Era 2: Systems

As part of this pragmatism, the school blazed a trail in the integration of social sciences into the design process, pioneered the use of computers in design, and increased its partnerships with industry.

Notably, ID’s photography program also flourished, as the photograph expanded beyond the documentary image to gain prestige as a creative tool and art form.

To build Crown Hall, the institution razed Mecca Flats, a housing complex of architectural and social significance for Chicago’s Black community. Indefensible acts of racial displacement and destruction of rich cultural sites were typical of “urban renewal” projects of the mid-20th century United States.

Because Mies had opposed the merger between Illinois Tech and ID, he called for a clear separation between the two schools. As a result, the school found itself literally—and figuratively—in the basement of Crown Hall.

Doblin’s appointment provoked the ire of faculty and students alike. Tenured faculty members resigned in protest, and students wrote a letter to the president of Illinois Tech opposing the decision to hire him. They also lampooned Doblin in periodicals. A shared hope for his failure unified almost everyone at ID.

Jay Doblin often criticized the state of design and design education, stating that the field of design was rooted too deeply in experimentation and that designs as experiments never led to anything tangible. Doblin worked tirelessly, developing theories about product, process, and communications design, the role of the designer, and how design could best become connected to other disciplines. 

Ultimately, with ID’s curriculum at his command, he wanted to shift design from a practice to a profession. In keeping with this aim, Doblin designed a portfolio of images that served as a compact, traveling exhibition of student work to take to the International Congress of Societies of Industrial Design board meeting in Europe. These plates—collected in a briefcase—could be easily transported and then mounted as a presentation of recent ID thinking.

Combining an ingenious idea, technology, and harmonious aesthetics, ID student Takatusgu Sugiyama's aluminum Ribbon Chair elegantly fulfills the task of designing a simple, lightweight, and durable chair out of aluminum.

Coming from a cultural background with little tradition in chair design—Japanese people had lived for centuries without such items in their homes—Takatusgu could detach from traditional notions of chairs and instead reframe the project for low cost in production and design, a novel approach. Metal rolling and binding one sheet, 7 feet long, 16 inches wide, at a thickness of 1/8 inch, to a base of aluminum bars, forms the seat of the Ribbon Chair.

Within the circle a smaller circle specifies activities of the disciplines, linked to categories in the outside circle and signifying a designer’s responsibilities within the discipline (styling, consumer research, design methods, production methods). Notably, Doblin places design itself at the intersection of the two axes and four external and internal quadrants, implying that the disciplines require design—and vice versa.

Doblin saw three levels of complexity to design: straightforward (products we can touch, photograph, and comprehend); unisystem (sets of coordinated products, and the people who operate them, such as a kitchen or airline); and multisystem (sets of competing systems, such as multiple corporations in retailing).

As part of their ID coursework, ID student David Kropp created this geodesic structure, and ID students John Zerning and Donald Davidson built it in 1956. Its multi-panel, low-poly roofing is made of triangles of insulated lightweight materials, hinged together, for quick construction.

Not only could the structure be assembled and installed in about 40 minutes, it could also be moved in production-line style. The structure photographed here exemplifies Doblin’s emphasis on planning and construction, and reflects the influences of ID teachers Buckminster Fuller and Konrad Wachsmann.

In 1962, designer and visiting lecturer Ken Isaacs imagined and constructed the Knowledge Box—a cube, 12 feet square, with a lightproof door on one wall that provides the only entrance. Four film slide projectors, mounted on each surface, display images onto each opposite wall, creating an immersive environment.

When the Knowledge Box is in use, a “learner” stands in darkness in the cube’s center and receives the projected images with no linear narrative. Isaacs designed the box in response to the physical structure of a traditional classroom, in which the rooms remain the same and often the only allowable activity is to listen to someone lecturing. As a compressed environment that delivered rapid communication without clear context, the Knowledge Box foreshadowed the information overload of today.

Doblin’s extensive contacts in industry directly benefited students, who were given opportunities to solve problems facing high-profile US corporations. One recurring contract was for Alcoa aluminum—the world’s eighth largest producer of aluminum—based in Pittsburgh.

Alcoa sponsored design awards for work in transportation and communications, and a recurring aluminum chair challenge. Doblin and ID students designed the brochure advertising the company, its products, and its design program, giving students experience in “branding systems” before that process and term came into vogue.

Sparky—an electric utility vehicle for city driving—can travel at 30 mph and up to 60 miles on a single charge. With room for four people (two up front, two in the back) or 800 pounds of freight, the car can be charged from any 115-volt outlet and operates at about one-tenth the cost of an internal combustion car.

Marnie Averitt built Sparky at ID as a student, under the guidance of his teacher James S. Montague. Other than integrating some formed aluminum body panels, he used readily available industrial components. In 1961, Averitt received a design award for Sparky from Alcoa, sponsor of the student design competition at ID.

With the electronic revolution right around the corner, communications became a mandatory area of study for ID students, including discussions about computers, shorthand stenotype, ophthalmology, and different types of electronics.

After initial research, each student in this course of study had to come up with an idea, prepare their plans for realizing it, and then construct a working model in the ID shops. The culmination was something new and novel in the field of communication, dreamed and realized by an ID student.

Might the English language be simplified to require fewer keys on a typewriter? Ken Hattori of ID analyzed the letters in the English alphabet to determine which of them could be eliminated, and then he economized the language by combining similar-sounding letters to create a ten-character alphabet that could be typed in five keys.

When assigning a chair design, ID professors urge students to move away from the familiar object, toward “body support.”

Since the word “chair” conjures images of four-legged structures with a flat seat and back, students are encouraged to think about designing something in which the human body can rest. Ultimately, students must forget that they have ever seen a chair and attempt to find new methods to relieve the human body of the strain of standing.

Alcoa established a recurring open design competition based on their chair design challenge. The Alcoa designs were then serialized and featured in the Forecast Collection, so named for their representation of “outstanding designs of the future.”

While these futuristic designs never went into production, they were highly publicized, bolstering Alcoa’s image as a cutting-edge commercial manufacturer.

The shapes of the chairs, whether abstract or humanoid, are formed from a single continuous piece of aluminum. The composite parts (backrest, armrest, and chair legs) are formed using an industrial brake, a machine used to bend and shape metal, and the resulting designs are stackable and sturdy enough to support the sitter.

Student-designer Bob Straub investigated transportation seating, and then tried to simulate and solve seating problems. Documenting famous seats, from the Carver invalid chair to the Ritter Euphorian chair, Straub aimed to develop a chair that would allow sleep, instead of just looking like someone could sleep in it.

As the United States enjoyed a wave of unprecedented prosperity at the end of World War II, newly developed suburbs experienced record-breaking rates of new house construction. At the center of every one of those homes: a modern kitchen.

Industrial design students at ID assigned to the food preparation study area worked at the intersection of kitchens and the various activities in and around them, learning to design original and functional food preparation equipment for both commercial and domestic use.

Projects included major appliances (refrigerators and cabinets), commercial equipment, minor appliances (toasters), and utensils (pots and pans, eggbeaters, knives, and forks).

Once they had mastered the basics of the art form, photography students at ID were expected to push themselves to use the camera to see their surroundings in new ways.

While elsewhere photography was seldom taught as anything other than trade, ID was led by traditional, technical, formal, experimental, and modern teachings. Students of Aaron Siskind and Harry Callahan became important artists and influential teachers, as formal visual arts education expanded following World War II.

At one point, most major faculty of photography around the country studied at or had some connection to ID. Barbara Crane, Nathan Lerner, Richard Nickel, and Arthur Siegel were all members of the ID community.

Information is conveyed not only through writing but also through the design of the printed page, typography, and mediums such as magazines and exhibitions. ID’s visual design program, led by Misch Kohn, broke down the hierarchy between fine and applied arts and industry.

Training focused on the development of familiarity and ease with all graphic visual forms. While being trained in the fine and applied arts—graphics, life drawing, and color—students also learned serigraphy, engraving, etching, lithography, and related mechanical processes (typesetting, printing, and proofing).

With these skills, visual design students define problems and address them through whatever visual means they deem most appropriate.

The skull image could be easily printed and distributed, yet had the size for more significant visual impact, and could be transferred in context, from the train platform to a school hall. Kraemer printed the skull head on cheap matchbooks, to remind smokers of the dangers of cigarettes just as they went to light one.

Kraemer even made a movie from the skull head by fastening a tripod to a downward-facing 16-millimeter camera, pointing to a surface for building a second skull. Every time a cigarette was added to form the skull, the camera captured it. The cigarettes formed the skull in 30 seconds—just the right length for a TV commercial.  

Tests were conducted to develop the styling measurement technique—with one of them endeavoring to determine why Kodak had used the additional styling methods and involved disassembling the camera and then designing and modeling three new versions, based on vernacularity, modernity, and commerciality.

Would the U.S.A. theory—basing value on utility, social meaning, and aesthetics—hold up? The resulting profiles answered the question when the public found the commercial design far more acceptable than the others, even though the respondents were told that all three cameras were equal in performance.

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ID and the Design Museum of Chicago partnered to organize this exhibition, which uses 85 key stories to demonstrate the vital role of design—and ID—in improving life, from gas stations to space stations; camping shelters to an app for urban explorers; a better bar of soap to a doable reimagining of water resources for food, energy, and manufacturing.

These stories fall into four eras:
1) Experimentation
2) Systems (this story)
3) Human-Centered Design
4) [Era in Process]