The Interface: IBM and the Transformation of Corporate Design, 1945–1976

Conclusion: Virtual Paradoxes

216 Conclusion Conclusion 217 Conclusion Virtual Paradoxes The age of media (not just since Turing’s game of imitation) renders indistinguishable what is human and what is machine, who is mad and who is faking it. Friedrich Kittler 218 Conclusion The End of the IBM Design Consultancy and Its Simulacra Now, with an overview, if not of the entirety, then at least of a reasonable cross-section of the IBM Design Program, several questions arise. First, and most generally: to what extent was Noyes’s and IBM’s attempt to redesign design—to reformulate design, previously conceived as an authorial act in one or another medium, into a systematic and anonymous logical process carried out simultaneously in various media—successful? In a televised interview with Noyes in 1966, just as RECD was gaining momentum and taking over the reins from Noyes in governing IBM’s architectural endeavors, the architecture critic and historian Reyner Banham asked him, “how will you hand on your power? Is there enough momentum inside the company or have you got to find and train another person?” In an obvious bid at continuing his quest to find the source of what he called an “Other Architecture,”1 Banham grinned and answered his own question before Noyes could respond: “You see the sneaky conclusion I’m working ’round to. This man might not be a designer.” Noyes, for his part, answered tellingly, It could happen of course. Adriano Olivetti was such a man. I haven’t seen it happen much. One of the things that I’ve been able to do, and really needed to do, I think, was direct the programme also by example setting. [Pointing to a slide of the IBM Development Laboratory.] You see the first modern building that IBM built, I built for them. I said, you see, that you can do it this way, and I got in there and started designing typewriters, and I then had to fight for my foothold in those areas. But I’ve insisted with all the companies that I work for that I’m really an architect and industrial designer, and that as a third profession or activity I’m willing to consult rather intensively, but I’m not willing to consult only; and if they’re not going to give me these jobs to do, I’m not going to accept the assignment; so my mix as a guy who performs, as well as talks, is very important to me, and I don’t know if I could run the programme without both.2 At this critical juncture in the design program, in the wake of the release of System/360, Noyes ultimately felt that he had, despite his collaboration and leadership in creating a collective and autogenerative mode of design—whether through the Design Guidelines or through RECD—preserved his autonomy as an author, but only by retaining control over individual architectural projects. The role of the traditional architectural author remained , to be sure, but only (in the best scenario) as an exemplar, to set a standard to which the automated and autonomous production of corporate architecture could then aspire. The architect of the corporation had already become a diffuse set of relations. Eames acknowledged this state of affairs in a response to a questionnaire circulated to various designers by the curators of a 1969 exhibition at the Louvre, provocatively titled Qu’est-ce que le design? (What Is Design?). The exhibition put this provocative question, among others, to the participating designers, in response to a perceived crisis in the identity of design. No longer associated with the humanist tradition of disegno, or with the modernist discipline of the Industrial Revolution and its aftermath, the definition of design was undergoing rapid change. As the Belgian art historian Henri Van Lier wrote in the 219 Conclusion introduction to the catalog for the exhibition, what had changed was the introduction of an “information explosion”: In the aftermath of the Second World War, and concurrently with the information explosion, design reformulated its problems in the terms of communication theory. It is at this moment that the industrial object, just as all other objects, appeared as a bundle of messages, according to its forms, its handling, its functions. These different messages, denoted (direct) and connoted (indirect), evidently assume codes, i.e. conventions . . . and consist of redundancies, in other words repetitions and insistence, the better to understand...