The Interface IBM and the Transformation of Corporate Design 1945-1976 John Harwood A Quadrant Book University of Minnesota Press Minneapolis London QUADRANT On the way from mythology to logistics, thought has lost the element of self-reflection, Quadrant, a joint initiative of the University of Published by the Minnesota Press and the Institute for Advanced University of Minnesota Press and today machinery disables men even as it nurtures them. Study at the University of Minnesota, provides 111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290 support for interdisciplinary scholarship within Minneapolis, MN 55401-2520 a new collaborative model of research and http://www.upress.umn.edu Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer publication. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Dialectic of Enlightenment Sponsored by the Quadrant Design, Architecture, Harwood, John and Culture group (advisory board: John Archer, The interface :IBM and the transformation of Ritu Bhatt, Marilyn Delong, Kate Solomonson) and corporate design, 1945-1976 I John Harwood. the University of Minnesota's College of Design. p. em. Includes bibliographical references and index. Quadrant is generously funded by the Andrew W. ISBN 978-0-8166-7039-0 (he : alk. paper) Mellon Foundation. ISBN 978-0-8166-7452-7 (pb : alk. paper) http://quadrant.umn.edu 1 . International Business Machines Corporation­ History. 2. Corporations-United States-History. This book is supported by a grant from the 3. Industrial design. 4. Modern movement Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the (Architecture)-United States. 5. Noyes, Eliot. Fine Arts. 6. Rand, Paul, 1914-1996. I. Title. HD9696.2.U6412547 2011 Every effort was made to obtain permission to 338. 7'6004097309045-dc23 reproduce material in this book. If any proper 2011031742 acknowledgment has not been included here, Printed in the United States of America on we encourage copyright holders to notify the acid-free paper publisher. The University of Minnesota is an equal­ Copyright 2011 by the Regents of the University opportunity educator and employer. of Minnesota 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 All rights reserved. No part of this publication 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Computers and the New Vision signers designed and engineered the apparatus character of the man-machine system of the computer: the functional and spatial relation of the machine to its users and to its It is a truism in the history of science and technology that the computer, like any technol­ surrounding environment. Another way of saying this is that in the design of computers, ogy, was invented at multiple times and in many places, by any number of different people; industrial designers played the part of engineers, but engineers of a very special kind, accordingly, the contemporary historian of science and technology has any number of occupying a liminal area of expertise situated somewhere between that of the electrical methodological responses to this problem immediately to hand. 1 Yet the computer presents engineer, the computer scientist, the human factors engineer (ergonomist), and, perplex­ a special problem to both designer and design historian, for two complex but interre­ ingly, the architect. Noyes and his fellow design engineers coordinated the raw data lated reasons. The first is that it is impossible to pinpoint exactly who designed a given generated by the human sciences (psychology, psychiatry, human factors engineering, computer. An industrial product of immense technological complexity, a computer is medicine, etc.), information sciences (information and communications theory, cybernetics, the result of the combined efforts of many different kinds of designs and designers: math­ game theory, systems theory, simulation), and the technical engineering of electronics ematicians, who articulate the computer's logical form; engineers of various types, who into a representational system capable of organizing and suspending the human being transpose that logical form into material, develop the mechanisms that grant it its memory and the automatic, autonomous object called the computer into an organic and produc­ and ability to communicate its functioning to other machines and operators, and much tive whole-a semiautomatic system. All of this work was poured into the production else besides; and technicians-whether machine or human-who assemble the vast array of an approach to the design of what Noyes and his colleagues at IBM called the exter­ of components into a functional apparatus on the factory floor and wherever the computer nals of the machine-its interface. is to be used. In 1966, when he was asked by Reyner Banham in a television interview how he main­ Most of these aspects of computer design are not treated here. They are treated ex­ tained visual and experiential consistency among the various IBM machines, Noyes tremely thoroughly elsewhere, in the literature on the history of science and technology answered amusingly, and in technical manuals, by historians and engineers with much greater expertise in such matters than I could possibly possess. 2 Rather, this chapter seeks to discuss the Well, it's first of all I think a general philosophy of design, let's say it's non-decorative, it's pretty contributions to the design of computers made by industrial designers, which has thus straightforward and functional and it's kind of producing order to make sure that there is order, far gone undiscussed in any detail by design historians.3 but the devices by which I keep order going here is, for example, a consistent approach to form and a consistent approach to detailing, and a consistent approach to colour and these to some It is not hard to see why historians have avoided such a difficult problem. Eliot Noyes, extent can be codified and I enlist the collaboration and co-operation of industrial design managers Paul Rand, and the IBM industrial design engineers with whom they collaborated did not of each location within IBM to become a sort of an informal committee. In fact I've often called participate directly in the design or engineering of the form or structure of the CPU or it the Lavender Hill Mob of IBM because it's absolutely illegal, there's nothing in their table of the computer's other mechanical and electronic parts, nor did they participate actively in organisation that says such people should talk to each other, or even know each other, because the academic research then being conducted into human physiology or the psychology they're in different divisions, each one of which has its own responsibility, but we do need of behavior and perception (the cognitive sciences) by ergonomists. Industrial designers and we do have our parties and we do agree about our standards and nobody can make any ... did not make substantial contributions to the design of software (notwithstanding a des1gn innovation or change without our general agreement, and in case of dispute I'm the handful of notable exceptions).4 They were misunderstood by their colleagues in other referee. 6 departments within the corporation, who saw them as concerned only with "the height of a reading board, the knee space necessary, the diameter of a knob,"5 or with the This group of bumbling crooks-Noyes refers to the Oscar-winning bank heist comedy banalities of advertising and so forth. In the rapidly changing world of computer design, The Lavender Hill Mob (1951)-worked across the clearly defined organizational units the role of the industrial designer in the process of designing computers became at of the corporation/ bringing their individual data into alignment with each other, critiquing one point so vague even to IBM management that the company considered merging the and correcting those data, and eventually codifying that harmony in the form of the IBM Industrial Design Department with the Human Factors Department, an episode that Design Guidelines. By virtue of this transorganizational position, the industrial designers will be discussed in some detail below. at IBM, then, did not just design the way that the computer looked, but also determined its fundamental character as a single system, and in so doing, redesigned the workings If industrial designers could not participate in any of these putatively essential aspects of the individual departments of the corporation itself. Any account of the design of the of computer design and manufacture, then what was their function? The answer is at computer must therefore take into account the nature of this role and seek to explain the once remarkably abstract and, in view of the evidence, tangibly concrete. Industrial de- precise techniques-at both formal and organizational levels-by which they fulfilled it. 60 The Architecture of the Computer 61 The Architecture of the Computer Further complicating matters, there is a second reason why the design of the computer hives of the Manhattan Project) and mechanical, even when not operating machines. They is a difficult subject for the designer and historian alike, and this is the simple fact that­ were adjuncts of the tables and arithmetic that constituted the modern administration because the computer is capable of reproducing formal logic and is always and every­ of business. One of the founding theoretical texts of computer science, the British mathe­ where in dialogue with a vast number of different people, of varying types discussed matician Alan Turing's "On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entschei­ below-the computer is a subject as much as it is an object. This is, of course, a problem dungsproblem" (1935), takes the slippage between embodied human thought13 and for the designer or historian of any given technological object, insofar as that object is discrete formal logic-a slippage engendered through the material practice of people both the product and the artifact of use.