Noah's Archive

As I write this I am eating a banana.

Last fall at the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts in Maine I took part in a seminar called Craft and Design: Hand, Mind and the Creative Process. My talk, as far as I could tell, caused no physical injury to the audience. I, however, passed out right after finishing. Fortunately, there was a doctor in the house. One of the other speakers was Frank Wilson, a neurologist who acted as—in his term—my “ad hoc doc.” He assessed the situation and conducted me to the nearest hospital, where tests revealed that the cause was not my presentation but my medication. Prescribed to bring down my blood pressure it had done that to a fault, bringing me down with it and leaching the potassium from my body as well. I am fine now, my dosage reduced and my potassium level vigilantly maintained.

That explains the banana. But what explains the neurologist? What was he doing at a design seminar in the first place? Designers have a long tradition of holding conferences featuring speakers chosen for their achievements in fields other than design. In 1957, at the annual meeting of the American Society of Industrial Designers, the principal speakers were a chemist, a biologist, and a psychologist. This past October, the Industrial Designers Society of America’s annual conference featured a debate between a professor of molecular biology and a specialist in technology policy. The program organizers reasoned that “designers think too much about design and not enough about anything else,” which was the same rationale used 50 years earlier.

That is still valid as rationale, but disingenuous as motive. Certainly design practitioners need the wisdom of specialists from many different fields. They provide breadth and depth not always found within the professions. But our reliance on stars from other galaxies has always been powered by an element of show-biz aspiration. Speakers purportedly invited because of their relevance were really sought as much for their gate appeal and outré glamour. One of the best of them, the great scientific humanist J. Brownowski, complained of being “dragged on stage to perform like a trained seal” at design conferences all over the world.

By way of full disclosure, or at least mea culpa, I admit I have always been susceptible to the cachet of an out-of-the way choice. Once, in Indianapolis, I visited a forum of born-again fervor called The Cadle Tabernacle, which each week featured a different, but equally colorful, evangelist. I had been drawn by an ad showing a convict in striped prison uniform holding a Bible. I took a seat next to a woman who had the unmistakable look of a regular.

Hoping to pass as a regular myself, I said enthusiastically, “I see that tonight we have a reformed convict.”

“That’s nothing,” she said. “Last week we had a reformed Jew!”

As the student head of the public events committee at a Quaker college, I delighted in booking a nun and a Marine Corps general as campus convocation speakers. Small wonder that, years later, when I chaired a design conference, the program included a wild-animal trainer, an astrophysicist, a poet, and a performance artist.

Each of them was excellent. The quality of design discourse has been enormously improved by men and women who are not designers. Bronowski, trained seal or not, developed design conference presentations that, in book or article form, have become design classics. But while design is enriched, and designers entertained, by the contributions of brilliant minds from outside the profession, we need such people today as more than just sustaining intellects. Henry Dreyfuss used the orthopedist Dr. Janet Travell (famous for prescribing a rocker to relieve JFK’s aching back) as a consultant when designing chairs; and Charles and Ray Eames enlisted mathematicians like James Redheffer in designing the still vital exhibition Mathematica. Fuller project collaboration is essential now that designers routinely face situations too complex to be addressed by any one discipline.

Dr. Frank Wilson has made a medical, intellectual, and artistic practice of collaborating with an astonishing variety of people seeking to understand—and promising to further his own understanding of—his specialty: That specialty happens to be the hand. Wilson knows and explains with engaging lucidity precisely the kind of thing designers need to know about hands—their own and everyone else’s.

After World War II an industrial designer named Thomas Lamb devoted himself to studying and drawing the human hand, and became a prized consultant to manufacturers of luggage, knives and anything else requiring handles. But to him, as to me and I guess to most of us, the hand was a limited concept. I thought of the hand as an organ starting at the wrist and ending with fingers of five different lengths. That is distressingly superficial, when you come to think of it, but I never had.

Wilson is the author of a seminal book called The Hand that begins by demonstrating the impossibility of saying where the hand begins, and ends by demonstrating the futility of even thinking about where the hand ends. To Wilson, hand equals brain in human significance, because the communication between the two is responsible for human understanding, emotions and development.

That accounts for what a neurologist was doing at a design seminar. It may even help explain why a juggler and a magician were there too.