Demystifying the Bauhaus as a reference in design education and as the fountain-head of modern industrial design

It does not happen often that you find a rational critique of a widely agreed truth. John Heskett in his book 'Industrial Design' (1980) presents a series of criticisms that provide a good counterbalance to all the praise the Bauhaus you have probably come across in multiple books, exhibits, conferences, etc. Rather than paraphrasing, I have copied the fragment here so you don't miss any detail of the author's great discourse. I strongly encourage you to go and buy a second hand copy of Heskett's book. It is a great read and, according to some pundits, one of the first books to provide a comprehensive history of Industrial Design.

[Extract from Page 101]

"In Germany, the belief that art and life could be reconciled by abstract artists creating universally relevant forms for industry came to be identified, above all, with the Bauhaus, the teaching institution founded at Weimar in 1919 following the amalgamation of the art and craft schools under the directorship of Walter Gropius. In the 1920s it was the focus of enormous publicity, arousing enthusiasm or opprobrium depending on one's point of view, and its closure by the nazis in 1933 earned it a kind of institutional canonization that has only recently been questioned.

To attempt to disentangle the web of myth and actuality surrounding the Bauhaus would require a separate volume, but two aspects of its reputation require consideration here: the first is the claim that the method of education evolved there was uniquely appropriate to industrial design; the second, that the institution is to be regarded as the fountain-head of modern industrial design

In the early years of the Bauhaus, the stress was placed on uniting art and craft. The foundation of the educational structure was the Vorkurs, or preliminary course, initially developed by Johannes Itten, and compulsory for all students. It emphasized learning by doing. On a basis of theoretical studies, practical work explored and combined form, colour, material, and texture. There followed workshop training in a selected discipline of art, craft and, from 1924, architecture in which the basic Vorkurs method was applied to the chosen specialist activity.

Under Itten, the emphasis was metaphysical: on experiment as a means of self-discovery. After his departure in 1923, the Vorkurs was taken over by Lazlo Moholy-Nagy and Josef Albers, who stressed technical objectivity and abstract, geometric form supported by a Platonic idealist theory.

This change reflected a development in Gropius' ideas, with his advocacy in 1923 of 'art and technology: a new unity'. What this actually meant was summarized in a document entitled 'Principles of Bauhaus Production', written in 1926: 'The Bauhaus workshops are essentially laboratories in which prototypes of products suitable for mass-production and typical of our time are carefully developed and constantly improved.

'In these laboratories the Bauhaus wants to train a new kind of collaborator for industry and the crafts, who has an equal command of both technology and form. To reach the objective of creating a set of standard prototypes which meet all the demands of economy, technology and form, requires the selection of the best, most versatile, and the most thoroughly educated men who are well grounded in workshop experience and who are imbued with an exact knowledge of the design elements of form and mechanics and their underlying laws.'

Gropius' terminology needs to be examined in the context of Bauhaus practice in order that his statement may be evaluated. The Bauhaus 'workshops', for example, remained craft-based, and the experience gained in them bore little relation to industrial practice. The Bauhaus concept of 'standards' differed similarly from the industrial concept, Gropius using it in the same sense as Muthesius and Le Corbusier, as a cultural type defined in terms of aesthetic form. Gropius' ideas of economy and form linked to underlying laws display the tendency to aesthetic abstraction evident also in contemporary art movements. This is hardly surprising, for the Bauhaus was a meeting-ground of many of the ideas and personalities already discussed in this chapter. Gropius and Le Corbusier had worked together under Peter Behrens; El Lissitsky visited the Bauhaus in 1921; and Vassily Kandinsky, leader of the Vchutemas painting course, left Russia in 1922 to become a Bauhaus teacher. Theo van Doesburg from Holland was also a visitor in 1921-2.

If the results of Gropius' policy are assessed in terms of Bauhaus prototypes actually put into production, the results are quantitatively insignificant. Marcel Breuer and Mies van der Rohe developed a series of designs for tubular steel furniture, produced by Thonet and Standard Möbel of Berlin, that exploited the structural qualities of the material to produce very original and widely imitated forms; Marianne Brandt and Hans Przyembel designed lights for Schwintzer and Graff of Berlin and Körting and Mathiesen of Leipzig; Gerhard Marcks, Marguerita Friedlander, Otto Lindig and others had ceramic-designs produced by several firms including the prestigious Staatliche Porzellanfabrik in Berlin.

The Adler Cabriolet designed by Gropius appeared in 1930, after he had resigned from the Bauhaus, but it illustrates his approach to design. It was an expensive vehicle, constructed in limited quantities by coach-builders using craft methods. Its severe geometric emphasis was modified by the rounded edges of the bodywork. Though it was large and stately, the rear end was poorly handled, with, literally, a trunk for storage: a large box resting on a protruding frame. The integration of such elements was becoming commonplace in production cars, but neither this example, nor the technical advances introduced by Ford, nor the ideas on streamlining developed in Germany in the previous decade, find any recognition in Gropius' work.

In sum, the list of industrial product emanating from the Bauhaus was hardly sufficient in range or accomplishment to warrant sweeping claims regarding its significance. In the context of the overall development of design in one of the world's leading industrial nations, moreover, Bauhaus products appear no more than a minuscule contribution from an avant-garde fringe group.

Its educational significance, in contrast, has been enormous, its methods forming the basis of art education in institutions the world over; though the history of its most notable successors, the New Bauhaus at Chicago, and the Hochschule für Gestaltung at Ulm in Bavaria, again cast doubt on the appropriateness of Bauhaus methods as a preparation for industrial design.

The New Bauhaus, founded in 1937, and later incorporated into the Illinois Institute of Technology, owed its existence to the indefatigable commitment of Lazlo Moholy-Nagy and his wife Sybil. Established as a direct successor to the Bauhaus, it brought a new dimension to creative education in the United States. Yet, as was later pointed out by the journal Industrial Design, most of its alumni were employed as artists, craftsmen and teachers, and not as designers in the industry.

The Hochschule für Gestaltung, Ulm, was inaugurated in 1955, largely as a result of initiatives by Max Bill, its first director and a former Bauhäusler. Its early existence was scarred by deep controversy between Bill and his deputy, Tomás Maldonado. Bill had conceived of Ulm as an institution for 'promoting the principles of the Bauhaus'. Maldonado argued that those principles could only be realized by abandoning Bauhaus methods; the emphasis on new forms was irrelevant; instead it was necessary to formulate principles and new methodologies which would enable designers to cope flexibly with the complex demands of technology and industry. Bill failed to gain adequate support among the staff and resigned as director, to be succeeded by Maldonado.

Whatever reservations may be expressed about the Bauhaus, the fact of its enormous influence is undeniable. The varied community of talent gathered together by Gropius was highly individualistic, but developed, too, a strong corporate identity. When scattered by emigration from the Third Reich, the members of this community carried with them a deep sense of conviction that had a profound impact wherever they worked and taught, and was reaffirmed by large numbers of student and adherents. What the Bauhaus was, appears to have been less important than what its members and followers believed it to be. Its influence, far greater than the sum of its practical achievements, is above all a testimony to the power of ideas."

The Principle of Proportionality Applied to Design

In law, "the concept of proportionality is used as a criterion of fairness and justice in statutory interpretation processes, especially in constitutional law, as a logical method intended to assist in discerning the correct balance between the restriction imposed by a corrective measure and the severity of the nature of the prohibited act. Within municipal (domestic) law, it is used to convey the idea that the punishment of an offender should fit the crime."

From Proportionality [wikipedia]

A beautiful design is the one that uses just the right amount of solution elements to solve a given problem.

A design that does not provide enough features to successfully solve a problem falls short on its objective as a product and and can be declared a functional failure: users can't satisfy their needs with it and need to eventually acquire another product that actually works as they hopped.

A design that provides a big and overblown solution to a minimal problem has no design credibility and is a ethical failure: users have been led to believe that they needed such a product when in reality something simpler would have sufficed. In addition to cheating users with more gaudy and expensive products, there is also the excess of product material that is unnecessary and violates the most basic fundamental sustainable design principles.

In design, the proportional law should be used to convey the idea that the magnitude of a solution should fit the problem.

Image: Powers of 10, Charles and Ray Eames

Is there a Future for Learning Clubs?

"Learning is inherently conversational"

Roger Schank, AI theorist

A painted sign outside the 'Darts Central' club in San Francisco invites people to join: "Learn to play. Join today". If you are someone who has never played darts before why would you consider joining a club to learn the sport instead of doing it at home?

This simple example can give us an indication of the future of learning and how powerful collaborative learning spaces will be for knowledge workers. First of all, curious and restless people (who usually earn a living as knowledge workers) always have topics of interest that they want to expand their knowledge of. In addition, it is a proven fact that meeting other people with the same interests and having conversations about it accelerates learning. If we agree that the importance of learning is only going to increase in the next years, here we can make the case we will see an increase in the amount of 'learning clubs': physical spaces that are dedicated to collaborative learning (as opposed to formal learning).

Clubs that focus on physical activities are plentiful and people that like to engage in such practices have plenty of choices: health-focused people have spas, gyms, soccer fields, public parks, beaches, etc. ; Cooking-focused people have markets, kitchens, public bbq grills, picnic, etc.

But what about people that want to focus on knowledge activities? What are some of the places that bring people together around a specific topic and facilitates the happening of conversations? Some examples: Dungeons & Dragons fans meet in basements of board game shops, or around people's dinning tables. People attend conferences to hotels in Las Vegas or at local hangouts but these places are not permanent and they are only useful for one-off  events. Cafes are generic enough that they can accommodate any conversation-driven activity that would lead to learning something new.

So if there is no generic and flexible place for such activities, what could be done about this? How would you enable a place where people with similar knowledge-based interests could gather? Where associations live today? Do they have a private space that they use solely for collective learning? Is there an opportunity to create spaces where people and associations can come together and make an ephemeral use of it? What should be the role of the people running this space? Like the darts club, there should be some basic learning and a good amount of social gluing so people can meet. Can people work from there? Is this a members-only club? What is the ultimate goal of that kind of space? Is it to connect people to knowledge by means of other people (peers, facilitators, etc.) and intense use of information technologies?

How much people pay for a gym today? Would people be willing to pay a monthly fee to maintain brain fitness? Is there such thing as a 'knowledge gym'? a place where you can go and keep fresh the body of knowledge you have and acquire new skills and capabilities? What are the components you would need? Is it just access to content? Meeting the right people and discussing the topics themselves? Knowledge matchmaking maybe? Could you get a personal knowledge trainer (or learning coach?) that points at the essential activities you need to meet your learning goals?

A physical gym can be very individualistic (you control what you are doing at all times and there is no need for negotiation with anyone else) and team sports are also very physically regulated about what can be done and what not. So what about a team learning sport? What kind of values and etiquettes should regulate the exchange of ideas? What kind of model interactions you can propose to people so they can interact in a way that is desirable and beneficial to all involved parties?

People who want to date have created their own ways of interacting: from speed dating (meeting someone for 5 minutes and follow up in case they like the other person) to start-with-coffee-and-if-I-like-him-we-will-go-for-dinner technique so you are not stuck for a full dinner with someone you know for sure you won't like to date in the future. Can we apply the same engagement models to learning? Can I chat for 5 minutes with someone about something I want feedback on? Can you teach me about this topic for 30 minutes? Can you teach me and my friends for 1 hour about this topic you know a lot about?

If these exchange happens, how do people get rewarded? Should it be a point system? should knowledge be quantified so it is part of a bartering system? the more you give, the more points you have, which later you can use to get access to new knowledge? It could function as a real-world manifestation of a knowledge system like Quora: the more credits you get, the more questions you can ask to people.

An effective learning method balances between social and personal, or more specifically between socializing knowledge (collaborative) and reflecting on knowledge (personal). You need quiet time to reflect about things and internalize. You also need social time to contrast your opinions and your thinking with others' to cancel biases. How can we encourage people to balance this two learning modes?

This obviously presents more questions than answers right now but if the knowledge-based economy is going to increase its share of the total economy in the near future, someone will have to figure out how to serve the needs of all these knowledge workers that are constantly looking for learning experiences as a way to achieve personal growth.

Will we soon see 'learning clubs' in the major knowledge cities of the world?

There are two types of thinkers: those who look to confirm their beliefs and those who are open to change their beliefs

"The fox knows many things, 

but the hedgehog knows one big thing"

-- Archilochus, 700 BC.

The metaphor of the fox and the hedgehog gives a sense of "the deepest differences which divide writers and thinkers and maybe human beings in general":

Hedgehogs

• Relate everything to a single central vision
• One system less or more coherent or articulate, in terms of which they understand, think and feel-a single, universal, organizing principle in terms of which alone all that they are and say has significance
• Seek to fit [experiences and objects] into, or exclude them from, any one unchanging, all-embracing, sometimes self-contradictory and incomplete, at times fanatical, unitary inner vision.
• Examples: Dante, Plato, Lucretius, Pascal, Hegel, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Ibsen, Proust

Foxes

• Pursue many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory, connected, if at all, only in some de facto way, for some psychological or physiological cause, related by no moral or aesthetic principle
• Lead lives, perform acts, and entertain ideas that are centrifugal rather than centripetal
• Their thought is scattered or diffused, moving on many levels, seizing upon the essence of a vast variety of experiences and objects for what they are in themselves
• Examples: Shakespeare, Herodotus, Aristotle, Montaigne, Erasmus, Molière, Goethe, Pushkin, Balzak, Joyce

Full essay from Sir Isaiah Berlin

Photo: Edgar Arceneaux "Huckleberry Finn"

The Importance of Language in Design

“If you cannot write well, you cannot think well; if you cannot think well, others will do your thinking for you.” Oscar Wilde

Today, of all the designs that coexist, the valuable design is the design that have the ability to solve problems. Unlike other more palpable designs, this practice requires a deep understanding of a given situation and an impeccable thought process that connects - in a logical manner - a proposed solution to its originating questions.

Language provides the building blocks of robust thinking. Without it, there is no way you can identify and manipulate the abstractions required to process the reality you want to change.

If we all agree that language is so critical to successfully conduct key design activities, how come language-related courses (English literature, creative writing, rhetoric, etc.) aren't mandatory yet in design schools?

Language is at the core of designing. Lack of command of language indicates clouded thinking. Clearly articulated thoughts are an indication of sound thinking. When collaborating with others, when communicating in the context of design, every word counts, and extensive use of language matters. The nuances involved in choosing between one word versus another matter and can make a huge difference.

If we think about design as a spectrum we find on one end ideas and on the other end the final materialized solution. Language is the first tool you use to get closer to the solutions and to start defining them better. After thinking has produced a clear yet simple outcome you can move to basic diagrams, then sketches, then prototypes, and then build the real solutions; you move from the most abstract design expressed in words to the most real design manifested in atoms. If that first abstract step is shaky and does not provide a solid argumentative foundation on which to build the rest, then everything falls apart and it makes irrelevant how good you can be at any other phases of design.

When I attended design graduate school, one of the things that struck me the most was that people who had an undergraduate in humanities and no background in design where the ones that did best in school. Why was that? Because they are so used to deal with abstract ideas and concepts that for them the process of thinking, coming up with hypotheses, building arguments, identifying premises and reaching conclusions was something they had been trained for. The students with a pure design background struggled the most at the beginning because they came from a very visual (communication designers) or material (product designers) world where they used mainly visual abstractions to express themselves. Eventually they got much better at using language to advance their design thinking but you could definitely tell the gap in sophistication between the more abstract camp versus the more tangible.

I wish I would have been taught the importance language had in designing when I was 18 in my first year of design school. I wish someone would have told me to read as much non-fiction as possible; to acquire a vocabulary as wide as possible; to keep a dictionary and a thesaurus always close; to understand the basics of traditional logic structure (premise-fact-conclusion; to write often not to publish but to keep a healthy routine of thinking; to understand cognitive biases; to identify fallacies; to be able to debate with objective and logical arguments; to defend a thinking process you have followed.

Agile Organizations Let Ideas Shape their Structure, not the Other Way Around

"We have a sort of mantra when it comes to adapting to the new situation and it is the idea that we come from a world where structures where used to create ideas but have now moved on to a world where ideas are creating structures. 

Therefore, we no longer live in a world that is organised and orderly, where people's careers more or less had a beginning and an end and you knew what you had to do to progress. 

We now live in a world where we no longer know this, a world where every new idea calls for different collaborators, different settings and so on. Let's say that a certain amount of independence, individuality and initiative in finding a way on your own is essential in the times we live in.  

[...] Structures should not be allowed to dictate like they did before, because the environment is no longer characterized by order, and so if we are to adapt to the new situation, we must have initiative and enterprise."

Toni Segarra speaking about the concept behind SCPF Academy, an experiment (not the first one) in taking education away from the traditional educational institutions and bringing it into the world of the enterprise as a paid apprenticeship. [full video]

Culture can't be taught. One of the arguments I liked the most is the one about how do you go about teaching something as intangible as culture. College classrooms are neutral sterile environments. A mere container that serves as a meeting place. How are you going to teach a certain culture here using only words, blackboards and presentations? You basically can't. Culture can't be taught. It has be to be learned by experience. Culture is a complex and ambiguous combination of rituals, beliefs and values that manifests itself in behaviors, artifacts, environments. That's not something that can be taught for a couple of hours a week in a culturally mute environment. If you want to train people with a point of view and with a specific perspective you need to immerse them for extended periods in an environment that breaths and sweats such culture.

In defense of apprenticeships. If we assume the pace of change accelerates, then the whole idea of learning within a purpose-built institution removed one step from reality makes less and less sense. Why limit yourself to spend four years learning an abstraction of the real world through a professor's mind when you would probably be better off spending quality time close to real world professionals in real world situations solving real world problems? When change happens so fast, you need to be as close to reality as possible so you save save yourself one adjusting step, contrasting the mental model you have been taught in your mind about your practice with how things actually are in reality.

Organizational structures as consequence rather than cause. A static world is a perfect place for static structures, solid ideas, pristine order and vivid certainty. The way to act in this context is clear: thoughtful reflection, careful planning and diligent specialization. A dynamic world can't wait for all these things. It demands messy collaboration, skills diversity, fast reaction times, thinking agility and constantly ad-hoc structures that mutate and evolve nonstop to respond to the shifting demands of the moment.


Photo: Martin Klimas, untitled 2006 

10 Principles for Comprehensive Anticipatory Design Leadership:

From Buckminster Fuller himself:

1. Think comprehensively
2. Anticipate the future
3. Respect gestation rates
4. Envision the best possible future
5. Be a "trim tab"--an individual who can initiate big changes
6. Take individual initiative
7. Ask the obvious and naïve questions
8. Do more with less
9. Seek to reform the environment, not people
10. Solve problems through action

"The Anticipatory Leader: Buckminster Fuller's Principles for Making the World Work," Medard Gabel and Jim Walker, The Futurist, September-October 2006, pages 39-44 (World Future Society, http://www.wfs.org)

Domestic maker brands: the household as social object.

In a not too distant future most of the people will be knowledge workers. That means that they will have to think for a living. Thinking means figuring a way to solve problems. Given a specific situation, how can you achieve a new desired state of things. If people are required to do this at work it is likely that they will apply the same mental processes at home to live better. 

If people have the capabilities to be creative at work for money and for someone else's benefit, then they are also capable to be creative at home for their own benefit. This will generate an explosion of new artifacts that people will create based on their unique needs and domestic circumstances. 

Technology is cheap enough these days that anyone can create what they need and want. Self-publishing (both print and online) can already solve all the communication projects you might have and self-manufacturing tools and services (from basic home construction to 3d) can already solve all the physical ones. 

Think about people creating their own posters to hang on the walls. People designing and building their own rings with 3D printing. People downloading a chair blueprint and adapting it to build a chair that fits their kitchen style. People compiling a cookbook with the recipes they try and cook at home and then creating an ebook out of it. People recording themselves on the piano and creating a music album to gift their friends and family. I am sure you get the point.

How can other people benefit from the richness and diversity of knowledge that is, and will be increasingly created in every household? What if I could get a copy of a children's book that my neighbor, who is a hobbyist illustrator, created for her three year old. What if I could get the recipe of a secret BBQ sauce recipe from someone in North Carolina? What if I could get the tips on how to maintain a garage door from someone in Frankfurt? 

Most of this bits of knowledge and artifacts are already out there today. Unfortunately they are scattered all over the internet: forums, yahoo questions, uploaded files, slideshare presentations, youtube videos, etc. This doesn't help the creators because it makes it harder for them to preserve and centralize the body of knowledge they have already created. It doesn't help either the rest of us because once we found something amazing out there it is very hard to find other things that this maker has done. 

A more natural way to collect and share these fabrications would be to do it organized around a household unit. People that share dwelling are usually intimately related and collaboration is usually inevitable. This face-to-face exchange of knowledge between makers results in a natural exchange of ideas and new projects. 

Taking the household as a social object makes it easier to document and discover related artifacts. And also to find out more about the thinking minds that are behind it. The intention behind browsing around a living unit can be manifold: get to know someone more through the stuff they create; reuse an existing creation in your own household; or simply learn about different wordly perspectives by means of examining the tangible captures of someone's thought process (Jay Doblin used to say that 'a product is frozen information'). 

Will we see future domestic brands in the near future? People documenting and sharing as a unit all the stuff that they create day after day? Will we see creative social networks aggregated around households? Will we see people profiting (even if this is done through micro payments) from their hobbies? Will we see families or domestic units invading the long tail of knowledge creation?

Photo: Thomas Allen

Reason and emotion

"Durante siglos nos pareció que lo importante era el conocimiento y la ciencia. Después nos dimos cuenta de algo obvio. Como dijo Gracián 'De nada vale que el entendimiento se adelante si el corazón se queda'. Creo que el concepto de inteligencia ejecutiva es integrador y define muy bien la inteligencia como capacidad de dirigir bien y eficientemente la conducta, aprovechando la información y gestionando las emociones. La acción (sea mental o física) es lo importante."

Jose Antonio Marina

For centuries we thought knowledge and science were the most important things. Then we realized the obvious. As Gracián said, "It is of no use that the intellect advances if the heart stays behind". I think the concept of 'executive intelligence' is inclusive and defines very well intelligence as the ability to manage behavior well and efficiently, taking advantage of information and managing emotions. The action (whether mental or physical) is what is important.


More on José Antonio Marina and Baltasar Grácian
Photo: Young-Deok Seo 서영덕

Adapting Enzo Mari Sedia 1 chair to American lumber standards

Enzo Mari Sedia chair plans adapted to
American lumber standards.
Measurements in centimeters.

When Enzo Mari published the book 'Autoprogettazione', he wanted to publish furniture designs that anyone could build at home. For that reason he used measurements in all his designs based on European lumber size standards.

For example, the 'tavolette' he used for the Sedia 1 chair  were of two kinds: 20 x 2,5 cms for the seat and the back rest; and 5 x 2,5 cms for the legs and the structure of the back rest.

If you try to build this chair in the US you will have a very hard time. Mainly because you won't find this lumber sizes at any home improvement store.

To begin with, American lumber has its own standards and they are obviously based in inches. But that is just the start because it gets more complicated than that when planning to build your own chair. Even when you buy a 1 x 8 board, that doesn't mean you are going to get a 1" x 8 ".  No, these are 'nominal' measures.  The actual measures are going to be 0.75" x 7.25".

All the conversion from centimeters to inches and the additional adjustments from nominal to actual are probably enough to discourage anyone to attempt to build this chair in the US. Which is the opposite that Enzo Mari was trying to accomplish. Since I have gone through this process several times and I have built a handful of prototypes I thought I would contribute to the cause and share the blueprints of the chair I have adapted to American lumber sizes. You can click on the image above to download the high resolution blueprint.

In order to convert the dimensions, the only rule I have followed has been to keep the seat proportions of the chair. The European chair measures 500 mm width x 520 mm depth (proportion 1.04) and the US chair measures 448 mm width x 466 mm depth (proportion 1.04). The US seat is obviously less wide (52 mm) and less deep (54mm) but that is mainly because the width of the 1 x 8 boards on the seat (pieces A) conditions the width and all the other measures and proportions of the chair.

If you decide to build this chair on pine wood like the original you will need to buy: 2 pieces of 1 x 2 x 6 board ($2.98 each) and 2 pieces of 1 x 8 x 4 board ($9.74 each). From these boards you will cut the 13 wooden pieces required to build the chair (click on blueprint for exact dimensions of the pieces):

The total cost (assuming you already have the rest of the tools needed: nails and saw) should be around $26 per chair in materials. Compare this with the Sedia 1 pre-built chair kit sold by Artek that goes for €265 (~$360). Timewise, you can assemble the chair in an hour from the moment you have cut all the pieces.


Learn more about Enzo Mari's 'Autoprogettazione' and Sedia 1 chair:

• [video] Building instructions for Sedia 1 chair by Enzo Mari
• [video] Enzo Mari for Artek: Homage to Autoprogettazione

Reintroducing Jay Doblin

This article appeared originally in the issue #30, May 4, 2007 of 'The New Idiom', the Institute of Design's student newsletter

We hear a lot about Jay at ID. Sometimes, professors that knew him tell us stories about him, point at his writings or simply express their admiration and respect for his figure and work. Other times, students talk about him and drop tidbits that they have heard from the rumor mill or read in some publication. As a result, we have a partial and fragmented vision of who he actually was and his relationship with ID.

Photo: Jay Doblin in 1982

To gain a closer and more complete picture of Jay, I went to the only people currently employed at Doblin who had actually worked with him: Larry Keeley and John Pipino. Larry supplied me with a miscellanea of stories that will bring you closer to his persona, both at ID and in the design world. Pip produced an amazing array of visual material from Jay to delight your eyes and help conjure an image in your mind the next time you hear about Jay Doblin.

I hope this piece will trigger other people’s interest in this figure, and that in the future more articles will be written to expand our collective knowledge about him and increase our school pride through a better understanding of our history and our roots.

“We will hire that crass commercial hack over my dead body”

Photo: The Alcoa chairs were produced in association with a campaign to demonstrate the versatility of aluminum. Jay and his chairs appeared in several publications in the Spring of 1960.

Larry Keeley: "To a very large extent, [in the 1950s] ID saw itself as a direct descendant from the Bauhaus. In that sense, it was about creating a culture of art and craft, trying to create a new sense of style. Moholy-Nagy’s famous photograms and a variety of other works epitomize the way in which the school saw itself. It was a powerful new vision of form, clearly connected to this one school and this one director. They brought Jay Doblin in in an attempt to try to cast a wide net, to see if he could be the next Director of the Institute of Design.

Serge Chermayeff, Ivan Chermayeff's dad, led the search committee for a new Director, who was appointed by the board. Amongst its members was Sybil Moholy-Nagy, the widow of Lazlo Moholy-Nagy, the former Director. Sybil’s words, shortly after Jay Doblin came for the interview and moments - nanoseconds, they say - after he walked out of the room, were, “We will hire that crass commercial hack over my dead body.”

Photo:Jay building the prototype of the Hot Point stove is dated before 1955, the year he left the Loewy office for Chicago.

Jay Doblin, knowing full well that Moholy-Nagy was a genius, came with a distinctive and revolutionary point of view: “There is only one strategy that I would consider if you bring me in as Director. The strategy that I would consider is to make the ID the world’s foremost functionalist design school. It is not that today. It would be a radical transformation. Today, you are fundamentally a great art school, one of the best in the world, but you were led by a genius, and so you have no place to go but down if you continue with your current strategy. On the other hand, there is no great functionalist design school and you can swiftly be the best in the world.”

And with that sort of pronouncement, and brooking no interference, Jay effectively breezed out of the room. That’s what gave rise to Sybil Moholy-Nagy’s outraged comment, which is a word-for-word quote.

I don’t know exactly how long the search committee stayed in business after Jay Doblin sort of breezed in and breezed out of the room, but one of the ways that I heard the story told was that they were so divided that they could not bring themselves to give him the position for a very long time and they interviewed many, many more people.

Ultimately, Serge Chermayeff said, “Look, of all the people we have interviewed, only one had a strong point of view, only one had an idea about what to do with the place. The rest of them were all perfectly nice but had no distinctive point of view.” And he recommended people to hire Jay.

It was controversial inside the board and it was controversial among faculty, as you would expect. A number of them were great artists and they did not want to be associated with something less than Moholy-Nagy’s view of what the Institute of Design could be.

A designer in camouflage

Photo: Jay Doblin’s diploma of a course he took at Pratt in Military Tactical Camouflage

Jay Doblin went to Pratt Institute and his degree was in camouflage, which will surprise some modern ID students. But, remember, it was the war years and people were trying to do things that were relevant. I can remember more than one vivid conversation with Jay were he was teaching me principles of camouflage. What do you do to disguise a tank, or a factory, or ammunitions plant, or ammunitions storage facilities so that anybody on a bombing strafe will go past it and tend to drop their bombs in a way that misses the target? It is not a question of making it completely disappear. It is a question of actually trying to get it to appear somewhere else.

It may also interest modern-day design students to know that Jay’s favorite color palette, both for the clothes that he wore and for virtually all of the things he designed, went towards military draft colors. He loved khakis and olives and a color palette that was decidedly muted and in line with theories and practices of camouflage.

Defining the ID curriculum

Photo: Complete ID faculty wearing a Moholoy-Nagy t-shirt during a spring final critique (some time between 1966 and 1969). Back row: Joe Jachna, Photography; Charles Owen, Product Design; Carl Regehr, Visual Design. 3rd row: Bill Kaulfus, Visual Design; Bill Martin, Color Photography; Arthur Siegal, Photography; Gordon Martin, Printing & Head of Art History Program. 2nd row: James Montague, Product Design & Assistant to the Director; Aaron Siskind, Photography & Head of Photography Program; Jay Doblin, Director. Front row seated: Chad Taylor, Visual Design & Head of Visual Design Program; Misch Kohn, Print Maker.

When Jay first arrived, part of his problem was to try to figure out what real courses in design should be. Jay himself taught foundation and theory of work and, to the end of his active time, was not just a director, but also a teacher. This is one of the places where Jay’s personal stamp on the institution was felt very strongly. Certainly, where he got his greatest enjoyment as an individual was to try to pioneer new understandings of the basics of design. What were the kinds of principles we could learn and impart to young people that are likely to be forever true? These were important questions to Jay all of his life, specifically the questions that I think he took to a high level - arguably, a higher level than anybody else contemporaneous to Jay at the Institute Design.

Jay’s “unfair share of attention”

Photo: Jay with ID students in the shop

LK: By being stuck in the basement of S.R. Crown Hall, Jay constantly felt like they were second-class citizens to architecture. Of course, both architects and designers were 3rd class in a sense relative to engineering, which is what IIT was focused around. Armour [College of Engineering] was by far the largest school at IIT.

One of the things Jay instituted was a way to get what later he came to call his "unfair share of attention." When you understand how sneaky and powerful he could be, you start to get a sense of what Jay would do to use the power of design to advance the field of design.

For instance, he knew that part of what made design compelling, especially to young people back in the days when ID had an undergraduate program, was to give young people the chance to make stuff and to do things that were interesting to solve tough puzzles. So, he instituted the ‘egg drop’ competition long before this was a commonplace challenge in high schools all across the land. He wanted to give people a constrained set of resources to work with: rubber bands, scotch tape, paper, straws, things that cost next to nothing. Get them to drop an egg and cradle it successfully from the height of a large tower crane, lifted 4 stories or something like that. This was a relatively easy way to engage young people in a design problem.

Where the sneaky part comes in is that he would host the actual egg drop competition outdoors, on the lawn, in front of main hall of IIT, on freshman recruiting days for the engineers. Prospective incoming freshmen would show up and there will be this guy with a megaphone saying, “Okay, prepare to drop the eggs!” They'd see the tower crane lifting up, and then, “Okay there, drop the egg!” He was making so much disruption on the front lawn that all the incoming prospective freshmen said “I want to go to that school!” He just figured out that the best way for him to increase enrollment was to steal from the rest of IIT and he did that simply by having more interesting assignments and more interesting sense of activity. What we today have a lexicon for - it's called “active learning”- Jay was just making up as he was going along, because there was no such term as active learning. He just learned to do it.

Gas stations, water, air, and the Flushmobile

Photo: The electric car was a student project from the Institute of Design in the early 1960s. The student is Marny Ferguson.

Other things that Jay did that were signature aspects of him were pick high profile projects and often do them over and over again. One of the ones that is just sort of fun is an assignment to create a working vehicle that would be powered entirely by only those things available for cheap at the average gas station, which typically was water and air. If you went to a gas station and you needed water for your radiator and needed compressed air, they charged you a quarter and they gave you those things.

Jay would create go-cart competitions or other things where kids had to solve the problem by using those means of propulsion that by popular claim, supposedly the one that was the best ever was nicknamed the Flushmobile. An ID undergraduate student got an old hot water heater filled with water and then compressed air on the top to hydraulically pressurize it, and the water squirted through a nozzle with a tiller to guide the propulsion system, and it could get going roughly 30 miles an hour down State Street. The reason they called it the Flushmobile is that when the water was raining from the hot water heater, the last few gallons would create this huge beautiful rooster tail that went 300 feet down the street. If the sun was shining, you'd get this fantastically gorgeous rainbow effect because of the way the Flushmobile emptied itself.

On teacups and design

Photo: From the presentation ‘Performance Tcups.’ Guided by Jay Doblin, students designed artifacts to test the performing properties of teacups. In this particular study, a teacup’s ‘sloshability’ is being tested.

One of the more substantial things that was brilliant about the way Jay designed the curriculum and the challenges for undergrads at ID was to pick problems that didn’t vary much but got deeper and more cumulatively insightful over time. By some measures, he spent at least 15 years analyzing teacups, and every year he would figure out a different assignment to give students that would be about teacups.

Photo: From the presentation ‘Performance Tcups.’ A graph visualizes different performance properties through a range of teacup types: from more pyramidal to more funnel-like.

I give two famous lectures a year, at least within Doblin, that are all based on the historic work that Jay did on teacups.

One is called Performance Teacups: all the performance analytics that you need to understand to explain virtually any teacup in the world - why it is designed the way it is and what the objective analysis of its performance features should be. This is a wonderful example of the analysis of form - what makes a teacup easier or harder to clean, what makes it better or worse at maintaining a certain temperature, what makes it tip-able or sip-able, or a variety of other objective features - not looking at appearance at all, but looking at performance.

Photo: From the presentation ‘Appearance Tcups.’ A pioneering use of a 2-by-2 in design to classify teacups.

Another entirely separate slide show called “Appearance Tcups” looks at the appearance and all the different stylistic conventions around teacups throughout history. When you see these two slide shows back-to-back, you understand the whole field of design at one level, and you understand the fundamental difference between analysis and synthesis. Plus, you understand the enormous difference between form and function and the interrelationships of all those topics. To take a seemingly simple, unchanging challenge like “let’s think about teacups” and to stick with it for 15 - even 20 - years is an example of true, theoretical brilliance. It ends up being the longitudinal study that gives us a sense of the field of design and the mastery of its many complex subspecialties.

Nowadays, I do these slide shows at Doblin because there are only two people still employed at Doblin who knew Jay personally. I do it to give people a sense of our founder and the field of design. Less than a third of our people these days are design-trained and I want the non-designers to really appreciate what design is all about without having the usual commonplace misunderstanding that it's creative people making things pretty.

The performer and presenter

Photo: Jay, in clown nose with a guitar, reveals the playful nature of a deeply thoughtful person. 

One thing that I think is important to understand about Jay Doblin is that his parents were in vaudeville, a style of variety entertainment that came after burlesque and before variety shows on television. It was live performance, but it had a lot of elements of humor and slapstick and drama. Jay was an unbelievably great theatrical performer on stage and he always had a sense of drama, always had a sense of how to deliver his lines - to be dry when he needed to be, hilarious when he needed to be, smart when he needed to be, to have a good strong narrative line when that was useful. He was a stunning performer live on stage.

He would obsess about each and every speech. Where I will do 4 or so a week, Jay would do 3 to 5 or 6 a year other than in class, and every single one would be a masterpiece. Every single one he would typically sweat over for 4 to 6 months at a time, building kodachrome slides by hand in his own basement, shooting every one, doing the artwork for every one by hand - press type, press films, working in his drafting table to make massive scale base art that he would then photograph with care. He would build slide by slide, letter by letter, in a way that is impossible to imagine today. It required so much in the way of craft skills, so much in the way of very good production skills. To this day, the slides we have that were hand-built by Jay are vastly more beautiful than the ones that we can create and generate by computers, because his ability to hand kern or to combine unusual typography is simply unmatched by what we can do on the computer.

In all the hot shops

Photo: The October 1953 issue of Esquire Magazine featured an article on Jay and his early adopter lifestyle in loft apartments in Greenwich Village. This unpublished outtake from the photo session shows Jay in his loft’s “phone booth.

In Jay’s lifetime, the three largest design firms were: Raymond Lowey and Associates, Lippincott & Margulies, and Unimark International. And Jay Doblin was the creative head and founding partner of all three, and the only single individual that connects those three firms. That can’t be an accident if a guy was in the hot shop, right?

One day he took me aside and said to me, “Some time in your life, you will have to be in the hot shop.” I said, “What do you mean?” He said, “Well, you and I, we just run this little business, Doblin. You need to be in the hot shop, the place that is the best in the world. A place that is the place that all the designers are dying to go and would cheerfully work at for free. There's nothing like it in the world.”

But, he also told me (on a different day, when he was feeling less sanguine about the design field), “You know, I look at my life like a horse race. I keep jumping from one horse to the next, trying to race ahead but I look behind me every now and again and what do I see behind me? A string of dead horses.” One of the things that very much troubled Jay to the day he died was that almost no design firm - just a handful of exceptions that I religiously track - survived the original founders without essentially going out of business. One of the few exceptions to that general rule is Pentagram. So, it’s very important to understand what it takes to design any firm in the field of design that is savvy enough about what it is trying to do and be, smart enough about its ability to attract and inspire and direct really great talent, and that it is able to transcend its original founders.

I think the fact that design firms had a highly volatile, spiky life to them caused Jay to believe that design was way too much affected by the vagaries of style - what’s hot and what’s happening. Specifically, he said, “Design firms tend to be like hot restaurants: they work fine when everything is humming and the chef is happy, but when the restaurant is hot and getting good reviews, all kinds of people start showing up. The maitre d’ even tries to make the place profitable and lets a few too many in, and next thing you know, the chef is peeling off the chef’s hat, throwing it on the floor in disgust and stomping out to start a competitive restaurant. That’s what happens in design firms all the time!”

Deal with enduring problems

Photo: A slide prepared by Jay himself for a presentation of the aluminum chairs he designed for Alcoa
Jay's work at the ID was not about commercial practice, although he never lost sight of the fact that design as a field was about trying to make the built world. He wanted to inform practice. He wanted the students from ID to be the best at practice.

For Jay, one of the things that was crucially important is that he was smart. He wanted to figure out the problems of design that would endure. He wanted to figure out what he could say about the field of design, the problems of design, the practice of design, the methods of design and the theory of design that would be true for a long time, maybe forever. And he was quite clearly cognizant about the fact that all respectable fields have history, criticism, theory, and practice.

It bothered him so much that practice in those days was ahead of theory and of criticism, to a certain extent. He was hoping desperately that the field would become co-equal with medicine or law or accounting or any other field that had discipline, history, criticism and theory. Under Patrick Whitney, we have added history and criticism. Under Jay, what he mostly emphasized was theory, because you have to start some place.

Taking Jay’s criticism

One of the things that always made it both exciting and frightening to collaborate with Jay Doblin is that, more than anybody I have ever known, he was able to see design as a process of learning, not just a process of learning things. As a non-designer working with Jay, it was not such an assault for me.

But, I witnessed first hand lots of tough programs where we were trying to explore the frontiers of something truly path-breaking and fundamentally new and unprecedented. When you ask a designer - or, more properly, a design team - to give up what is typically weeks - often months - of their life (day and night, seven days a week) to slave away and crack this really tough problem (unprecedented in the history of the world) and to create something that is vivid and powerful and path-breaking, and you show it first to the inside team in the firm (always watching like a hog to see whether the big guy, Jay Doblin, would respond positively or not) it is so hard when the big guy looks at it and says, very politely, “This is incredible. I really appreciate all the work you guys did. It was unbelievable. You did just what I asked you to do.” And then - with great frequency, absolutely no compunction and absolutely no remorse, and absolutely no hesitation - Jay would take his arm and sweep all the resulting models into the trash, unceremonialy and without a single glance backwards.

Now, some observations about that are useful to present students at ID. Jay was very lucky that he was not killed by some designer. Designers get emotionally involved with these things that they lovingly craft. So, the responses to these frequent occurrences were close to homicidal rage. I guess I am very empathetic about it - I can certainly see how people would be mortified by their work being summarily trashed without comment. A cursory thank you - “Thank you very much, you did a great job” and then chuck it in the garbage. But, the deeper lesson, the harder one to learn - the one that only comes when you reflect on it a lot and when you remove yourself from the emotional intensity of having your work trashed - is that you can start to see that, more than anybody I ever met, Jay Doblin took seriously the idea that a very big part of design wasn’t to get to the answer, but to explore the problem.

What Jay would often mutter, as he was trashing things, was something really quite humble and really quite brilliant. It would usually be something like, “Wow, you gave me exactly what I asked for and now I can see that I asked you for the wrong thing.” Think about that for a moment, because it is only the greatest of planners who - even when they are staring at the client-driven deadline and the really big show where they have to present something, perhaps just hours from now - will have the personal integrity and the courage to say, “We really worked hard on this and we did the wrong thing, but now we do know what the right thing is to do.” In fact, a classic phrase that Jay would use around all of us who worked with him regularly - the one that we can all mimic with the exact right tone of voice - goes, “No, no, you got it aaaaaall wrong!” We would get that phrase at least twice a week, and it was the thing that, if you were not a strong person, crushed your soul. And, if you were a strong person, you would say, ”Oh, what did I miss? Let’s try again, let’s roll up our sleeves and think it through.” He did it because he thought of them as working for him. He was not pushing them anywhere - he was taking them as talented individuals making something - but it was something to help them think, not making something because it was going to change the world. He was using the process of design to understand the nature of the problem.

Photo: Jay working on a model
Use this one hypothetically: you make a model of how a modern city could function, and he would take a look at it and say, “Oh, yeah, I see now. We can’t put the subways there, we can’t put the airports there. Okay, that is what I needed.” Boom! Gone. Okay, it was that easy for him. But, other people seeing how many thousands of man-hours were being used to craft something can’t sweep it away. They can’t make it a lesson learned. It’s like the difference between somebody that has the deep confidence that they can do it again and somebody who thinks that every time that you produce something it has to be treated as this religious artifact.

He was not vindictive. I am completely convinced that’s why he never really saw that he had to suck up to people more before they did it. He thought everybody would be comfortable with that field of design and that process of design. It would be like, “Oh, okay. Yeah, that went wrong. Let’s do it again.” To him, it was sort of matter-of-fact and interesting. But, he would never say any of those nice, polite things, so if you are not there filling in the gaps and you can’t see what his motivations are, you are mortified and offended. I have watched lots of designers really lose it over this.

Me? I don’t know what it is. I am probably pretty perverse, but I would just laugh and say, "Okay!”

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All pictures courtesy of Doblin Inc. All rights reserved.

We would like to thank Larry Keeley for his anecdotes and storytelling about Jay, and John ‘Pip’ Pipino for his time and generosity to open Jay’s visual archive for us. Additional thanks to Professors Charles Owen and Dale Fahnstrom for helping us identify all the faculty members that appear in Moholy-Nagy T-shirts in the ID faculty photograph.

The Degrees of Greatness

"Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people."
Eleanor Roosevelt

"Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different."
T.S. Eliot

"Bad Designers Copy. Average Designers Imitate. Great Designers Steal."
underdesign.com

Albert Roux, one half of the Roux Brothers and one of the world’s greatest chefs, once told me that “bad chefs count the days they worked, decent chefs count the plates they sold, but great chefs count the smiles they put on faces.”
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"May your trips take you wherever your dreams are waiting for you"

Art: Hubert Blanz "The Fifth Face"

The takeover of ID by IIT under the fierce opposition of Mies

This article appeared originally in the issue #21, November 21, 2006 of engageID, the Institute of Design's student newsletter

In 1944, when the second World War was close to its end, the US government passed the G.I. Bill of Rights in order to support anyone that served in the army services. This bill, among other forms of compensation, had the mission to provide for college or vocational education for returning veterans in the hopes of smoothing their reincorporation to society. This measure had the effect in many universities in the US of causing them to grow very rapidly in the following years. Among these schools there was a recently founded school born from the merger between the Lewis Institute and the Armour Institute: the Illinois Institute of Technology.

A few years later, in 1949, IIT was considering merging with other schools to expand its academic offering and accommodate new students. The Institute of Design was one of these targeted schools. In that time, Serge Ivan Chermayeff was its president, filling the place of the founder Moholy-Nagy following his death from leukemia in 1946.

IIT had been pondering the merge for some time, but before making any decision about the merger, Henry T.Heald, president at that time of the IIT, wanted to hear the opinion of the IIT Dean of Architecture, the person who would ultimately have to integrate the school into IIT. Mies van der Rohe had held that position since 1938 when he emigrated from Germany. He agreed to join the Armour and Art Institute of Chicago’s architecture program on the condition that he would design and build the new campus that was planned for the school on the south side of Chicago. President Heald, looking for an informed opinion, wrote a letter to Mies asking about how he felt about incorporating the Institute of Design into IIT.

On March 5th, 1949 Mies responded by letter to President Heald and his words could not have been more honest and bruising. Not only he disapproved the takeover, but he also expressed his strong personal opinions about ID and Chermayeff. In his own words the integration between both schools could never succeed because “our school is based on discipline and the Institute of Design exists on extravaganza”.

His opinion about ID’s director was not much better. Mies stressed his refusal to work with Chermayeff and he even threatened to resign from his position if Chermayeff became dean of the department of Design. The relationship between Mies and ID’s founder Moholy Nagy had been less than good since both emigrated from Germany in the late 1930’s. Apparently the relationship and regard of the then ID director was even worse: total disapproval.

In the end, despite all of Mies’ contrary opinions, the acquisition happened. But obviously Mies wanted to have the last say and have his own small personal revenge. At the beginning of the 1950s, as part of the design of the IIT campus in the south side, Mies envisioned the building where the Department of Architecture and Design would reside: the magnificent S.R. Crown Hall. The way spaces would be distributed was clear for him: the College of Architecture would occupy the high ceiling and luminous first floor and the Institute of Design would occupy the poorly lighted basement.

Ironies of history and 50 years later things have changed. ID does not inhabit the basement of S.R. Crown Hall anymore and most importantly ID is now the jewel of the crown as former IIT President Lew Collen’s once acknowledged.

At the instructional level, ID has also gone through several transformations. These years have seen how ID has completely transformed itself from a school with a modernist aesthetic and tradition into one of the few design schools that currently use design methods and tools to rigorously approach problems. Quite a far cry from Mies’s perceived extravaganza.

Full letter from Mies to President Heald