[:en]
A review of
The Man Who Designed the Future: Norman Bel Geddes and the Invention of the Twentieth-Century America
A review ofAbout this book
by B. Alexandra Szerlip
A good reference for UX Theory
Primary audience: Researchers and designers who have some experience with the topic
Writing style: Matter-of-fact, mostly text
Melville House, 2016, 366 pages, 23 chapters
The house lights dim, the recorded sound effects make the audience quiet, and you’re launched into a spectacle of ideas, passion, and entertainment–just another night at the theater. What has this got to do with user experience? Lots, as it turns out.
Norman Bel Geddes (1893-1958) was a major talent in theater, an innovative engineering genius, and arguably the grandfather of today’s user experience practitioners. His biography, The Man Who Designed the Future: Norman Bel Geddes and the Invention of the Twentieth-Century America by B. Alexandra Szerlip (Melville House, 2016), traces an unconventional career from theater to technology products, with few or no stops for formal education. He started out designing stage sets and lighting, paying close attention to how they worked for people in the “house,” and gradually transferred his consumer-oriented process to the new field of industrial design.
His biography is a lively history of usable design, in a world mostly devoid of computers, let alone software or websites. Bel Geddes’s career reflects a seamless transition from theater to products that passed or exceeded all prevailing standards for human factors in design. “He planned to approach product design as an organic outgrowth of efficiency and ease of use—a natural evolution, with visual integrity following of its own accord,” Szerlip writes.
In 1928, Bel Geddes took on a commission to redesign the Toledo Scale Company’s cast-iron grocery scale, and it grew into the job of setting up a research and development department as part of redesigning the whole Toledo factory along Bauhaus lines. Another peak experience for Bel Geddes—and for readers of his biography—was the design of General Electric’s ride-through Futurama exhibit in the 1933 World’s Fair.
In the time of World War II and its aftermath, Norman Bel Geddes was hailed as one of the Big Four in industrial design—along with Henry Dreyfuss, Raymond Loewy, and Walter Teague. In addition to work for the Department of Defense, Norman re-invented the Ringling Brothers’ traveling circus tent, developed the invention of the first rotating rooftop restaurant, renovated the Hayden Planetarium, and made the notion of aerodynamic “streamlining” accessible in household appliances.
Despite an emphasis on pleasure and entertainment, Bel Geddes’ rigorous development process generally included customer research, prototypes for consumer reaction, and audience or customer surveys—plus close working relationships with the senior management of his clients and prospective clients.
Bel Geddes was there at the birth of milestones in American cinema, partly as a result of friendships that included Cecil B. DeMille, Charlie Chaplin, Max Reinhart, and the witty denizens of New York’s Algonquin Round Table. There’s also an early connection to gaming in the scale-model baseball and football parties that his guests were invited to play—Wii, anyone? The Nutshell Jockey Club, a 28-foot-long racetrack in his basement—with electric starting gates and other innovative but realistically developed features—eventually became a prototype for the real thing.
In defense of what was often perceived as his perfectionist tendencies, he said, “The job is as simple as adding a column of numbers. It adds up correctly or it doesn’t. If it does, you can call it perfectionism. If it doesn’t, call it whatever you like.”
The Patriot
The Patriot, Bell Geddes would later write, “was probably the straw that broke the camel’s back,” breaking theater’s absolute hold on his attention. A drama about the assassination of Catherine the Great’s son (with John Gielgud in his first stateside role), the play opened at Broadway’s Majestic Theater on January 19, 1927, the culmination of difficult work in challenging circumstances.
Bel Geddes had been called in, “after months of worry,” to salvage the production. The play required characters to exit from one of five different locales, mid-speech, and continue, almost interrupted, in another. To meet the challenges of almost instantaneous scene changes, Bel Geddes had designed a series of sliding partitions and interchangeable modules, every piece fitting into every other.
Rather than cutting the floor into a revolving stage—the standard solution, which reduced the performance area by half and accommodated only two scenes at a time—he’d suspended his five sets on cables so they could be stored high up in “the flies,” the space above the stage. Once two half-set platforms pivoted out of the side wings on silent castors to meet center stage, the required “walls” swung into place, and a hinged “ceiling” folded down.
Critics praised Bel Geddes’s “patrician” lighting (when a door opens on a monarch’s dark bedchamber, a scarlet uniform streaks across the lights), his sound effects (a suspenseful pause marked only by the creaking of boots), and especially has eight elaborate, regal sets, which changed noiselessly, in the twinkling of an eye. “Vivid, unforgettable… beyond all praise,” wrote the New York Telegram.
So ingenious was his interchangeable, raised-and-lowered-by-cable-shifting-back-and-forth-between-five-settings approach that Scientific American published a full-page annotated schemata— “How ‘Lighting Stage Changes are Made.” The play itself was less than stellar. “One wishes,” wrote New York Times drama critic Brooks Atkinson, “that The Patriot moved as expeditiously as its scenery. It closed after a five-day run.
[:zh]《设计未来的人》书评，该书回顾诺曼·贝尔·盖迪斯的一生。贝尔·盖迪斯是 20 世纪剧场和工程领域的重要人物，但他没接受过多少正规的学术教育。他对完美的渴望和对试验和原型设计的热情，使他被公认为工业设计领域的“四大巨头”之一。他的传记向大家展示了一个在以用户为中心设计与大多数现代技术诞生之前，就践行此类设计的人。
文章全文为英文版[:KO]노만 벨 게데스(Norman Bel Geddes)의 삶을 연구한 “The Man Who Designed the Future”(미래를 설계한 사람)에 대한 서평. 벨 게데스는 정식 교육을 거의 받지 않았음에도 불구하고 1900년대에 극장과 엔지니어링 분야에 영향을 끼친 인물이었습니다. 완벽함을 위한 그의 노력과 실험과 원형(prototype)을 향한 의지로 산업 디자인에서 4대 거장 중의 한 사람으로 인정받았습니다. 그의 전기에서는 사용자 중심의 디자인과 대부분의 최신 기술이 존재하기도 전에 그것을 실천한 한 사람을 보여줍니다.
전체 기사는 영어로만 제공됩니다.[:pt]Uma resenha de “The Man Who Designed the Future”, que examina a vida de Norman Bel Geddes. Bel Geddes foi uma potência no teatro e na engenharia no início do século 20, apesar de ter tido pouco treinamento acadêmico formal. Sua determinação pela perfeição e sua disposição para inovar e criar protótipos levaram a seu reconhecimento como um dos Quatro Grandes (Big Four) em desenho industrial. Sua biografia revela um homem que praticava o projeto centrado no usuário antes que isso (e a maioria das tecnologias modernas) existisse.
O artigo completo está disponível somente em inglês.[:ja]Norman Bel Geddes（ノーマン・ベル・ゲッデス）の生涯を考察する『The Man Who Designed the Future』（仮訳「未来をデザインした男」）の書評。ベル・ゲッデスは、正式な教育を受けていないにもかかわらず1900年代の舞台美術やエンジニアリングに大きく貢献したアメリカのデザイナーである。完璧さを追求し、実験を重ねてプロトタイプを作り出そうという意欲により、彼はインダストリアルデザイン分野の四天王の一人として認められるに至った。本書は、ユーザー中心や最先端テクノロジーといった概念が存在する以前から既に「ユーザー中心のデザインを実践」していた彼の軌跡をたどる伝記である。
原文は英語だけになります[:es]Una reseña del libro “The Man Who Designed the Future”, que analiza la vida de Norman Bel Geddes. Bel Geddes fue un referente en el teatro y la ingeniería en el siglo XX, aunque tenía muy poca formación académica formal. Su pasión por la perfección y su voluntad para experimentar y hacer prototipos hicieron que se lo reconozca como uno de los Cuatro Grandes del diseño industrial. Su biografía revela un hombre que practicaba el diseño centrado en el usuario antes de que este y la mayoría de las tecnologías modernas existieran.
La versión completa de este artículo está sólo disponible en inglés[:]
Retrieved from https://oldmagazine.uxpa.org/a-life-of-design-and-innovation/
