Early Computer Interface Design: Two Archival Documents

Abstract

Introduction The documents transcribed herein represent two crucial moments in the design of the computer. The first is a short memorandum— really more like a slightly formalized set of notes—written by the art and architecture critic Edgar Kaufmann, Jr. to Eliot Noyes in mid–1957. In 1956, Noyes had hired Kaufmann, along with Charles Eames, George Nelson, and Paul Rand, to aid him in the “IBM Design Consultancy”—a twenty-year campaign to redesign every aspect of IBM and develop for the corporation an autonomous means of designing and redesigning itself. Kaufmann’s notes detail his “impressions” and “hunches” regarding the design of computer interfaces,1 formed in part through his encounters with both the Noyes-designed IBM showroom for the IBM 702 and 705 computers, at the company’s Madison Avenue headquarters, and with the most recent line of computers produced by General Electric. As he noted in his cover to Noyes, the latter visit “served to confirm [his] ideas” regarding the shortcomings of IBM’s computers, whose interfaces were also designed by Noyes in collaboration with the industrial design firm Sundberg-Farrar and IBM’s own team of engineers. As I have detailed in my recent book The Interface, 2 Kaufmann’s notes wholly transformed the approach that Noyes had taken towards redesigning IBM’s products. In true modernist fashion, Noyes’s initial response to what he called IBM’s “design schizophrenia” had been to “strip away” the mannered, cluttered and inelegant surfaces of these complex machines.3 By opening up these opaque surfaces, he had aimed to reveal—and here his language of revelation and overt Biblical reference is telling— the “coat of many colors” that was concealed within. Encased not in elaborate steel containers, but rather simple frameworks, covered only by clear and sheer panes of glass, the computer’s operators would be able, Noyes reasoned, to grasp the computer’s true essence. 1 Edgar Kaufmann, jr. to Eliot Noyes, 13 June 13, 1957, Eliot Noyes Archive. The other memoranda reproduced here providing the context for Kaufmann’s notes are from the same string of correspondence, running from February 26 to June 17, 1957, all attached to one another in the same file. 2 John Harwood, The Interface: IBM and the Transformation of Corporate Design, 1945–1976 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), chap. 2. 3 Eliot Noyes, speech at Yale University, December 8. 1976, quoted in Gordon Bruce, Eliot Noyes: A Pioneer of Design and Architecture in the Age of American Modernism (London: Phaidon, 2006), 146.