Make It New: The History of Silicon Valley Design by Barry M. Katz & John Maeda

Author:Barry M. Katz & John Maeda
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780262029636
Publisher: The MIT Press
Published: 2015-09-11T06:00:00+00:00

Industrial arts at San José State comprised two main areas of instruction, the largest of which—not surprisingly, given the normal school roots of the college—was the training of elementary, high school, and college shop teachers, and at the graduate level, the study of issues in teacher education per se. The other was broadly characterized as “occupational instruction,” and included an existing program intended to channel graduates into business and industry and a new one, approved following a two-year study conducted by an interdepartmental faculty group and a nine-person advisory group drawn from local corporations and consultancies, in the “exacting” but ill-undefined field of industrial design. Insofar as the stated mission of this program was “to achieve a balance between an education in the humanities, science, business, engineering and art [with] proficiency in technique,” Wayne Champion emerged as the obvious person to lead it. In reality, he soon found himself at the center of a community composed of “dissatisfied engineering students, art students with a too-practical bent, missionary-types, salesmen unsure of what to sell, and craftsmen growing up in an age when individual craftsmanship was dead or dying.”22

Precisely because he was not a trained designer, Champion was able to introduce two radical innovations into his program. First, he was unwavering in his insistence upon a comprehensive approach: to meet the challenges of the present, he argued, “A designer must first of all be a creative thinker. He must think broadly and flexibly and must be aware of the physical, psychological, social needs of man in a rapidly changing and perplexing environment.”23 Second, recognizing that his own relation to the field was that of a “tourist,” Champion befriended as many local practitioners as he could: Carl Clement lent him a member of his team at Hewlett-Packard to teach senior product design two afternoons a week; Frank Walsh of Ampex arranged for Arden Farey to teach the first-year studio; IBM’s Don Moore taught portfolio presentation, and other part-time instructors came from FMC, Lockheed, and elsewhere. The embryonic design program at San José State gradually became one of the hubs of a professional design community that was just beginning to coalesce on the peninsula.

As the outlines of a viable program began to take shape, Champion was given authorization to hire a full-time faculty, and his own humanistic bent was soon complemented by the no-nonsense professionalism of Jack Crist and the creative eccentricity of Nelson van Judah. The triumvirate worked tirelessly to develop a practice-based curriculum, build a robust internship program with local companies, and enhance the visibility of the program within the college: in 1966 the enigmatic Buckminster Fuller spent a six-week residency as a guest of the engineering department, and Van Judah gained local notoriety by commandeering a disproportionate amount of his time. By the time the inventor of “anticipatory design science” had departed on his next global adventure, one of Van Judah’s students had constructed a fifteen-foot geodesic dome in the middle of their classroom, and the class spontaneously began meeting in it.

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