by Dieter Rams with whom I worked directly for over a decade and whosefurniture and audio designs I have personally owned for over 50 years.
Dieter Rams transitions me nicely to 2012 our minimalist Soundmatters branded foxLsand Ives Behar’s Jamboxes, which contain my ownminiature audio designs.They are close to my heart but driven by physics hoping to make good music systems pocket-portable, and affordable. Maybe I am not a renaissance man but naissance man?
2) We read your tag line on Soundmatters : Simply. Better.Can simple be better?
All the BEST things appear simple to the USER.
On the inside there are many layers and interconnects of simple concepts to form a complex whole. The guts of our products are quite inter disciplinary and is distilled to the greatest achievable outside simplicity and calm for ease of use.
Take two recent examples: Soundmatters’originalfoxL and Jawbone’s newer JAMBOX.
No doubt, that Ives Behar did the better job of translating form to user interface, but possibly, I did the better job on pocket portability. Both are viable outcomes!
3) Can you tell us about how Soundmatters came about?
Good men must have a midlife crisis before they can become renaissance men.
I was tired of form follows function, making products for rich people only, and limiting the result to exclusive distribution channels.
It was the sound fidelity that mattered! Not the shape, the budget or the store channels.
So itwas easy to say good bye to BRAUN and a/d/s/ and I locked myself up in my lab to question and reform what I had done in the past:
Less bulk, less material, less energy, less cost of ownership,more sustainable- allledto some of my patents.There was an opportunity to shrink the size and lower the cost of great sounding speakers.
Luckily, I was not alone in wanting to create a more affordable and also more immersive multi-media space, where poor quality audio was still the norm.
So I started up Soundmatters, initially strictly as an R+D firm, then added our own brand to showcase our new designs in the market and to license them to a few
Likeminded. I intend to continue this direction as you will soon see. There is never an end, only a new beginning.
4) Your education background is very radically different from a typical
industrial designer, how has that helped you with the processes in your
company?
Correct: I am not an industrial designer and I would never be a great one.
From time to time- through my broad interests and skills- through long exposure and several excellent famous designer teachers have I been able to make my own products from scratch - such as our foxL or our new foxLO micro subwoofer.
I am not even engineering or acoustics “trained.” My advanced education was in physics, chemistry and astronomy.
My shortcomings make me appreciate the true experts all the more. Our team is very international, interdisciplinary, and multi generational. (Quite a bit like Yanko Design except over broader age range?) We seek to network with the best in the field and have no contact fear and no not-invented-here problems.
We respect the IP of others as we like to have ours respected.
My background has been very helpful to appreciate that the devil is in the detail and that after that lessanything - including design- is better than more.
One must never lose sight of the objective and not forget that our products are meant for human use and enjoyment.
5) What according to you is innovation?
The Latin word says it all: brought in as new. Not existed before. In truth, very oftenevolution would be a more humble but more correct word. Sometimes, putting existing things together in a different way does create something truly new.
6) You have worked with Dieter Rams, and now you have seen the Appleproducts, there has always been a debate that Steve Jobs employed the
Principles of Good Design in his products too; what is you opinion on this?
It may not surprise you, that I consider Apple hardware design as a very good example of EVOLUTION not innovation beyond Dieter Rams’ BRAUN design language.
Apple software (Operating system and graphic user interface) to me are innovation.
7) What makes Soundmatters different from the other products out there in
the market?
Our company focus is putting our expertiseinto other companies’products, because we CAN.From time to time we market our own to keep in close touch with end-users.
We believe that the patented technologies for our acoustic drivers using exotic high tech materials, and the years of experience in utilizing them in a synergistic manner with state-of-the-art electronics create customer friendly audio systems soundingmuch better and larger than other similarly sized/priced products.
Our focus will stay on “SLIM” as in our upcoming 18mm thin micro soundbar:foxL Dash 7 designed to closely match 7” tablets and expandthem into pocket movie theaters with full range hi fi sound.
8) Which is the most iconic design that you resonate with?
Hard to improve: Needle
9) Words of advice for designers, who always seem to argue with engineers.
Unless it’s a sculpture, the Design must almost never drive the engineering. Good engineering is often very naturally elegant, but engineers who love good proportions and material choices should be happy to oblige a designer’s wishes.
10) Which is your favorite color.why?
No color: I follow Dieter Rams: Black and white! (asappear Steve Jobs and Jonathan Ive!)
But rules work most convincingly once there are exceptions. Then, I pick first natural materials, and then blue.
Why: Calm, easy to live with and easy to reversibly accent by light and mood.
Thanks for asking,
Godehard A. Guenther