One evening last October, Apple’s tight-knit team of designers took their seats in San Francisco’s Castro cinema, excited to watch the premiere of a new documentary about their hero Dieter Rams.
去年10月的一个晚上，相互间关系密切的苹果(Apple)设计师团队在旧金山的Castro电影院落座，兴奋地等待观看一部有关他们的英雄——迪特•拉姆斯(Dieter Rams)的最新纪录片的首映。
The legendary former head of design at German electronics manufacturer Braun, Mr Rams’ simple and elegant line of appliances, clocks and record players embodied his maxim of “less, but better”. His influence has been felt keenly by Apple design chief Jony Ive, who has brought that ethos to his iPods, iPhones and dozens more Apple products over the past 20 years.
这位传奇人物是德国电子产品制造商博朗(Braun)的前设计总监，他为电器、钟表以及唱机设计的简单和优雅的线条，体现出他的“少，却更好”的箴言。苹果设计总监乔纳森•艾夫(Jonathan Ive)深受他的影响，过去20年里，艾夫把这种理念应用于他的iPod、iPhone等数十款苹果产品。
But as the film played, it turned out Mr Rams was uncomfortable with some parts of that legacy. Gary Hustwit’s documentary shows him standing in a bustling Apple Store, lamenting that people spend more time looking at their iPhone screens than each other, and deeply concerned about the environmental impact of all the gadgetry that surrounds him.
但随着影片的播放，观众们了解到，拉姆斯对自己留下的设计传奇的某些部分并不自在。加里•休斯维特(Gary Hustwit)的这部纪录片显示，拉姆斯站在一家繁忙的苹果商店(Apple Store)里叹息道，人们盯着手机屏幕的时间超过了对彼此的关注，同时他对身边所有这些设备的环境影响深感担忧。
“There’s no future with so many redundant things,” Mr Rams says. “Less but better is not just a design concept — it’s also about our behaviour.”
“有这么多冗余的东西，哪里还有未来？”拉姆斯说道，“少，却更好不只是一种设计概念，它也关乎我们的行为。”
He adds: “We have to be careful now, that we rule over the digital world, and are not ruled by it.”
他补充称：“我们现在必须谨慎，我们要统治数字世界，而不是被它统治。”
There is little question about the creative impact that Sir Jonathan, who has announced his departure from Apple, has had in Silicon Valley and far beyond it. His team is credited with bringing high-quality design to a mass market through aspirational products such as the iPhone and elevating the industry’s standards in the process.
已宣布将从苹果离职的乔纳森爵士，在硅谷乃至更广泛世界产生的创造性影响几乎是不容置疑的。他的团队被誉为把高质量的设计通过iPhone等令人神往的产品带给大众市场，在此过程中提升了行业的标准。
“What we’ve seen in the last generation or so is a transformative attitude towards design,” says Ben Evans, director of the London Design Festival. “You can give a huge amount of credit to Jony and his time at Apple.”
“过去一代人时间里，我们看到人们对设计的态度发生转变，”伦敦设计节(London Design Festival)总监本•埃文斯(Ben Evans)表示，“这一切在很大程度上要归功于乔尼和他在苹果的时间。”
But after two decades that saw Apple introduce the clean Rams aesthetic to hundreds of millions of new consumers, the movie may prove to be a wake-up call for Silicon Valley. The priorities of many consumers are changing. A new generation of environmentally conscious consumers may no longer fetishise a Macbook’s aluminium unibody or see the latest iPhone as less of a status symbol than their predecessors.
但在苹果将干净简洁的拉姆斯审美观带给数亿新消费者20年后，有关拉姆斯的这部纪录片可能被证明是给硅谷敲响的警钟。很多消费者的优先事项在发生变化。新一代有环保意识的消费者可能不再迷恋Macbook的铝质一体机身，或者不再认为新款iPhone像前几代一样是身份的象征。