The Interface: IBM and the Transformation of Corporate Design by John Harwood (review)

That form follows function is one of the most regularly repeated and critiqued adages in both the histories of design and of technology. The Interface: IBM and the Transformation of Corporate Design by John Harwood rethinks this paradigm for the computer age. The book is an excellent survey of a history of IBM's design programs, with a focus on the immediate post-World War II period into the 1970s. At stake in this text is inverting the famous argument about form and function to demonstrate how aesthetic practices and design interventions are coproduced with corporate systems and technology. If in an earlier age we theorized that how things look and how they act was a linear process of function creating form, now we are invited to consider the feedback loops between spectacle and system. How we imagine, design, and figure our machines, Harwood argues, is not merely a superficial activity shadowed by engineering. Rather, it is one that shapes our organizations and technology—in this case of computing.

At the center of this book is the argument that studying design strategies offers us insights into reconsidering what corporations are and into rethinking what media might be. "At IBM," Harwood states, "the design program was to serve a control function; in harmony with the demand of the computer that all its data be processed in mathematical terms, the design program would seek to establish a material regime by, for, and of the logic of organization" (p. 4). For Harwood, design offers the symbolic and material structure that made the seeming abstractions of computation acceptable and desired by the public. Moreover, the book argues that design was not an activity secondary to IBM's engineering and administration, but rather an integral part, coproduced with a transforming organization. As IBM developed more flexible, decentralized administration and was forced to transform its engineering and scientific laboratories to adjust to communication theories, the designs of its machines, labs, headquarters, marketing and educational programs, and logos all aided and abetted this structural transformation in knowledge and economy. The book traces the IBM design program through four nodes—its introduction and development immediately after the war, the participation of designers in IBM's computer production, the architecture of IBM's many global office parks as the corporation expanded after the 1950s, and finally, IBM's efforts at public engagement and science education.

Surveying the work of prominent mid-century designers such as Eliot Noyes, Paul Rand, Eero Saarinen, and Charles Eames, Harwood traverses a territory that on the surface appears familiar to design and art historians. This appearance is deceptive. Harwood's innovation is to use the familiar to defamiliarize our present and accepted understandings of corporations and computers. He insightfully extracts the specific logics that convinced the public and engineers of the type of machines they needed to build. Central to this narrative is an underdeveloped but useful term, "the interface," which Harwood defines as the location where human and machine interactions are organized. This is not necessarily a screen, he implies (but insufficiently elaborates upon), but rather a field where bodies and technologies are spatially arranged in new relations for production (p. 9).

For example, from the beginning of IBM's turn to computing, designers had debated the appearance of the computer (pp. 80-82). Such seemingly inconsequential decisions, Harwood argues persuasively, produced concepts of what it means to engage with a machine and how human operators should be trained and incorporated into the human-machine system. Decisions about how much the customer or user might see of the inside of the computer, what parts are transparent and opaque, and how the machine would be color coded were closely linked to rethinking computers not as mammoth architectures and isolated objects, but rather as "furniture"—modular, scalable, and parts of a system rather than discrete objects. In machines such as IBM's System/360, the careful design of attention and distraction—from the structure of operating systems to the skin...