"Right in your eye, and in your eye right"

Joseph Claude Sinel (September 27, 1889 – January 27, 1975), also know as "Jo Sinel," "Auckland Jo," or "Kiwi Jo" was a pioneering industrial designer born in New Zealand where his father ran a stevedoring operation. He attended the Elam School of Art, then started work as an apprentice in the art department of Wilson & Horton Lithographers, working at the New Zealand Herald from 1904-1909 and studying under Harry Wallace. After a stint in England, he returned to New Zealand and Australia working as a freelance designer, then moved to San Francisco in 1918, where he first worked in advertising.  In 1923 Sinel started his own industrial design company in New York City, but by 1936, had relocated back to the San Francisco Bay Area.

Sinel claimed to have designed everything from "ads to andirons and automobiles, from beer bottles to book covers, from hammers to hearing aids, from labels and letterheads to packages and pickle jars, from textiles and telephone books to toasters, typewriters and trucks." Although he is perhaps best remembered for his designs of industrial scales, typewriters, and calculators, he also designed trademarks for businesses such as the Art Institute of Chicago, created book jackets for Doubleday, Knopf, and Random House, and for many years designed publications for Mills College. He taught design in a number of schools in the United States, and in 1955 became one of the fourteen founders of the American Society of Industrial Designers – which later merged with other organizations to form the modern-day Industrial Designers Society of America.

Sinel is sometimes said to have coined the term "industrial design" around the 1920s in the USA. During a 1972 interview with Robert Harper, Sinel denied the paternity of this term.

"... that's the same time [1920] that I was injecting myself into the industrial design field, of which it's claimed (and I'm in several of the books where they claim) that I was the first one, and they even say that I invented the name. I'm sure I didn't do that. I don't know where it originated and I don't know where I got hold of it."



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Want to know more?  Learn all about Kiwi Jo at any of the websites documenting his achievements, including the California College of the Arts Library or The New Zealand Edge, which features an in-depth account of Sinel's life and work.

"A continuum exists between pure performance and pure appearance"

Jay Doblin (1920 – 1989), believed in the power of design to solve large-scale and complex problems. He was an innovator in industrial, product and graphic design, design methods, design theory, and management. Through his teaching, practice, and role as spokesperson, he continually pushed the profession to extend itself beyond surface roles.

Doblin was born in Brooklyn, NY and graduated from the Pratt Institute in 1942.  During World War II, his talents were used by the military to design camouflage. 

After the war, Doblin was hired by Raymond Loewy Associates, where he worked for over 12 years.  Much of that time as executive designer, managing the office’s largest accounts that included Shell Oil, Nabisco, Coca Cola, and BP.  Doblin directed the Frigidaire account among others, and designing vending machines for Coca-Cola, razors for Schick and fountain pens for Eversharp.  During this time, Doblin also directed the night school at Pratt Institute from 1947 to 1952.

In the 1950's Doblin advised Japan's Ministry of International Trade and Industry on formation of a national design policy, helping to develop the export laws, design practices and schools that eventually were instrumental in improving product quality.

In 1955 Doblin was chosen to direct the Illinois Institute of Design, after the resignation of Serge Chermayeff.  IIT had been founded as a ''New Bauhaus'' by Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, and its reputation was based on experiment.  Doblin maintained that policy as director, and later broadened the institute's curriculum to include more formal methods and theories.  He achieved advances in many areas of design, including graphics, theory and management.  In 1957, Doblin established the first graduate program for industrial design there with a strong emphasis on engineering. 



Unimark International

In 1964, following a brief stint as a partner in Lippincott & Marguiles, then the country’s leading corporate identity firm, Doblin co-founded Unimark International in 1969, which became the world’s largest design firm of that era with offices in seven countries.  Unimark was a design consulting firm specializing in corporate identity programs, with Doblin serving as a senior VP.  While at Unimark, he worked with the J.C. Penney Company to develop a comprehensive corporate identity program that in 1974 won an IDSA Special Award for the Advancement of Design.



JDA

In 1979 Doblin and Larry Keeley set out to build a company that was a hybrid between classic strategic planning and design.  Jay Doblin and Associates (JDA), located in Chicago, helped clients reinvent their offerings and experiences to improve customer satisfaction and business success.  By 1986, Jay retired and Larry took over firm leadership. He began integrating new disciplines into the firm, including corporate strategy, social science research, and library science. He broadened the firms offering beyond concept development and into innovation ambition and direction setting. He realized that the discipline was in its infancy, and embraced the challenge of developing better methods and practices.  In 1985, Unimark was reorganized as a new partnership, Doblin Keely Malin Stamos, headed by Larry Keeley. After 1994 it was known as the Doblin Group, and in 1997 became part of Perot Systems.



Accolades
Doblin was president of The American Society of Industrial designers (ASID) in 1956 and of the Industrial Design Educators Association (IDEA) in 1962.  He was a longtime leader of the Industrial Designers Society of America, serving as president and board chairman and, in 1982, receiving the society's personal achievement award. In 1964, Doblin received a Kaufmann research grant for work in progress.  He was a fellow of Britain's Royal Society of Arts, and was award the AIGA medal posthumously in 2004 in recognition of exceptional achievement and contributions to the field of design and visual communication

His writings included two books, ''Perspective, A New System for Designers,'' published in 1955, and ''100 Great Product Designs'' in 1969.



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Want to know more?  Learn all about Jay Doblin at any of the official websites documenting his life achievements, including the Doblin Associates website, or any number of websites and blogs discussing his design principles of the "Innovation Landscape" and "Ten Types of Innovation."

"Good design is for everyone"™

Russel Wright (April 3, 1904 – December 21, 1976) was an American Industrial designer during the 20th century. Beginning in the late 1920s through the 1960s, Russel Wright created a succession of artistically distinctive and commercially successful items that helped bring modern design to the general public.

Design

Russel Wright’s method of design came from the belief that the table was the center of the home. Designing in layers from there outwards, he designed tableware to larger furniture, architecture to landscaping, all according to his concept of easy, informal living. It was through his immensely popular and widely distributed housewares and furnishings that he revolutionized the way Americans lived and organized their homes in the mid 20th century.

Wright's legacy continues today as his company Russel Wright Studios remains an active industrial design licensing firm. With offices in Garrison, New York and Burbank, California, Russel Wright Studios continues to work with corporate and public clients in the licensing and manufacturing of his designs and products.

Dinnerware

Wright is best known for his colorful American Modern®, the most widely sold American ceramic dinnerware in history, manufactured between 1939 and 1959 by Steubenville Pottery in Steubenville, Ohio. He also designed top selling wooden furniture, spun aluminum dining accessories and textiles. His simple, practical style was influential in persuading ordinary Americans to embrace Modernism in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s. Wright's trademarked signature was the first to be identified with lifestyle-marketed products, paving the way for personality-driven lifestyle empires such as Martha Stewart, Ralph Lauren and others.

Wright designed several popular lines of Melmac melamine resin plastic dinnerware for the home and did early research on plastic Melmac dinnerware for restaurant use. Wright's first Melmac line of plastic dinnerware for the home, called "Residential" was manufactured by Northern Plastic Company of Boston, MA beginning in 1953. "Residential" received the Museum of Modern Art Good Design Award in 1953. Also "Residential" was one of the most popular Melmac lines with gross sales of over $4 million in 1957. The line remained popular for many years continuing in production by Home Decorators, Inc. of Newark, NY. Wright introduced his Melmac dinnerware line called "Flair" in 1959. One of the patterns of "Flair", called "Ming Lace" has the actual leaves of the Chinese jade orchid tree tinted and embedded inside the translucent plastic. As with his ceramic dinnerware, Wright began designing his Melmac only in solid colors, but by the end of the 1950s created several patterns ornamented with decoration, usually depicting plant forms.

Furniture

Wright designed a succession of popular furniture lines for many furniture companies beginning in the early 1930s through the 1950s. His most popular line of essentially Art Deco American Modern® "blonde" wooden furniture was produced by the Conant-Ball company of Gardner, Massachusetts between 1935 and 1939, and bore the branded mark "American Modern® Built by Conant-Ball Co. Designed by Russel Wright".

Career

Russel's early art training was under Frank Duveneck at the Art Academy of Cincinnati while still in high school. While following his family's tradition of studying for a legal career at Princeton University, he was a member of the Princeton Triangle Club and won several Tiffany & Co. prizes for outstanding World War I memorial sculptures. This, along with the urging of his academic adviser at Princeton, confirmed his conviction gained in the year before college while a student at the Art Students League of New York under Kenneth Hayes Miller and Boardman Robinson, that his future was in the field of art.

Wright left Princeton for the New York City theater world and quickly became a set designer for Norman Bel Geddes. This early association with the theater lead to further work with George Cukor, Lee Simonson, Robert Edmond Jones, and Rouben Mamoulian. His theater career came to an end when George Cukor closed his Rochester, New York stock company at the end of 1927. Upon returning to New York City, he started his own design firm making theatrical props and small decorative cast metal objects.

Although firmly rooted in the Midwest, he spent the entirety of his professional artistic career in New York, employing such early instrumental modern design practitioners and artists as Petra Cabot, Henry P. Glass and Hector Leonardi in his growing industrial design firm.

Personal Life

Russel Wright was born into an historic old American family, Wright's mother had direct lineage with two signers of the Declaration of Independence, and his father and grandfather were local judges.  Wright married Mary Small Einstein, a designer, sculptor and businesswoman, in 1927, after a short yet care free summer together in Woodstock, New York, where Russel was involved in the New York artist's Maverick Festival and artist colony. Mary studied sculpture under Alexander Archipenko. Together Mary and Russel went on to form Wright Accessories, a home accessories design business and began creating small objects for the home consisting of cast metal animals and informal serving accessories of spun aluminum and other materials. The couple also wrote the best-selling Guide to Easier Living in 1950 that described how to reduce housework and increase leisure time through efficient design and management.

Wright’s only child, Annie, was only two years old when Mary died in 1952, necessitating Wright's raising their adopted daughter as a single parent. Annie Wright continues to manage her father’s designs and products through Russel Wright Studios.

Dragon Rock at Manitoga

After his wife’s death, Russel Wright retired to his 75-acre (300,000 m2) estate, Manitoga in Garrison, New York, building an eco-sensitive Modernist home and studio called Dragon Rock surrounded by extensive woodland gardens. It is on the National Register of Historic Places and a U.S. Department of Interior designated National Historic Landmark. Manitoga is open to the public, operated by the non-profit Russel Wright Design Center, with tours and hiking trails.


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Want to know more?  Learn all about Russel Wright at any of the official websites documenting his work, including the Russel Wright Design Center, Russel Right Studios, Bauer Pottery Company, or the Arts Midwest website.

David Chapman, US architect and industrial designer, was an architectural graduate of the Armour Institute of Technology (which later became Illinois Institute of Technology), Chicago. Chapman worked on the design staff of the Century of Progress Exposition in 1933-1934, and at the same time, joined Montgomery Ward as an architect. Anne Swainson, then heading the Montgomery Ward internal Bureau of Design, appointed him Head of Product Design, where he designed many products and had a staff of 18 by 1935.

Chapman left Montgomery Ward in 1936 to open his own design office, Dave Chapman Inc., hiring William Goldsmith, Kim Yamasaki, and Paul Specht who later become partners of his firm, renamed in 1970 as Goldsmith Yamasaki Specht Inc. The firm worked during the WW II to re-adapt companies to peacetime production, and major clients included Parker Pen Company, International Harvester, Brunswick-Balke-Collender, and Scovill Manufacturing Company.

Chapman was president of the Society of Industrial Designers in 1950, and in 1954 organized a subsidiary company, Design Research, Inc., to provide long-range planning for clients. In 1955, he returned to Montgomery Ward to re-organize the Bureau of Design, which was headed by Frederick W. Priess. The Bureau lasted until 1976.

After Chapman's retirement in 1970, the surviving partners of Goldsmith, Yamasaki and Specht continued the firm successfully for over 25 years more, producing outstanding designs and retaining national visibility.

In 1996, First Design, a design firm in Kansas City , KS, purchased GYS, Inc, which had survived with Paul Specht as the only remaining partner. A partner of First Design, David McCormick, became president of GYS, and retained the Chicago office until 1999, when it was sold to Sundberg-Ferar.

"The true modernist eliminate[s] all unnecessary detail in attaining a practical - and by reason of its intense practicality, a beautiful - result"

This month's designer, dubbed the "quintessential modernist"  began as an illustrator, before taking on graphic design, and finally, a 40-year industrial design career.  As with many of our past designers, this designer's career peaked during the height of last century's art-deco movement - though his unique philosophy bridged the gap between the "harsh" Bauhaus functionalism and burgeoning Streamlining movements - paving the way for products that are still in use today.  If you've ever ridden a NYC subway, you've experienced this designer's contribution firsthand.

John Vassos (October 23, 1898 – December 6, 1985) was born in Romania as John Plato Vassacopolous, the son of a Greek newspaper publisher and diplomat.  At an early age, Vassos' father moved his family from Romania to Constantinople.  In his teens Vassos became the editorial cartoonist for a liberal newspaper, though after one of his cartoons was printed criticizing the Turkish senate, Vassos was forced to flee the country at only 16 years old.  He served with a suicide minesweeper squadron in WW I which was torpedoed, but fortunately Vassos and crew were rescued by a US transport.  Vassos ended up in Boston around 1919, where he studied art and illustration with John Singer Sargent at the Fenway Art School.

The year 1924 brought a number of changes to Vassos – he was married, became a US citizen, and changed his name to Vassos. That same year, Vassos moved to New York where he opened a commercial studio called The New York Display Company – creating murals, advertisements and window signs.  During this time, Vassos also studied at the Art Students league under notable artists such as George Bridgman, John Sloan, and others.  Vassos landed a job as illustrator for Harper's and New Yorker magazines, as well as created advertisements for Packard Automobiles and French Line cruise ships.  He wrote, illustrated and published a number of fiction books with wife Ruth; Contempo, in 1929; Ultima in 1930; and Phobia in 1931.  His illustrations were commissioned and featured in the literary works of Oscar Wilde.

The next logical step for men of his time, was industrial design.  Vassos' first design came in 1924, when he created a face lotion bottle that could be reused, and became popular as a hip flask during Prohibition.  In 1933 he established the first internal design department for the Radio Corporation of America (RCA), a relationship that would span nearly 40 years.  Vassos' design work with RCA during this time, would come to include radio and television cabinets, phonographs, cameras, control rooms, exhibits and even theaters.  In 1939 he designed the first consumer television sets for RCA that were introduced at the New York World's Fair – this one in particular, dubbed the "Phantom TRK-12," had a cabinet that was entirely built from Lucite – allowing fair visitors to see the inner-workings of this futuristic new technology.  Vassos also designed the concept and theme of RCA's pavilion at the fair.  Discovered among his many sketches now at Syracuse University, was a design for a flat screen television, rejected by RCA in 1957 as being too difficult to develop.  Vassos remained as a consultant to RCA until 1964, though he continued to practice independently.

With the onset of WWII, Vassos enlisted in the US Army Air Corps where he was commissioned as a Lieutenant and posted in Alabama.  He was later reassigned to Washington DC, serving with the OSS.  In addition to producing pamphlets and a series of war posters, Vassos designed camouflage and helped to develop camouflage techniques.  Working with the OSS, forerunner of the CIA, Vassos helped to rewrite a top-secret training manual.  He produced a second manual for the underground Greek gorilla forces and twice entered Greece secretly by parachute to help organize the underground against Nazis forces.  Vassos left the military in 1945, at the rank of Colonel – a title he continued to use for many years after the war.
In 1938 Vassos was one of the founders and first president of the American Designers Institute, along with visiting professorships at Pratt Institute, Columbia University, and Norwalk Community College.  Vassos served as president of the ADI in 1948, and was later elected the first Chairman of the Board of the IDSA when it was formed in 1965.  He was also president of the Silvermine Guild of Artists in CT.

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Want to know more?  Learn all about John Vassos at any of several websites documenting his life and accomplishments.  Vassos' work is on display at the Brooklyn Museum, Museum of Fine Art in Texas, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in Manhattan.

"Masses of people can never find a solution to a problem until they are shown the way."

As with many of our past designers, this designer's career peaked during the height of last century's art-deco and streamlining movements.  Transitioning into Industrial Design in the late 1920's, notable icons such as Henry Dreyfuss apprenticed at his design firm.
 
Norman Melancton Bel Geddes (April 27, 1893 – May 9, 1958) was born in Adrian, Michigan and raised in New Philadelphia, Ohio - the son of Flora Luelle (née Yingling) and Clifton T. Geddes, a stockbroker.  In 1916, Geddes married a woman named Helen Belle Schneider, shortly thereafter incorporating their names to Bel Geddes. The couple's daughter was actress Barbara Bel Geddes, famous for her roles in Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo, and the 1980's TV series Dallas.

Theater and Stage
He began his career with set designs for Aline Barnsdall's Los Angeles Little Theater in the 1916-1917 season, then in 1918 as the scene designer for the Metropolitan Opera in New York.  His interest in the theater came from his mother, a woman of culture and means prior to the death of her husband.  Though left in poverty, she inspired a love of the arts in her son.  Though Bel Geddes attended the Cleveland Institute of Art and the Chicago Art Institute briefly, his real love was the opera and stage.  Bel Geddes primary creative contribution was to lighting, specifically, the dramatic potential of spotlighting. He directed the lighting on over 200 productions. 

He designed and directed various theatrical works, from Arabesque and The Five O'Clock Girl on Broadway to an ice show entitled It Happened on Ice produced by Sonja Henie. He created set designs for the film Feet of Clay (1924), directed by Cecil B. DeMille, designed costumes for Max Reinhardt, and created the sets for the Broadway production of Sidney Kingsley's Dead End (1935).

Industrial Design
Bel Geddes opened an industrial design studio in 1927, and designed a wide range of commercial products, from cocktail shakers to commemorative medallions to radio cabinets.  Like many designers of his day, Bel Geddes' designs extended to unrealized futuristic concepts: a teardrop-shaped automobile, and an Art Deco House of Tomorrow.  In 1929, he designed "Airliner Number 4," a 9-deck amphibian airliner that incorporated areas for deck-games, an orchestra, a gymnasium, a solarium, and two airplane hangars.

Bel Geddes's book Horizons (1932) had a significant impact: "By popularizing streamlining when only a few engineers were considering its functional use, he made possible the design style of the thirties."  He wrote forward-looking articles for popular American periodicals.

Working closely with the auto industry, Bel Geddes designed the General Motors Pavilion known as Futurama, for the 1939 New York World's Fair.  For that famous and enormously influential installation, Bel Geddes exploited his earlier work in the same vein: he had designed a "Metropolis City of 1960" in 1936.  His 1940 book Magic Motorways promoted advances in highway design and transportation, foreshadowing the Interstate Highway System ("there should be no more reason for a motorist who is passing through a city to slow down than there is for an airplane which is passing over it").  His later autobiography, Miracle in the Evening, was published posthumously in 1960.

The case for the Mark I computer was designed by Norman Bel Geddes. IBM's Thomas Watson presented it to Harvard.  At the time, some saw it as a waste of resources, since computing power was in high demand during this part of World War II and those funds could have been used to build additional equipment.  Other products designed by Norman Bel-Geddes included Toledo scales, Philco radio cabinets, typewriters, cigarette cases, kitchen stoves (the Oriole), tents and even battleships.  Clients included IBM, Ringling Brothers, Toledo, OH, J. Walter Thompson Advertising, Shell Oil and Chrysler. For the Simmons Company he designed metal bedroom furniture that was introduced in 1932.  The 1946 Nash auto carried a Bel-Geddes designed dashboard.

The United States Postal Service celebrated the First-Day-Of-Issue for a commemorative U.S. postage stamp honoring Bel Geddes as a "Pioneer Of American Industrial Design" on June 29, 2011 at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum in NYC.


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Want to know more?  Learn all about Norman Bel Geddes at any of several websites documenting his life and accomplishments.  Bel Geddes' work is on display at the Brooklyn Museum, Museum of Fine Art in Texas, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in Manhattan.

"Industrial Humaneer"

This month's designer, is largely unknown to most consumers, even in the design industry – partially overshadowed by his contemporaries of the time such as Raymond Loewy, Walter Dorwin Teague, Henry Dreyfuss, and Norman Bel Geddes. Nevertheless, this designer helped usher in the "Age of Streamlining" during the 1930's, and in the process forever changed packaging design as we know it.  A successful Industrial Designer as well, Arens' design influence can still be seen on the consumer landscape and in many american kitchens to this day.

Egmont H. Arens (1888 – 1966) was born in Cleveland, Ohio but spent his youth in New Mexico – sent by his family at an early age to recover from Tuberculosis.  Arens studied at the University of New Mexico and later the University of Chicago, but began his career as a sports editor for the Albuquerque Tribune-Citizen in 1916. The following year he moved to NY and operated the Washington Square Bookstore where he established the Flying Stag Press, printing magazines.

His interest in art led him to editorship of Creative Arts magazine, Playboy (no, not that one - but the one first devoted to modern art), and Vanity Fair, a leading style and fashion magazine. In 1927 he was working on the design and manufacture of a line of lamps including a chrome-plated spherical table lamp.

By 1929 he became advertising director for Calkins & Holden, where he started and headed an industrial styling department until it was discontinued in 1936. He wrote Consumer Engineering with Roy Shelton in 1932, and designed the Higgens ink bottle, A&P packages including 8 o'clock coffee and the Phillip Morris logo trademark.Working for the Hobart Manufacturing Company, Arens designed what has become the classic Kitchen Aid Model "K" stand mixer (1937) and "Streamliner" meat slicer (1941).  In 1939, he designed the "Good Life" main exhibit in the Consumers Building, and had his work reproduced for the 1939 New York World's Fair.  His work appeared in print numerous times, gracing the pages of Vogue, House and Garden, Charm, Good Housekeeping, and Harper's Bazaar among others.

In 1944, Arens was one of the 15 practitioners who established the Society of Industrial Designers, our modern-day IDSA, and in 1952 was one of the 12 who established the Package Designers Council.

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Want to know more?  Read a great interview, preserved and reprinted by Mechanix Illustrated (Dec, 1946).  In addition, you can see E.A.'s work at the MoMA in New York, The Brooklyn Museum, or your favorite local housewares store.

"To whom does design address itself: to the greatest number, to the specialist of an enlightened matter, to a privileged social class?  Design addresses itself to the need."


This month's designer, heavily influenced by the Bauhaus movement, was known for zealous experiments with materials and form that defined the landscape of furniture design as we know it.  By employing a philosophy of function and simplicity, this designer was able to help pioneer innovative manufacturing techniques, creating truly iconic products that continue to stand the test of time.

Charles Ormond Eames, Jr. (June 17, 1907 – August 21, 1978), was born in St. Louis, Missouri, the nephew of St. Louis architect William S. Eames.  By the time he was 14 years old, while attending high school, Charles worked at the Laclede Steel Company as a part-time laborer, where he learned about engineering, drawing, and architecture.  
Charles briefly studied architecture at Washington University in St. Louis oCharles briefly studied architecture at Washington University in St. Louis on an architecture scholarship. After two years of study, he left the university.n an architecture scholarship. After two years of study, he left the university to work for St. Louis architectural firm Trueblood & Graf.  In 1930, Charles began his own architectural practice in St. Louis with partner Charles Gray. They were later joined by a third partner, Walter Pauley.  In the late 1940s, as part of the Arts & Architecture magazine's "Case Study" program, Ray and Charles designed and built the groundbreaking Eames House, Case Study House #8, as their home. Located upon a cliff overlooking the Pacific Ocean, and hand-constructed within a matter of days entirely of pre-fabricated steel parts intended for industrial construction, it remains a milestone of modern architecture.

Furniture
Charles Eames was greatly influenced by the Finnish architect Eliel Saarinen (whose son Eero, also an architect, would become a partner and friend).  At the elder Saarinen's invitation, Charles moved in 1938 with his wife Catherine and daughter Lucia to Michigan, to further study architecture at the Cranbrook Academy of Art, where he would become a teacher and head of the industrial design department.  In order to apply for the Architecture and Urban Planning Program, Eames defined an area of focus—the St. Louis waterfront.  In 1941, together with Eero Saarinen he designed prize-winning furniture for New York's Museum of Modern Art "Organic Design in Home Furnishings" competition.  Their work displayed the new technique of wood moulding (originally developed by Alvar Aalto), that Eames would further develop into many moulded plywood products.

Charles married Cranbrook colleague Ray Kaiser in 1941 and moved to Venice, CA to design film sets for MGM but continued experiments with plywood; producing and supplying plywood leg splints to the US Navy starting in 1942.  Their workshop became a subsidiary of the Evans Products Company, laminating glider parts starting in 1943. In 1946, the company turned to production of Eames chairs, when his rights were bought by the Herman Miller Furniture Company. That year, the Museum of Modern Art exhibited his work at a show, "New Furniture Designed by Charles Eames."The Museum of Modern Art held an international competition in 1948 for "Low Cost Furniture Design" in collaboration with a group of furniture retailers who agreed to produce the winning designs. Herman Miller produced one by Eames with an organically-shaped one-piece stamped metal bucket seat in fiberglass, the first successfully mass-produced plastic chair. It was produced through 1995.  A series of upholstered chairs, with welded wire mesh shells shaped to body forms and designed by Eames were also introduced by the Herman Miller Furniture Company in 1951, and were produced through 1967.

In the 1950s, the Eames' continued their work in architecture and modern furniture design.  Like in the earlier molded plywood work, the Eames' pioneered innovative technologies, such as the fiberglass, plastic resin chairs and the wire mesh chairs designed for Herman Miller.  In 1956, the Herman Miller Furniture Company introduced Eames's lounge chair and ottoman with molded rosewood plywood shell structure padded with leather cushions. While quite expensive and originally designed as a birthday gift for film director Billy Wilder, the design became a classic, was placed in the Museum of Art's permanent collection, and won a gold medal (Compasso d'Oro) at the XII Triennale in Milan in 1960.O'Hare airport tandem seating by Eames and introduced by Herman Miller Furniture Company in 1962, was used in airports throughout the world, capturing 90% of the market and was still in use in 1992.The office of Charles and Ray Eames, which functioned for more than four decades (1943–88) at 901 Washington Boulevard in Venice, California, included in its staff, at one time or another, a number of remarkable designers.  Among the many important designs originating there are the molded-plywood DCW (Dining Chair Wood) and DCM (Dining Chair Metal with a plywood seat) (1945), Eames Lounge Chair (1956), the Aluminum Group furniture (1958) and as well as the Eames Chaise (1968), designed for Charles's friend, film director Billy Wilder, the playful Do-Nothing Machine (1957), an early solar energy experiment, and a number of toys.  

Film & Exhibit Design
Charles and Ray would soon channel Charles' interest in photography into the production of short films.  From their first film, the unfinished Traveling Boy (1950), to the extraordinary Powers of Ten (1977), their cinematic work was an outlet for ideas, a vehicle for experimentation and education.  The Eames' also conceived and designed a number of landmark exhibitions.  The first of these, Mathematica: a world of numbers...and beyond (1961), was sponsored by IBM, and is the only one of their exhibitions still extant. The Mathematica Exhibition is still considered a model forscientific popularization exhibitions.  It was followed by "A Computer Perspective: Background to the Computer Age" (1971) and "The World of Franklin and Jefferson" (1975–1977), among others.

The couple often produced short films in order to document their interests, such as collecting toys and cultural artifacts on their travels. The films also record the process of hanging their exhibits or producing classic furniture designs. Some of their other films cover more intellectual topics. For example, one film covers the purposefully mundane topic of filming soap suds moving over the pavement of a parking lot. "Powers of Ten" (narrated by the late physicist Philip Morrison), gives a dramatic demonstration of orders of magnitude by visually zooming away from the earth to the edge of the universe, and then microscopically zooming into the nucleus of a carbon atom.

Recognition
At WORLDESIGN 85, at the first Congress of the International Council of Societies of Industrial Design held in the US, hosted by IDSA in Washington, registrants voted Charles Eames the Most Influential Designer of the 20th Century.  In 1979, the Royal Institute of British Architects awarded Charles and Ray with the Royal Gold Medal.  On June 17, 2008, the US Postal Service released the Eames Stamps, a pane of 16 stamps celebrating the designs of Charles and Ray Eames.

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Want to know more?  Learn all about Charles & Ray Eames at the official Eames website, or  the Library of Congress Exhibition website.  Both feature rare photos and the interesting history of this iconic design-duo.  If you'd like to know more about the Case Study House program, or the Eames House, visit the Eames Foundation website.

"Out of the merger of art, science and
industry have come new techniques that
have within themselves the ability to
create an entirely new pattern and setting
for the life of the world."

This month's designer helped to pioneer the use of freeform sketching and
hand-sculpted clay models as design techniques.  Affectionately referred to as "The Father of the Concept Car," his work as a coachbuilder led him to influence and help position design as an engine for his company's product success – finally becoming what many consider the first styling VP at a large corporation.

Harley J. Earl (November 22, 1893 – April 10, 1969), was born in Hollywood, California to the son of a coachbuilder.  The senior Earl eventually changed his practice from horse-drawn vehicles to custom bodies and customized parts and accessories for automobiles, founding Earl Automobile Works in 1908.  Earl attended the University of Southern California in 1912 and studied engineering at Stanford University from 1914 to 1917, but left prematurely to work with and learn from his father at Earl Automotive Works.  By this time, the shop was building custom bodies for Hollywood movie stars.  Harley designed the first complete car produced by the firm in 1918.

Don Lee, West Coast Cadillac distributor, bought the Earl Automotive Works (including Harley) in 1919. Earl's talents were soon recognized by Larry Fisher, Cadillac Division president, and he was sent to Detroit in 1925 to work at GM.  Harley Earl’s first design for GM was the 1927 LaSalle, and its success lead to the foundation of the Art and Color Division of General Motors, later renamed Styling Division in 1937, of which Earl became the director.  For the first time, a manufacturer began to recognize the importance of a car’s design beyond functionality and cost.  But of course, a creative mind as Earl was confronted with other GM executives in the engineering departments that had a more pragmatic point of view on the functionality of a car.

However, for Earl, there was no contradiction between his design work and the work of the engineers. Rather, he aimed to incorporate all aspects into the development process, assuming that a car appealing in design would also be more functional to the driver.  An beyond beauty and functionality, he regarded the design was essential ingredient to a brand’s commercial success: "It's a matter of record that poor styling or improperly timed styling has proved financially disastrous to some automobile manufacturers."

In 1939, the Styling Division, under Earl's instruction, styled and built the Buick "Y-job" the motor industry's first concept car.  While many one-off custom automobiles had been made before, the "Y-job" was the first car built by a mass manufacturer for the sole purpose of determining the public's reaction to new design ideas.  After being shown to the public, the "Y-job" became Earl's daily driver.  In 1940, Earl became a VP of GM in 1940, an unheard of level of corporate design until then.  His pre-war concept car, the Buick "Y-job" became the template for all GM's postwar styling innovation.

In 1945, while continuing as head of GM styling, he established his own independent consulting firm, Harley Earl. Inc., to design many successful products not competitive with GM. In 1964 his consulting firm merged with Walter B. Ford Design Associates, Inc. to form Ford & Earl Design Associates.  Later in the mid-50's, Earl is regarded as the first to introduce women to high paying jobs within the auto industry, establishing his "Damsels of Design."
Earl pioneered in the process of building full-scale clay models and in dozens of innovative designs including the hardtop convertible, wrap-around windshields, two-tone paint, heavy chrome plating, and tailfins.  Earl's work materialised in a number of ground braking models, some of which have lived over generations until the present day – One example being his "Project Opel", which eventually became the Chevrolet Corvette.  Earl dominated GM design policies (and thus the entire industry) until his retirement in 1958, naming William Mitchell (PE 1958) as his successor. By then, GM styling had passed its time and was criticized as excessive and wasteful. The tone soon turned to a more conservative direction.

Want to know more?  Learn all about Earl, including rare photos and newspaper clippings, at the official Harley J. Earl website, or the GM Heritage Center website.  Both feature rich stories, about this iconic designer.