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”
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.”
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
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
 |
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”
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
 |
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
 |
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.
 |
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.
 |
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
 |
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
 |
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
 |
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.
 |
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!”
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.
Posts
Who are you and why did you stop your blog? I am an alumni of the program and currently work at the Doblin practice in Toronto, Canada. I'd love to reconnect with you and learn more about the archive you have on Jay! My email is arianashadlyn@gmail.com
ReplyDeleteyeah, keep posting...
ReplyDelete