Manufactured Artifact vs. Designed Artifact

• Harley Earl introduced styling to the automotive industry – colours and interiors (worked for GM)
• 1903 – Fords starts company with 28K startup cash. Model-T using mostly all preexisting parts – created the “horseless carriage”.
• 1903 – the Wright Flyer, the flying machine built off knowledge from bicycle making // precursor to entirely new industry.
• Horseless carrier/flying machine becomes automobile/airplane through process of industrial design. A new category of object – a coherent design artifact
• Wireless telegraph (manufactured artifact) – 10 years to become a designed artifact – with its own design language.
• Typewriter + Television – a coherent design language for a computer has yet to be defined
• *Objects in transition* The development of a new design language

Scale, Power, Speed: Machine-Age America height and bulk of skyscraper, the speed of the locomotive, influenced design of Electrolux vacuum cleaner, etc…
New Materiality – Plastics: The materiality of invention

• 19th century: first celluloids
• Evolution of the use of celluloid materials from use as imitation, to substitution, to invention.
• Imitation – thought of as replacement for ivory, tortoise shells and other natural materials\ Leo Bakeland – invents bakelite. FIrst commercial polymers. Realized that plastics offer control that allow us to create forms/objects that were not possible previously.
• Invention: We can do things that mother nature is incapable of creating: “The material of a thousand uses.”

Buckminster Fuller: Dymaxian Chronofile (collected all his ideas and thoughts within this filing system from 1927 onwards).

• Plans for a new mass-produced house

October 1929 – Stock Market Crash, start of global depression

Birth of the Industrial Designer
Introducing the two most prominent designers of the time: Raymond Loewy, Henry Dreyfuss.

Raymond Loewy: The first celebrity designer

• Loewy’s background in illustration
• 3 favorite shapes: the egg, his wife’s figure, a sales curve rising to infinity
• Used clay over wood frame for prototype
• Trope of the era – “BEFORE and AFTER”
• Mimeograph: from industrial machine to office furniture (concealed, protected, integrated, coherent designed object)
• GE Ice Box (Sears selling 65,000/year) -> Refrigerator, 3 years later (275,000 per year)
• Locomotive – redesign the railroad experience. First job was to redesign trash bins in Grand Central Station
• Painted stripes on the locomotive engine (consistent design language of speed and scale)
• From locomotive to pencil sharpener – language extended on symbolic basis.
• Expertise in rendering an object desirable (example Lucky Strike Cigarettes)
• Designed Airforce 1 and the Concorde
• “Never Leave Well Enough Alone”, Loewy’s Published Memoirs. Introduced the MAYA Principle – Most Advanced Yet Acceptable
• Loewy design exhibition of he future of space flight
• SkyLab – 1967 NASA mission – Loewy conducted “habitability studies”

Henry Dreyfuss: The “Conscience of the Industrial Design Revolution”

• Background in theater
• Won industrial design competition for the design of the rotary-dial telephone
• One model, one color (standardized, visually ubiquitous artifact)
• An evolved form, that almost disappears on someone’s desktop
• PROCESS: developed a methodology of design
• Analysis -> Sketching -> Modeling -> Presentation -> Critique
• Brought ergonomics to the field of design
• “Design is for People”, Dreyfuss’ book – introduced the anthropometric figures “Joe and Josephine” – a typical man and woman
• When his wife found out she had terminal brain cancer, they committed suicide together. (wow)

Ray & Charles Eames

• Met at Cranbrook
• Combined idealism of European Modernism with the populism of American Industrial Design
• Developed leg split and shoulder splint – discovered evocative forms through these designs
• DCM – Dining Chair Metal
• Sotsas’ response to this chair – “Eames did not invent a new chair, he invented a new way of sitting down.”
• Hard angles soften to the curvature of the human body