Dhat would be a box seat for a journey into the history of German railway design: Ursula Bartelsheim, curator of the DB Museum in Nuremberg, pulls the white dust cover off the upholstered armchair. A single seat of the first Intercity generation (IC) presented in 1965 appears underneath. Stripes in yellow, orange and dark coffee brown shine between the red plush surfaces. Right next to it, seats point to the history of the Intercity-Express, or ICE for short: the voluminous armchair with a small pattern in carmine and blue and interfaces to the on-board media system dates from 1988. In 2005 the filigree high-tech seat with blue leather had its premiere, which refers to the sober, functional modernity in the interior of today’s high-speed traffic.
Unfortunately, the visitor is not allowed to take a seat in any of the three railway armchairs. Because the stalls – like a plush baroque armchair from the “Rheingold” from 1928 – are among the exhibits in the new special exhibition “Bahn & Design”, which opened in the DB Museum in Nuremberg on Friday and which will run until June 12, 2022 will be seen.
Product and communication design accompany every train journey even before boarding the train: How are the routes to the platform marked? How do the shape and color of the vehicles correspond to their function? Which solutions did the designers choose for the balance between ergonomics and efficient use of space? What role do uniforms and corporate clothing play in the perception of employees?
Railway and design
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Good design for the track
The many approaches suggest that you should deal with the topic more intensively. In Germany, however, little has happened so far beyond car design, says Oliver Götze, director of the DB Museum. “That is why this show is also a research exhibition,” the cultural and technical historian classifies. Other countries are further here, including Switzerland and Holland. The reflection of the design history of public transport is also pronounced in Great Britain. Here, in particular, the graphic world of the London subway is discussed again and again.
A small self-experiment with the exhibition catalog published by Oliver Götze, Ursula Bartelsheim and Janina Baur shows how memorable the railway design affects everyday German perception: a full-page graphic shows seven color fields as a sequence of black, white and red ribbons underneath an abstract blue sky triangle. This can be deciphered as a representation of the ICE, the details of which have been blurred into homogeneous surfaces by the speed. After the successful development of the Intercity-Experimental, this high-speed train first brought today’s long-distance traffic colors onto the rails in regular operation in 1991. In addition to the red ribbon, there are now also belly bands in blue (as a symbol for Europe), green (an expression of environmental friendliness) and, since July, in rainbow tones (“Railbow” for diversity and tolerance).
Keyword tolerance: in the history of German railway design there have also been tough confrontations between designers. The exhibition makes this clear in the debate about the design of the new logo for Deutsche Bahn AG in the early 1990s. The designer Kurt Weidemann was commissioned, who first of all thoroughly panned out the “Bundesbahn biscuit” of the 1950s. This led to a high-profile dispute with the typographer Erik Spiekermann, which was carried out in specialist magazines and the public media.
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