The American Scene; Contemporary Design

Good morning, this is Howard Benson doing the arts for the American scene for Illinois Institute of Technology. Lots and lots of arts, we've taken up and times past. One of the most significant arts for our time is, of course, the art of design. And this is particularly relevant to this very program because, since it is sponsored by Illinois Institute of Technology, we like time to time to call upon the resources of our own school. And I think Chicagoans know, informed Chicagoans know, that we have an excellent, probably the best in the country, to Chicago kind of description, Institute of Design. And to talk about the art of design, I've asked the director of the Illinois Institute of Technology School of Design to come down and be with us today, Jay Doblin, who is head of the department there. Jay, how

old are we starting out here? What limitation are we going to put to design today? Well, Howard, you say design today, today, I think we're in a bit of a design chaos, sort of a transitional state between beginning to learn how to design and what design means in the mass production economy we're living in, and where we will be, we hope, in 15 or 20 years when design becomes a really integrated force with technology. What you're saying is that we haven't, we've been designing on the basis of an old kind of outward economics or world, and we've got this mass industry and mass production, and we haven't brought our design up to date and are decordinated. No, not at all, Howard. The design, of course, covers the areas of graphics and visual things with newspapers, books, magazines,

and so on, and it also covers the products that we use, all of them, the automobiles, television sets, and so on that are being mass -produced. But in most cases, these are rather poorly integrated into the overall scene of architecture and city planning. And in essence, I have a feeling that as time goes on, the young designers that we're now training will be able to put a tremendous amount of control and make all these products fit together and much more harmony than they do today. Well, this disintegration, or this lack of, not disintegration because it hasn't been integrated yet. This lack of integration comes probably because they've been working in separate fields here and there and not understanding the work of the other fields and the not understanding social, psychological, economic forces. And here, I would gather that you would defend the position that these things can be brought together and coordinated and made effective through a school. Oh, definitely. Absolutely. You see, at IIT, the school of architecture, the school of city planning, the school of graphic design, photography, product design, are all under the same roof.

And this is going to have the young people meet each other on very common ground. In addition to that, as the fields mature, remember the field, for example, of industrial design, those who design all these products that are being sold and such, the economy is based on them, is only not over 30 years old. And this is very young, indeed, compared to such professions as architecture, who can trace down to the Greeks and engineering that can be traced very back. Design in the past is only incidental, now it's become a section in the world in itself. A profession, a legal and organized profession, yes. Now, I don't want to make it sound as other designers, isn't doing a real job and doing a tremendous amount of work, except that we look at the world, the designer is now being involved in, as being a bit chaotic, as I said earlier, he's take a supermarket, for example, there's probably this mass

of 4 ,000 packages and products under a roof just screaming at each other, totally unorganized. Something will be done about that. In visual design, for example, I saw this marvelous chaotic performance at the national conventions, the man from Pennsylvania standing under a sign that said Missouri, these are just very fundamental things, which designers, I think, will be able to straighten out before too long. Well, I don't think you need to be entirely pessimistic, do you? Because when you think of the old grocery store, what a charming place it was, but completely chaotic, no organization whatsoever, no design. We can be also too organized, I think, probably some of our newest architecture, a box in a field, maybe a little overorganized, it becomes a little dull rather compared to a European city, for example. So over -designed, it isn't good design. Yeah, it becomes a little bit a little bit too intellectually controlled. I think you've got to have a

little chaos to transmit the human idea. How's the school going to do this? By having the variety of departments, for instance, and the disciplines of study, for instance, even as a subject of design, person ought to know something about materials. Oh, sure. Yes, we give a rather broad materials program, both in the engineering school and in our own school. I sort of like the old argument, or the old thing of Charlie Chaplin's modern times. This has been this to me the classic picture of modern civilization. Chaplin made this picture at a time when the mass production idea was just beginning to become understood. His picture showed the poor worker, a small entity, involved in two, the two major criteria of mass production, the division of labor. Remember, he was putting bolts in something, but he had no idea what it was. The picture never showed what the product was, and also the mechanization of hand processes, where the

thing stamps were before somebody hammered. For example, we're beginning to see these things creep into the home, which at the Institute of Design find rather amusing. The electric can open, for example. There's a marvelous example of mechanizing a hand operation, and rather foolishly, because the problem is the designer can that you don't need a can open for you. Oh, yes, of course. And so this is what we're trying to train our students to do. You know, see through the problem, rather than complicated. Instead of making a design a kind of blind, superficial blind idle, using intelligence, applying intelligence of all sorts to the problem. Sure, the ring to bear. That's right. And we try to get the students rather than to solve the immediate problem, to say, well, what is the problem? You know, the ideas to get food from place A to place B in some form that it's protected and usable and so on, and not bound up in such a way that you need all kinds of equipment and machinery to make the thing at all feasible. It's really abstract,

and you're really getting abstract there. Oh, yes. And this is the fun of being a designer, to find out, to try to make things simpler and easier and less complicated. And I look at the out -of -drive in Chicago, where the car is lined up with the hoods open on the hot day, and all, and the other hara, you know. I wait for two hours after work, as I would go home, so I don't get involved in it. I guess I'm more sensitive to this. Knowing full well, there's an answer for this thing, whether it's a small vehicle, or a wider road, or better access, or something. And I could send out a team of students who, in a matter of three or four days, can probably solve that particular problem, or solve the problem of the kitchen, or solve problems of this kind, and that's what we're training them to do. You're training them to know how to solve the problems in the terms of the exterior sense, but they've got to solve those problems in terms of political organization, in terms of city groups, in terms of people. And there is your headache. In other words, what you're saying these design people have got to be trained in sociology, and economics, and human relations.

Absolutely, yes. That's why we have our program in a university, of course, and then the student takes economics and sociology and psychology, and mathematics, and all of the subjects that must necessarily go along with being a designer. A design that has nothing to do with bending a piece of tubing is why are you bending tubing? And if you bend it, if you're going to bend a million of them, how is this thing going to integrate itself with society as exists? It's going to aggravate or help. Well, then there's morality involved here. Absolutely. Well, you mentioned something about the visual problems. Let's explore that a little bit more. What did you mean by that when you talked about the visual problem solving? Some instances. Well, we believe, and we're at the beginnings of this. There's been a lot in the writings and so on, but we believe that

up till now education has basically been of two types. And that is the verbal type in which the liberal education is based on that, I would say, largely, and most examinations, the IQ test, all of this are based on visual, I mean, on verbal communications. And it's very important on newspaper and all these things, the verbal communication straight out, books are verbal communications. And then the newer, and well, not newer necessarily, but the more interesting and more work being done, the field of what we call symbolic education. That is mathematics, all of the sciences where they're trying to get people to reduce facts to symbols and then turn symbols back to facts so they can predict what the facts will be. And this is the science education, and people have left the visual education, thinking directly in visual terms to the art schools. And the training of artists doesn't necessarily solve any problems, any given problems, because the artist is only solving problems which are inside himself.

They sensitize this person, and I'm not saying art is important, it's a terribly important thing. Except that the artist doesn't solve problems that strike mankind in totals, such as when you look down at Chicago Street, you see all these signs hanging up. Everybody's answered to getting their sign to read a little bit more, it's a double the size of it. So everybody doubles the size. This doesn't solve the problem at all, and only introduces disorder and ultimate unpleasantness, and the people become unable to read anything after while, because one sign covers the other. They can't see each other out. That's a mutual cancellation, the plate of spaghetti idea, you see. And so we try to teach our people, if you're called in to do a sign, how do you make your sign read, and how do you convince the people to take all the signs down and start all over so that the communications aspect is made clear, how do you get the each store to identify itself? And that's what we need of people trained to

solve problems visually. In other words, I, after all, am tied up with the field of verbal symbols and myself, and you say, and we certainly do live in the world of verbal symbols, but it didn't the world only of verbal symbols. By no means, no means. And we are in sense that we have not, we have been aware that these things exist, but we haven't been aware of the point of educating in the formal ways. We've been educating in speech, in language for two thousand, three thousand years. Yes. We are, but we have an individual term, except until the training, the training artists are not in terms of life in general. No, and it's beginning to tell on us, and one of the problems is that as our communications media increase, for example, if you look in your own home of the number of communications inputs in any day, telephone, telegrams, mail, newspaper, books, magazines, possibly television? Television. Radio, words coming in, clock's keeping time is a vast mass of

incoming information, which is increasing in intensity and and types day after day, the person begins to unable to cope with it, or else he gets himself to point where he doesn't pay any attention to it. And of course, this is a wrong thing. Well, what would he do about it? The person himself is rather unable to control it, unless he just cuts it all off and becomes a, builds a wall around himself. The problem is that the people who are controlling the communications, we hope the design of the visual communications in particular, become intelligent about the use and transmission of these things. Advertising, for example, is a tremendously powerful visual communications business. And yet they probably understand none of the basic facts of what people see and how they react and how they operate. Nobody has ever made a basic study as to how the visual picture word media operate. All they know is that if they have two girls in a boat smoking cigarettes or something like that,

that the sales respond in some roundabout way, but they don't know why or how or what this thing is. Well, they flared me here because certainly designers are working for all these media and that's right. And getting paid well some of them for it and yet you say they're not they're not aware. I don't think so. I don't think we understand the rudiments of it. And I think even in our generation, we may not understand the rudiments of it, but I think we're beginning to and talking like we are now. And with many students and many schools talking this way, slowly but surely, the rudiments will come through to so that the people after a while will begin to understand why they put an illustration in something or why. Don't these consumer studies do something with this? Studies of consumer reactions. Certainly consumers are reacting visually to things. Absolutely. And I should think that these consumer studies would become aware of this. Well, that is even more infant business than the

visual problem solving. Probably consumer research, particularly in visual research, is one of the newest sciences we know, a real baby with no background and no library of information at all. And that's beginning to gain some stature, but there are an awful lot of charlatans in the field too who are taking advantage of this because the businessman today feels highly inadequate to making these judgments and the expenditures, you must realize that tremendous is an average firm spending $10, $20, $30 million a year on advertising. He still doesn't understand or on product design too. Why does his product outsell somebody else's? They're both basically the same machine yet one outsells the other by twice. And it has something to do with the emotional overtones of the appearance of this thing. The effect of the effectiveness of color of lime. Absolutely. Yes. And this is a highly temporal thing too. It changes not only yearly, but maybe in some times in a matter of hours.

One new thing coming on a field can completely upset the public's attitude to that whole field. I mean, a lot of imitators will come along, but they ought to be able to predict more and more shrewdly, I think. Well, how would you like to be as a business executive responsible for making a decision on a business that may have $10 million of sales and like general motives, for example? Yes. And the sales up or down 10, 20 % can be easily bet on whether the thing looks right or not. I know recently my publisher put out a series, I won't mention his name, their name. It's not a single person. Put out a series of paperbacks. They've absolutely done. They had good scholars working on them. These are very effective teaching instruments, reading instruments, but the design, I mean, just the visuals. They're horrible books. Now it seems to me that any intelligent, any person, any taste whatsoever wouldn't put out such monstrosities yet they did it. This is what we've been talking about. The fact is that how do you bring to people the idea that this is terribly

important, that the visual parts have to be in complete harmony with the rest of the program? And when I say harmony, I mean that a chair must look like a chair, not a rocket chair. Well, it must look like a chair, but it must act like a chair. This is, and if it acts like a chair, it looks like a chair, you insist. So you usually as a circular relationship, if the thing really performs, it will probably be as a parents, if it isn't too badly doctored up by some foolish designer, it'll look pretty good. What these people are fighting, of course, when they try to do rocket chairs, is they're fighting the concept there, such a thing as an ideal, platonic sense, ideal chair, and they say chairs is the form follows a function, but that's a little bit too simple too. I mean, you've got this. Well, the form

following function was a marvelous idea, except that take a table radio, what function are you going to follow? The function of sound? What does the function of sound look like for this form to follow it? There's no function. This function of control, which is the knobs and dials, is it all a great big dial, or the function of the electronic mechanism, most of those are covered up by, and so on, so that the form follows function. Some objects have functions which are on it, you have no forms to match them, you say? You know, inevitable form. Certainly. So you can take many, and also I have a feeling that if you take 10, really first -rate designers, they'll get 10 different forms, expressing the same function. Well, this, if you're arguing at the beginning, this is confusion, you've just born it out, if you get the 10, the docus of the ones who are supposed to be able to diagnose the case, if they diagnose 10 different ways, why does it support

Lehman to do? The Lehman, I think, will respond to the visual and a purely emotional way. All right. Then you've got to study human emotions. Absolutely. It's the basis of all the arts. And what you're saying is the importance of psychology in the study. Do you make your students take courses in psychology? We do. Absolutely. And of course, design itself is a psychological study. Sociological study, too, because mobility and directions that people's and mass take, too, have a profound effect on design. In other words, if people are going to crowd together, obviously the things can't be so big and so forth, so that the two have bearing on each other. Do you feel that the design person can sort of push, and this is a hope of advertising, is that push and direct taste and reaction by one device or another?

I would say that designer could. He could, if he knew more about the emotions, that's right. He can lead the public. He should be able to, by his thorough knowledge of how people will respond. You're critical of this ad, which has two sexy gals and so on, breaking out with a bottle of beer or something else over near here. And yet, those people know that two pretty gals are very potent appeal. That's right. That'll bring readership attention to that taste. They've sold everything from spark plugs through, I suppose, renting elephants with that same device. You resent that from the design part of you, but that is emotionally and advertisingly rather effective. Yes, you trade on the very basic desires and drives of people. Of course, I have a feeling that you'd be better to try to find out what your product is supposed to do. And then match

it up with the desire that is meaningful to that product. And we'd get a little less crass approach, I think, then, to just picking off symbols and which are perfectly obviously attractive to try to hang something on. This particular example, I always smile when I think of the average engineering trade publication. And every one of them is at least ten ads for fasteners or steel or something. It always has a picture of a beautiful girl. Well, you know, there's this thing really, there's this idea really fit the attitude that they want to generate. This is almost an insult, isn't it, to the engineer to put that kind of advertising in one of his journals, because all that he had to, that would attract him yet that's very human. I would say so. I would have a feeling that if you really went down into it, you could find a more

attractive and more communicative method. You could use other devices, because besides say the sexual, you could use the wet irony. And you could use actual design on the page. It would be much more correct, tasteful, I would say. There are occasional, to come back to ads, there are occasionally ads that you'd like to, almost to put on the wall, not very many other, but occasionally you have one that constitutes that attractive. There are some companies that do a beautiful job. And because they're experimenting, you know, they're trying to do such a beautifully tasteful job of advertising, the problem is, does this thing really get to the reader in this American civilization the way other types do? But I think they're finding out that with intelligent design they can. The thing can be properly directed, a very high level of taste and aesthetics, and still come across with just this powerful message. And in the long run, it suits the company better to have

the message, which is parallel to its long -range plan, not the short -range plan. Probably this is the problem of today's business is that too many people looking at the short gain, and not enough at the long plan, which is going to tend to screw up, I'm afraid, the temporary situation. That's why I started and said we are in a transitional state, because the businessman is too often concerned with how his balance sheet looks at the end of this year, and that means he's got to do something immediately to prevent that from moving there. That aborted director is back. And that means his advertising, his product design, so on a roll made using the most successful and obvious techniques that can't fail, the guarantor, the riskless choice. And I think now that our bigger companies are being operated by a much newer brighter, I'm not saying they're smarter, but they have a lot more

imaginative. They look at the corporation as being a more long -range affair, not their own lives, because they don't own them anymore. They're simply professional managers. I think they see this thing as building the idea of the corporation, whatever it happens to be, where they want it to be strength or a public service. They have a higher motive than simply business doing. Now let's get to this from another point of view. You're talking in your school, you're training people who are going out to be designers, but what about training people who are not going out to be designers to be aware of these problems? General courses in design, in principles of design, which would be taken by, I won't say this to be required, the way freshman composition is required, but why not? We should have be sophisticated in this. Well, we believe, of course, in training for trying to train people to be visual sensitive and have some degree of judgment emotionally and visually, which you'd be amazed hard, the executives who make million -dollar decisions hourly who can't pick out

their own neckties. I have no doubt about it. They have no eyes at all. They feel completely unsure of themselves aesthetically. That's right. Well, they are. And so they must be allowed. Look at their houses. They rely on consultants to provide all this information for them. It would be better if all these people could be trained to have confidence in their own essence. In other words, they must be educated people. I mean, educated a good, not a silly superficial sense. And one of the parts of education I'm playing, your department up, is that a general course be given, or a course be given in which general students, it's among my majors, could come over and learn something about the principles of design. That's right. Well, it's happening now, Howard. Take any good home economics department today, for example, has an interior design course. Some of them given on a very poor level, but others given on an excellent level, where the girls are trained and what is good taste, and where a good furniture can be obtained, and what is long -wearing cloth. And so they have some idea

when they're confronted with the, say, the $200 ,000 worth of purchases they'll make during their lives. And I suppose it amounts to something like that, including their home and so forth, that they'll make little better decisions than they would have made without such an education. Well, surely. Well, maybe we ought to work out. I'm thinking of our school. We have the problem here of educating people who are going out and take management positions and important positions here and there. I mean, not the design students are not my English majors, but generally, in general engineering students. And if we can work out some kind of principles, the principles of visual forms, as well as the principles of the language that we have, our business, or the principles of symbolism, which is in the, let's say, the philosophy department, but if we can work out principles of visual form, this would be a good course. Howard, I certainly hope we'll have a chance to go on with this work, and that's what we're planning to do. This is all part of this plan of visual education. Well, the two that institutes of design, schools of design, are fairly

new thing in absolutely. This is a spread of them, so they are growing and working towards formulations. Yes, I think we've come a long way, but we still have a long way to go. A long way to go, surely. Well, thank you very much, Dave Doblin, for coming in and talking to us about the design. We have just touched upon the surface of the surface of the surface, but it is a tremendous problem. And I hope that this is a roused people to an awareness of it and come back again sometime, Dave. Thank you.