By Neil Kleinman
Published in Print, July/August 1973 Volume XXVII:IV, p. 54-59, 83.
The First Federal Design Assembly said all the appropriate things about upgrading government design. But it also raised some hard doubts about what this administration means when it talks about “good design.”
Some events attract us because they promise so much of what we want, while making it all seem relatively easy to get. We would like to live in buildings that do not breed slums we would like to live in cities that have parks, promenades, and quiet open spaces; we would like to read forms, applications and booklets regulations and be able to make sense of them. We would like to drive down roads and know where we are, where we are going, and where to turn off. Such needs seem reasonable.
Participants in the First Federal Design Assembly attended their first session in the Interdepartmental Auditorium, a setting that looked as if it were designed by Albert Speer for a Nuremberg rally or for a D. W. Griffith epic on the sacking of Rome. The audience of 1000 was welcomed by Nancy Hanks, head of the National Endowment for the Arts, which is underwriting the federal design improvement program. President Nixon, via tape, also was heard. |
To most of us, it has been clear that the general performance of the government in these areas of design, architecture and planning has been unsatisfactory. Each of us can think of his own favorite monstrosity. Some of the things designed by the federal government, like the income tax forms or the brochures explaining Social Security benefits, simply baffle us. Some of them, like the Sam Rayburn building, are so ugly that they have achieved an almost mythic universality virtually becoming archetypes for what ugly is.
The First Federal Design Assembly held in Washington last April 2nd and 3rd was an attempt to set some of these federal sins aright. It was a two-day affair with an evening of opening speeches in which about 1000 designers, federal administrators and dignitaries participated, followed by a day of workshops which was open to about 300 designers and administrators. The Assembly — its preparation and staging, and the book, film and exhibit that augmented it — cost approximately $100,000. It was a stuffed two days.
The Assembly was organized as the first stage of an elaborate design re-programing: the guidelines for federal architecture are to be revised; an attempt will be made to improve graphics in the various executive agencies; employment procedures for artists, architects and designers in federal service are to be reviewed by the Civil Service Commission. In short, the purpose of the Assembly was to begin the process of showing federal administrators that “good design is good government” — a rather pleasant truism if a bit unsettling in these times of political PR and managed news.
Some events like this Assembly look rather appealing — even quite necessary and certainly quite honorable — until seen in light of the political realities that surround them. Whatever else can be said about the Assembly, it made apparent a confused set of priorities. On the first night, the audience heard a garbled tape by President Nixon saying that he did indeed support good federal design. “Excellence of design,” he added, is “a necessity for answering real human needs.” Fair enough, but if one judges Nixon’s commitment to design and “real human needs” in an historical context, the judgement cannot help but be rather sober — especially at this point in time. The political and legislative record of his Administration has given cause for doubt and suspicion.
In the last months, we have witnessed drastic cuts in federal programs ranging from education to care for the elderly to attempts at curing urban blight. It is quite possible that Nixon will succeed in dismantling the Model Cities programs, in abolishing the funds for parks and open spaces, and in severely restricting housing programs for the aged and the poor. In this light, what are we to make of his view that design is “a necessity for answering real human needs?” The definition of “real human needs” becomes at best fuzzy, and at worst somewhat perverse.
We are left with the impression that Nixon sees design as a means of providing form without content. Up-date and improve the guidelines for federally sponsored buildings and houses for people to live in. Spend money to talk about and plan for livable and healthy cities, but then make unavailable the funds that make such cities possible.
It is hardly a surprise, however, that Nixon and company should support the Design Impulse while he is bust cutting funds in other programs created to answer social and human needs. From the beginning, Nixon has made it perfectly clear that his commitment is to order, to a harmony of parts. His is a conservative doctrine that promised stability if nothing else.
We have come into a time in the Republic when we all need “order” of one kind or another. As the system becomes clearly more finite, things do not necessarily get better, they simply get more crowded and complex. For this reason, we turn to designers. While they cannot change anything in a fundamental way, they can help organize what is in a better way. Designers are the prophets of order, needed precisely at a time when order is the issue of the day.
The First Design Assembly gave the stage to first-rate designers and architects like Ivan Chermayeff, Richard Saul Wurman, Lou Dorfsman, Eliot Noyes, Saul Bass among others; often as not, the professional skills of these men have been in the service of corporate improvement, advertising and public relations. In the context of politics and public policy, it is hard not to wonder whether the work they do does not take on different meaning, different values.
Shown are spreads from “The Design Necessity,” the book produced for and distributed at the Assembly. Written by Ralph Caplan and designed by Peter Bradford, under the supervision of Ivan Chermayeff and Richard Saul Wurman, the book is basically a portfolio of designs supported by the federal government that worked. The authors had to be very cunning since there weren’t many examples to choose from. Using a Swiss tyle grid system, sans-serif type and an airy layout, the book looks much like an annual report produced by one of the more prestigious corporations — tasteful and bold, yet conservative, solid and safe. Available from MIT Press in paperback, “The Design Necessity” costs six dollars — which seems a pretty steep price, expecially considering that the book has been given away free to so many people: federal agency heads, state governors, state arts council directors, mayors of cities with populations over 250,000, and to a mailing list of 3000 including federal employees, members of professional design societies, and deans of design at colleges. |
When their work is sponsored by public money, one needs to ask who, then, is their client? Who is being sold? And what is being sold? Does design increase the flow of information making it more accesible and does it “enhance communication,” as so many of the speakers at the Assembly argued, or does design more often emphasize image, style and salesmanship?
Through its design program, a corporation sells itself and its products. It persuades its buying public and its stockholders that it is vigorous, shrewd, intelligent, capable of producing a good product at the most efficient cost, or is sensitive to the public’s needs, or that, in sum, it has any of a number of corporate virtues.
The designer is the artist of the corporation. By organizing mold and to make truths. So the State turns to the designers of Mobil (Eliot Noyes and Ivan Chermayeff), and of AT&T (Saul Bass) and others for its design talent. Where else would it turn?
The point is that, while the federal government may act like one more corporation in our society — often sharing interlocking directories — government is not yet a corporation. At least we have the right to insist that it not remain one. The relationship of the public to the government should be different from the relationship the public has with corporations it deals with and buys from. Corporate design is concerned with the promotion of corporate image and style; a governmental design program should, if anything, allow the public a freer access to the truth beneath the image. This is self-evident. Or is it?
Certainly events of the last decade, ranging from Vietnam to Watergate, put its self-evidency in serious doubt. Still, one may ask why no one during the Design Assembly thought it fitting to consider this contradiction of purposes between corporate and governmental design. Is it because the designers, the federal officials, the planners saw none?
Very little of substance was said during the two days of the Design Assembly. The audience heard and could read in The Design Necessity, a book prepared specifically for the Assembly, that “there are sound, proven criteria for judging design effectiveness,” but very little was said about what those criteria might be. The idea, first expressed by President Nixon in his message, that design “can save money, time, and maintenance... and can immeasurably enhance communication and understanding,” became a refrain throughout the Assembly. These are statements that one does not argue with, but the repetition did not in itself move the discourse very far.
It became clear that one was not going to discover how to appreciate food design and certainly no how to understand what good design is. If anything, one learned only how to respect the performance of a designer, not how to evaluate his work. One had to take the designer at his own estimate of himself, his work and how well he performed it. Taking people at their own estimate of themselves and their work makes one this sort of dependency. It presented the designer as but one more indispensable expert who must by accepted. From the designer’s point of view that approach made sense, but it did not make much sense for anyone who wanted to learn about design and how it functions.
This message was expressed quite explicitly in the rather banal and unimaginative film, “What Do You Mean By Design?,” that had produced for the Assembly by Chermayeff and Wurman, the co-chairmen. “We are constantly confronted with design problems so involved that it is no longer enough to know what you like. In order to define these problems and solve them,” the narration explained, “the experience of a design expert is necessary. If you break a bone, you call the right doctor. If your books don”t balance, you call a good accountant. If you have a serious design problem, you call the designer who has the knowledge you need...’
What design is, not to mention good design, is not the point: learning that we all need a designer is the point. The times cry out for de-mystifying professions, making the skills available to others besides The Experts. This Assembly perpetuated the mystical. This time there were good designers showing what they do, but what about next time? Certainly most of the bad design in federal publications and architecture has not been designer-free. The Sam Rayburn Building had an architect. The stationary, the brochures, the IRS tax forms, road signage, the road and highway system itself were once designed. But by and large, they were designed poorly. People in authority bought these designs because they had been taught that the experts knew best. The public accepted these designs because they thought that the authorities knew best.
One of the things a design assembly should preach is a healthy skepticism about the expertness of designers. But the First Federal Assemble was not inclined to preach this because the administrators in attendance saw themselves as fellow-experts: each group congratulated the other for its special knowledge and its special powers.
One got one’s first whiff of this spirit the first evening of the Assembly, while the avenue sat in what should be known as the Albert Speer Memorial Hall but is more elegantly called the Interdepartmental Auditorium (see photo). After the tape of the President’s remarks was played, after Nancy Hanks, ostensible hostess of the occasion since she chairs the National Endowment of the Arts which is underwriting the program, gave her greeting, J. Carter Brown got up to introduce Rawleigh Warner, Jr., chairman of the board and chief executive officer of the Mobil Oil Corporation.
Mr. Brown was chairman of the task force for this first Design Assembly and is chairman of the Commission on Fine Arts and director of the National Gallery of Art. But before introducing Warner, he felt it incumbent upon himself to put his own credentials in order. He did not want his audience to be left with the impression that he was simply some soft-headed enthusiast for art. He explained that he was a graduate of Harvard Business School and that he sat on innumerable presidential commissions and task forces where he had learned the relevance of all forms of administration to each other. Warming to his subject, he moved on to describe Mobil’s sales record — it is a blue chip company! — and then quite glowingly painted the meteoric climb of Mr. Warner in the Mobil hierarchy. One felt that one was listening to a Medici explain that patronage of the arts was good business.
Mr. Warner of Mobil, an intelligent, lucid and witty man, gave an intelligent, lucid and witty speech. He was a good choice as keynoter for he is the compleat executive, a model for what others in the audience might become. After modestly nodding in the direction of Eliot Noyes who had been responsible for Mobil’s new design program (“I am Eliot Noyes” assistant’), Warner got down to business. “I am convinced,” he said, “that persistent tough-minded monitoring [of a design effort] is absolutely essential to success. The need for this kind of monitoring must be recognized at the top of the organization and communicated clearly downward.” This was a cautionary bit of advice he offered his fellow executives at the top, but I’m sure those less well placed in the audience could hear a slight edge of warning. After listening to Nixon and Warner, some in the audience probably began to see that it was to their best interest to start initiating programs of their own. A sense of authority was there to respond to.
The following full day, spent at the State Department Auditorium, was devoted to case studies; this gave the audience a chance to look at examples of good design ranging through graphic and industrial design, architecture and landscape. The show was good. The men displaying their talents are among the best designers now working in corporate America. And their presentations were good, too. The trouble with experts is that they are fun to watch.
At one end, we have the sparkling coherence of Dorfsman, Bass and Noyes giving presentations that had become trim and taught through practice in many boardrooms. At the other end, we had the wild, perceptive humor of landscape architect Paul Friedberg; and in between, we had the studied probity of men like industrial designers Niels Diffrient and Robert Propst.
The Assembly was full of a kind of positive over-kill. Quite deliberately, “bad” design was avoided. The planners did not want to embarrass. Yet without showing how well-intentioned design fails, it is hard to know why a good one succeeds. Bad design is not always a matter of a bad designer.
Often bad design is a matter of political restrictions, human realities, and a multiplicity of conflicting priorities that damage a good idea or limit the work of a good man. It is these restrictions and conflicts one would have expected a meeting of designers, politicians and bureaucrats to talk about.
An example of how these issues were avoided occurred while Paul Friedberg was discussing a project he was working on for housing along the Hudson River in New York City. He explained that the purpose of the project was to integrate parks with living spaces. To do this, medium-high apartment buildings were to be constructed, allowing the people in them to see the parks and playgrounds from their apartment windows. Among other things this would increase the involvement of those who lived there with what was happening below: the parks would be less anonymous and safer since they would be watched as well as used.
However, owing to financial and political pressures the plans had been changed; more tenants were to be added and the number of stories in each building were to be doubled or tripled. Even if everything else remained the same, the basic logic of the design was crucially altered. People, 20 or 30 stories up from the ground, would not be able to take protective custody of the space below. They would not be able to watch their children and know they are safe. And, of course, the ratio of people to space was also changed.
The architectural and landscape renderings Friedberg showed his audience looked fine — renderings and models always look fine — but the human reality will be different when these buildings are translated into concrete. Yet despite this and despite the fact that Friedberg is a gifted and conscientious designer, there was no discussion of what a political decision had meant to the basic, “good” design.
To talk about good design means learning how to talk about bad design, learning how to talk about the failure that politics imposes while talking with politicians and political administrators. What was needed at the Assembly was a language of candor, something that cannot be had by avoiding political questions and the politics of bad design. Like good design, candor also can “enhance communication.”
State Department Auditorium was scene of all-day workshop devoted to presentations by prominent designers and architects. |
One is left with a rather pessimistic sense of what can be hoped for from this current federal design effort. Still, one can be surprised. We shall have to wait to see what comes out of the program to evaluate and improve federal graphics. We shall have to wait still longer, beyond the relatively simple task of revising the guidelines for federal architecture, to see what new buildings are built, what new transportation systems are devised, what new urban solutions are created.
It will take time but it will be interesting to see if this design program will be able to make use of the energy and imagination of less well-known designers, of designers and artists who are not locked into the corporation for their work and sustenance. Even more important, will this program be able to generate ideas and participation from the people inside and outside the government who must make, use and read the brochures and forms, the people who must live and work in the buildings and drive on the highways? If design in Washington simply stays the domain of the super-expert, the program will not be very successful nor very different from what has gone before.
Someday soon, perhaps, we will have an assembly that will help us define what we mean by “real human needs” and how they can be met. Better, more handsome brochures, stationery, graphics on Postal Service trucks, displays explaining atomic energy reactors, or even better federal buildings will simply not be enough to meet the problems of human needs. In fact, “good design” of this type may only make it easier to forget that human needs are not being met. It is a pity, but it is the truth.
SIDEBAR
Parallel to the Assembly is the work of the Graphics Improvement Program under the direction of Jerome Perlmutter, coordinator of federal graphics. Seven federal agencies are presently participating in this program. The Labor department has hired a design consultant to develop a graphics system. Other agencies are considering future involvement. The National Zoo is working with the Graphics Program to develop a model graphics system. The Federal Prison Industries, a government corporation which manages 50 manufacturing plants within federal penitentiaries, is proposing to develop a new contemporary line of furniture to be manufactured in the prisons.
To assess the graphics of various agencies, Perlmutter has created a series of evaluation panels, consisting of people from business, education, government, art, publishing, and printing. Each agency is asked to submit a portfolio of finished work which usually contains examples of logos, buttons, badges, signs, as well as of special publications, posters, books, photographs, maps, programs, press releases; and examples of stationery, invoices, forms and catalogs.
A panel provides item-by-item evaluations as well as general impressions of an agency’s current graphic program. Where necessary, the panel suggests new directions and improvements. These suggestions are then relayed to the concerned agencies. It is still too early to tell what the effect of these evaluations will be on federal graphics. Sometime in the next year, PRINT plans to cover the graphics program in detail, comparing the redesigned graphics of various agencies with what they had previously produced.
The Design Assembly seems to have been only the opening production of a series of road shows. The Design Necessity Exhibit which illustrates maxims on good design will tour nine states in the midwest during the next year. A duplicate exhibit will tour the lobbies of federal office buildings in Washington, D.C.
Ten states have expressed interest in developing their own design improvement programs. At least two, and possibly four, will be sponsoring State Design Assemblies within the next ten months. The Government Printing Office is arranging a mini-Assembly for its senior administrative staff at which the Public Printer is to express his support for the Federal Design Improvement Program.
Neil Klienman is the author of “The Dream That Was No More a Dream,” a study of German propaganda through its graphics and popular art. He is a freelance writer and designer and is the director of Umbrella Press, a consultant group in publishing; an Umbrella book on mime will be published by Harper & Row next spring.