Leica – an icon of photography and design – celebrates its first 100 years. In 100 years, Leica has been and still is an extraordinary direct spectator, facing the things that happen, inside and in front of history, the many stories of humanity.
To celebrate this anniversary, the centenary of the legendary Leica I, and to celebrate the present, tell about the evolution of a path and the vision of the future, Leica Camera Italia participates in the Milan Design Week with a stage of a global project that, After Dubai and before New York, it arrives in Milan, then continues to Wetzlar, Shanghai and Tokyo.
The Leica I, born from the intuition of Oskar Barnack and the entrepreneurial vision of Ernst Leitz II, has revolutionized the world of photography as the first mass-produced 35 mm camera. This milestone marked the beginning of an extraordinary journey, which led Leica to broaden its horizon beyond photography, exploring new opportunities, for example with the Leica Cine 1 and Leica Cine Play 1 for home cinema, and with the Leica ZM collection in watchmaking, Continuing the development in mobile together with Huawei before and Xiaomi today, and consolidating its know-how in areas directly related to image, such as lenses for glasses and cinema. All this always faithful to their DNA and their motto: Das Wesentliche, the essential.
For the occasion, we met with Mark Shipard, Head of Design at Leica, to talk about the present, past and future of the brand.
What’s the secret to create products that are both aesthetically pleasing and user -friendly at the same time?
As Matthias Harsch said, ‘to make simple thing it’s really complex’. Typically, when you start a new project, a new product idea, multiple people are involved: it’s design, it’s product management, it’s engineering. Everybody’s throwing in ideas and the difficult thing is cutting that back to what the customers really will not just need, but what they will really appreciate in the end. And the appreciation for our products from our customers comes often from the fact that we don’t overload stuff. There is a team at Leica in the meantime, a small but such a talented team of designers we have. It’s a great bunch of people and everybody working very collaborative together.
I think it’s just something that Leica did since decades. But interestingly, you think, ‘okay, it’s a recipe, we just do it again on the next project’, but then you always go through the same process of filtering out, cutting back layers. Just trying to really figure out what is important to make a product that is something that somebody really loves. It’s beautiful but highly functional and when those things work in harmony, then you know, you’ve got it.
In these first 100 years of Leica, what have been the steps forward and what have remained unchanged throughout this time?
I think unchanged is this core, the idea is how to take a piece of technology, an idea, and make that understandable for a person to use for their everyday life. That was the invention of the 35mm camera. Before that, it had come with some huge box that many people had to carry. So this was not what we would call today user-centered design, and then 100 years ago somebody had an idea, Oskar Barnack, to make a user-centered approach to a camera. It was literally probably the first piece of mobile technology that people carried with them 100 years ago. That approach is still relevant.
Imagining the future of Leica, in how many other fields, besides photography and home cinema, you could or you would like to experiment?
We have 100 years at Leica today, but the design department last week was 10 years old. In these 10 years we have explored many fields of where Leica could go, in terms of new product categories and so forth beyond, that’s called the core of imaging, photography. We have of course our sport optic business unit as well which will also go through I think quite a transformation next year with some emerging digital technologies. So it’s been previously very mechanically optical from the nature, binoculars and so forth. And there’s a lot of very interesting emerging digital technologies that bring new solutions for new customers there on a sport optic basis. Then we have the world’s most modern producer for corrective lenses and, of course, the Smart Projection for home cinemas.
Mobile is for us photography as well, it’s a complementary way to do photography. It’s a form of photography that’s in everybody’s pocket and probably one of the greatest revolution to happen to this field in the last decades, because it just accelerates massively the amount of people taking images, whether they’re good or bad, it’s a personal thing. But the interest in photography got massive through mobile and we as Leica, we’re making also very good inroads here on the software side with apps, with our partner company Xiaomi now. And I think they’ll be very excited to see what comes there in the next year or two. So I think we have, with photography, sports and corrective optics, mobile telephony, intelligent projection, several fields on which to experiment in the near future.
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