Jay Doblin Part III: Professionalizing Design
How Doblin shifted design's focus from products to systems and found new ways to partner with business.
Professionalizing design
In Moholy’s time, corporate sponsors were often an afterthought; commercial contracts funded Moholy’s experiments with little concern for the business needs of the patrons. Not surprisingly, these clients were often less than enthusiastic about the outcomes.
Bringing in corporate sponsors
Under Doblin, the school became something of a magnet for corporate-backed innovation. Students benefitted from Doblin’s many contacts in the commercial industry, as high-profile American corporations invited them to solve actual problems.
Alcoa Aluminum ChairsInstitute of Design (ID) at Illinois Tech
Aluminum chairs for Alcoa
One recurring contract was for Alcoa, the world’s eighth largest producer of aluminum. The brief asked students to design a chair using a single, standard sheet of square aluminum with minimal material waste.
Two prototypes seen here are formed from a continuous piece of aluminum. Composite parts are formed with an industrial brake. Both resulting designs are stackable and sturdy enough to support a sitting person.
While these futuristic designs never went into production, they were highly publicized, bolstering Alcoa’s image as a cutting-edge commercial manufacturer.
“A lot of criticism levied at Doblin’s approach to design is because it was very much embedded within consumerism and capitalism. But maybe it had to be. That was the world that he lived in. He wanted design to have a seat at the table where decisions were being made within corporations. He wanted design to be taken seriously.”
— Tomoko Ichikawa, ID Associate Professor of Visual Communication
Nasa Prints: BedInstitute of Design (ID) at Illinois Tech
The foam core space station
NASA was another ID client. Students designed a full-scale re-creation of a futuristic space station out of foam core, based on design requirements determined with a DSM matrix.
Particularly impressed with ID’s systematic approach to design execution, NASA went on to use this method to specify requirements for subsequent projects.
Jay Doblin's Trip to JapanInstitute of Design (ID) at Illinois Tech
A teacher and a practitioner
In addition to teaching and publishing, Doblin consulted for governments and corporations. In 1959, Japan’s Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI) invited him to assess whether Japanese design was good enough to export to other countries.
The Japanese government had recently passed laws intended to increase the presence of Japanese design in international markets. Concerned that the laws might stymie economic growth, Japanese officials invited Doblin to visit Japan to assess the government-backed design program.
Doblin was thoroughly impressed with the government’s willingness to prioritize a coordinated design program. Reflecting on his work for Japan some 20 years later, Doblin issued a critical appraisal of the US government’s comparative lack of initiative: “The United States is being decimated by Japanese design and manufacturing... In contrast to Japan’s well-organized program, the USA has no export department or laws. We are really dumb.”
“I’ve met talented designers that cannot teach and I’ve met good teachers that do not practice. But in this regard Jay was, again, exceptional. He was both a teacher and a practitioner.”
- Kun-Pyo Lee, Dean of the School of Design, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, former Doblin student
Product, Unisystem, Multisystem DiagramInstitute of Design (ID) at Illinois Tech
Shifting the focus from products to systems
Doblin was often critical of what he saw as the field’s myopic focus. Doblin encouraged designers to engage in higher order thinking, looking beyond the product to what he called “the simplest kind of design,” to the larger systems in which those products participate.
Rather than focus on the product in a vacuum, Doblin drew attention to its larger context, what he termed the unisystem, “a set of coordinated products and the people who operate them.” The final order was the multisystem—nested systems that must be coordinated.
“[Doblin] was getting us to see the systemic nature of design—the interlocking, interdependent, many-layered relationships.”
—John Cain, Doblin student and employee, Co-Founder, E-Lab
Doblin was laying the foundation for contemporary design practice. Although such terminology had not yet crystallized in Doblin’s time, this is the level at which service design, user experience design, and human-centered design operate today.
Pivotal
“'Pivotal' is the word that comes to mind. Without Jay, I don’t think that the concept of human-centered design would exist today."
- Tomoko Ichikawa, Associate Professor at the Institute of Design and former Doblin student
Jay Doblin Leaves Institute of Design, Pursues Career With Design FirmInstitute of Design (ID) at Illinois Tech
Leaving the Institute of Design
For all Doblin’s grand ambitions to remake the field of design, he was out of runway. Despite growing enrollment figures, corporate sponsorships, and favorable press, Doblin had to fight tooth and nail for funding.
The final straw came when Doblin revealed to the school’s president that he had been using the entirety of his IIT salary to fund student projects while supporting himself on his corporate contracts.
Asked to provide proof, he shared a copy of his tax returns. Doblin was met with stiff indifference and later recalled, “IIT’s administration made it clear that the Institute of Design was low on their priority list." In 1969, Jay Doblin left.
“In Korea, we have a proverb: ‘After a tiger’s death, what’s left behind is their skin. After a human’s death, what’s left behind is their name. Everyone... needs to know the name ‘Jay Doblin.’”
- Kun-Pyo Lee, Dean, School of Design, Hong Kong Polytechnic University
