DESIGN: The Origin of the ThinkPad Reserve Edition?

[beeblebrox]

As it is generally known the original ThinkPad was a notebook with real paper and bound in brown leather, with a large "THINK" printed on the front.

By pure coincidence I was searching for a new espresso machine and found one at Alessi last week.
Checking for details on the water pressure I checked the internet and interestingly found an article about its designer:
Richard Sapper, a German, Munich-born designer working in his own design studio in Milan for various companies. Among them Alessi.

Now:
Richard Sapper is the original designer of the Artemide Tizio desk lamp, which was a breakthrough minimalistic design with black elements and red design accents.
He also later designed the ThinkPad with identical design styles, which fits perfectly to the Tizio lamp.

Looking further for his other designs I came across a design from 1963 which you can see here:

http://www.io.tudelft.nl/public/vdm/fda ... /index.htm

Now, any similarity to the Thinkpad Reserve is, of course, pure coincidence.

Btw. There is another German designer, named Dieter Rams, who invented a lot of design icons in the 50's and 60's and who's design motif was "minimalistic beauty and functionality". He was the chief designer at BRAUN.

He was the designer of many design icons in the living room of a British family, named Ive. Their son, Jonathan, grew up with all these things and when he later became a designer he was heavily influenced by Rams' design. Years later he moved to California and became the chief designer at a certain "Fruit Company".
A lot of those current design toys of this "Fruit Company" have an utterly coincidental similarity to Jonathan's household articles during his childhood.

http://gizmodo.com/343641/1960s-braun-p ... les-future

(the calculator app in the iPhone is direct copy of a Braun calculator in the 70's)

So, in other words, designs of Thinkpads and Macs have German origin.
It is known that all first Mac generations were designed by FrogDesign, a studio of the German designer Hartmut Esslinger. Now the interesting part is that all three designers are from the same region, southern Germany and they all studied at universities down there with professors of the same design school. Somehow it all goes back to the good old Bauhaus design.

[Trekk69]

Very interesting connection, thanks

[JaneL]

Looking down through Design Matters, it appears that he's still involved in ThinkPad design:

http://lenovoblogs.com/designmatters/?s=sapper