Three degrees of separation: Industrial designers find inspiration with Norman Bel Geddes

 

Scott Lauffer, an Industrial Design Director at Dell’s Enterprise Product Group, recently visited the exhibition I Have Seen the Future: Norman Bel Geddes Designs America with a group of colleagues, primarily industrial designers and engineers. The group takes occasional offsite visits to find inspiration. This is the third visit the group made to the Ransom Center over the past few years. Lauffer shares his observations from the visit.

As designers I think we all drew inspiration from the versatility that Norman Bel Geddes displayed not only in the types of work that he consulted on, but the salesmanship he exhibited to convince many of his clients to invest in creating better human experiences in a time before it was expected and demanded by consumers. His background in theater probably served him well in being a better storyteller for his vision. His approach for researching and understanding human behavior along with model building and storytelling are all techniques that we draw on heavily as designers today.

It was interesting to see how Bel Geddes not only influenced our group’s profession of industrial design, but also our industry, albeit indirectly. Elliot Noyes, who founded the Industrial Design program for IBM and pioneered the corporate design discipline in 1956, was previously employed by Bel Geddes. We later discovered there were only three degrees of separation for some of us: Bel Geddes to Elliot Noyes to Tom Hardy, with whom some of us previously worked in his capacity as design director at IBM.

The exhibition was crafted to educate a wide audience through thoughtfully selected examples that represent the breadth of Bel Geddes’s work, without overwhelming. The courage Bel Geddes showed in proposing the visionary and using this to stretch the imagination of his clients is inspirational.