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1999 AIGA MEDAL
I have to begin this essay with a confession: it is not easy to
write about an old friend and teacher, someone to whom I owe so
much. I have been in awe of Katherine McCoy's talents and
accomplishments for the almost thirty years that I have known her,
and that admiration is framed by my experience of being her student
at Cranbrook back in the '70s. When I heard that Katherine McCoy
was being awarded the AlGA Gold Medal, I interpreted it as a sign
that the AlGA was honoring design education through this specific
award to such a consummate educator. My reaction may be an
automatic reflection of the stubborn split between those designers
who perceive themselves primarily as educators, and those who see
themselves primarily as professionals. And I am sure there are
designers our there who think Katherine McCoy comes purely from the
educator's side, and is somehow detached from the pragmatic
concerns of day-to-day practice. But what I wish to describe is how
the work of Katherine McCoy has been concentrated in education, and
yet has had an enormous impact on design practice in the United
States during the last two decades, and conversely, how the
professional work and activities that she has engaged in have also
functioned as educational, and have made a terrific contribution to
the maturing of design in the broadest sense.
Katherine often has said that it was a visit to the Museum of
Modern Art (on a family trip to the New York world's Fair in 1964)
that made her realize she was most interested in the power of
design. After majoring in industrial design at Michigan State
University and graduating in 1967, she took a job in the Detroit
offices of Unimark International, design consultants who produced
some of the largest and most notable corporate identity projects of
the period. The offices of Unimark, where she received her real
typographic training, were famous for the strict, clean “Swiss”
Modernism of their designs, which at that time was still unique,
almost exotic to corporate communications. Not only did Unimark
sell their work to their clients, they also promoted a
hyper-rational problem-solving approach to corporate
communications, detached from advertising or marketing. The house
journal, Dot Zero, published some of the earliest arguments in the
United States in support of the Modern style. Immersed in the
ideology of problem solving through “objectivity” in form, she
spent hours poring over the office copies of the “Swiss Bibles,”
typographic books by Müller-Brockmann, Ruder, Gerstner, and
Hofmann.
Her experience at Unimark was followed by a year at Chrysler
Corporation's corporate identity office, and then by a Boston
office, Omnigraphics, that consulted with Muriel Cooper at the MIT
Press, which provided further opportunity to hone the typographic
approach she had developed at Unimark, and a design office in
Detroit, Designers and Partners, which was quite a different place
altogether. Designers and Partners was oriented toward working with
advertising agencies, mostly on automotive accounts, and had a
staff that consisted of all sorts of graphic arts “professionals,”
including illustrators, cartoonists, and “lettering men” as well as
graphic designers. Although she did not particularly enjoy the work
with advertising clients (finding the focus on selling to be
contrary to her interests in communication), Katherine was exposed
to a very lively group—including her colleague Edward Fella, who
was later to become one of the more influential participants (as
both a critic and a graduate) in the Cranbrook design department,
and whose aesthetic was as eclectic as Unimark's was pure.
In 1971, Katherine and her husband, Michael, an industrial
designer, were founding their partnership, McCoy & McCoy
Associates, when they were asked by the Cranbrook Academy of Art to
become co-chairs of the design department. Under the direction of
Eliel Saarinen from the '30s to the '50s, Cranbrook's
graduate-level design department had nurtured and produced several
students who went on to become major forces in American
architecture and design—Harry Bertoia, Eero Saarinen, Florence
Schust (Knoll), and Ray and Charles Eames, among others. But all
schools go through cycles and not much had happened in design at
Cranbrook after that. After some hesitation, Michael and Katherine
accepted the position, walking into a department that had a great
past but no present—although it did have the incredible and
subtly beautiful Saarinen-designed campus as a daily reminder of
what could be accomplished in that place.
The McCoys were free to reinvent the programs in 2-D and 3-D
design however they wanted. Katherine recalls that she combined the
“objective” typographic approach that she knew through professional
practice with an interest in the social and cultural activism that
was in the air in the late '60s. One early recruitment poster for
the program features text that describes the goals of the design
program in almost completely Utopian terms, combined with a collage
that reproduces fragments of provocative design from both the
professional and avant-garde design traditions of the twentieth
century. The beginning of the McCoys' program at Cranbrook can be
seen as part of a wave of activity in U.S. design programs that was
directed toward more high-level experimental work. California
Institute of the Arts, the Kansas City Art Institute, and the Rhode
Island School of Design, among other schools, started to offer
alternatives to the graduate program at Yale, one of the advanced
programs in graphic design studies that not only trained people for
professional practice, but encouraged them to work speculatively,
beyond the professional model.
The tensions and contradictions between the Modernist obsession
with process and methodology versus the fascinations with both
historical and speculative form were always in play at Cranbrook.
Katherine McCoy describes her role as a “parade organizer” or a
“coach,” concerned with setting the scene for a rich interchange
between students. The remarkable thing about Cranbrook under the
direction of the McCoys that is not well understood is how, on the
surface, a department with so little structure actually worked. The
art school was run without classes, grades, requirements, or
deadlines other than a final thesis show, and yet the place was a
beehive of activity. This has lots of anecdotal explanations—winter weather so bad that there was nothing to do but work, or
haunted dorm rooms—but the truth as usual is more complex. The
McCoys had a good eye for the right students, and really knew how
to create an interesting mix of personalities in the studio. After
a brief foray into interdisciplinary projects, the students were
segregated into projects but not into separate studios, so graphic
designers were exposed on a daily basis to the problems of
industrial designers, and vice versa. Students sat in on one
another's critiques without regard to specialty. It is true that
Katherine leaned on her Modernist typographic background at the
beginning (I remember Kathy handed me a copy of Ruari McLean's
translation of Jan Tschichold's Asymmetric Typography and said,
“Here, read this, it's all you really have to know about type.”)
but she soon evolved a short sequence of introductory projects for
the graphic design majors that would accelerate their progress from
standard typographic skills into the ability to play more fluidly
and expressively with typography.
Over the years Katherine designed a lot of material for the
Cranbrook educational community, quarterly magazines, catalogues,
and posters, along with other projects that she and Michael
produced as McCoy & McCoy. Within the tradition of the atelier
there were many opportunities for students to collaborate with
Katherine on the design of works that were actually realized. This
is the counterbalance to the experimental work of the Cranbrook
students, which was so often reproduced yet not understood to be
part of a wider range of projects undertaken in the department.
However, that interest in process and progress that the McCoys had
brought to the program transformed itself into an obsession with
the possibilities of change and transformation of design practice
itself. At the studios and the critiques at Cranbrook, discussions
often centered on the possibility of breaking away from the norms
of everyday practice. Katherine and Michael required the students
to read about both historical and contemporary design and theory,
to really understand the context in which each student was going to
be entering. In retrospect, this might have seemed a bit
presumptuous for a design department in a somewhat obscure art
school in the northwestern suburbs of Detroit, but the internal
expectation set up by Katherine and Michael was simply that they
(the McCoys and the students) were in this not only to make
interesting work, but to make their mark upon the development of
the field. And Katherine's ongoing work outside of Cranbrook, with
its orientation toward public education, such as the Design
Michigan project of 1977, the Colorado Native American Heritage
poster project of 1978, or the Fluxus book of 1981 constantly set
the example of work that worked, both formally and conceptually,
for its audience.
Something else that Katherine and Michael McCoy gave their
students—although it was obviously never taught, it was offered
purely by example—was the idea of living a life that could not be
divided simplistically between life and work, but that integrated
life and love and design and work absolutely seamlessly. The
McCoys, like all the Cranbrook faculty, lived and worked on campus,
although they were the only teachers who worked as a team, as a
creative partnership, and as a married couple. Every day the
students witnessed what prodigious things could be accomplished
under such an arrangement! The power and positive energy implicit
in the creative partnership of McCoy & McCoy (that simple
equation, one plus one) proved to be exponential, and again only
emphasized the importance of commitment both inside and outside of
the design studio.
Katherine took two leaps in the design of the design program
during the late '70s, which led to its second, very influential
phase. First, she began to alter the introductory typography
projects to allow a semiotic interpretation to begin to drive the
solutions, and she allowed the students to depart from the stricter
Modernist vocabulary of previous years, to include stylistic
elements that had previously been underused by Modernist
typographers, such as historical or vernacular type forms or
images. The second leap was to let the students, who were more than
ready and able, to take the lead on the exploration of theory, but
to insist that it always be resolved as a visual problem rather
than an academic one. This again emanated from Katherine's honest
assessment that the strength of the Cranbrook tradition was one of
making meaning through making real work. Also, what cannot be
underestimated is Katherine McCoy's ability to put together classes
of students who would challenge without competitively destroying
each other, and her ability to articulate an ethic of community
that somehow encouraged this high level of productivity. It is
important to note that while Katherine was running the 2-D program
at Cranbrook and consulting on myriad design projects, she also
served as the first woman president of the Industrial Design
Society of America (1983–1985), sat on the national advisory board
of the AlGA, and chaired the Design Arts Fellowship Grant Panel for
the National Endowment for the Arts for three years. The generous
amount of time she spent on the development of professional
organizations during these years of growth came out of her
conviction that it constituted an extension of her teaching time—that the organizations were critical to the ongoing development of
the design itself. She has a holistic view of the interrelationship
between the academies and the design offices, and sees the
professional organizations as the natural link, a force for
education that does not stop with school.
Another aspect of Katherine's influence has been her writing,
which has always been cogent, jargon free, and clear in its
commitment to the continuing education of all designers, not just
those in school. After she and Mike took a sabbatical in Holland,
she wrote an essay in I.D. Magazine titled “Reconstructing Dutch
Graphics” (1985), which was one of the first explorations of the
new Dutch work to appear in an American design magazine. It did a
lot to draw the attention of young American designers to the high
level of contemporary design being produced there and helped to
instigate many exchanges between American and Dutch graphic
designers during the next few years. But most of Katherine's
writing has been focused on issues specific to education or to
attitudes that affect design practice, inside and outside of the
classroom. A continual theme running through her writing is that of
authenticity an ethics: in education (working through ideas about
understanding the criteria to judge effective programs to teach
design) and in professional practice (exploring the idea of
commitment to social and cultural and political activity and the
tension between that an. the stubborn notion of the disengaged
professional). Also, she has used writing to spur her own research
into the articulation of new ideas in design, and in the process
has often found the words to explain what we are experiencing
visually at that moment. That writing, which would include her
essays on typography and now on new media, has entered the syllabi
of studio and seminar courses in design schools across the
country.
In 1991, the McCoys (with a large team of 2-D and 3-D students)
produced the book Cranbrook Design: The New Discourse (Rizzoli
International Publications). The book documented the high-octane
visuals of the work that had been produced in the Cranbrook studios
during the 1980s, and it probably sealed the reputation of the
school as being a place where the visual quality of the work,
sometimes generated by a highly creative (or even mistaken!)
interpretation of theory took precedent without regard to the
“needs” of the profession. Again, the critique that often met the
work represented in that book was often voiced without knowledge of
the actual discourse of the studio critique, driven by the McCoys,
that challenged the experimentation to be as real as possible, out
of a dedication to realizing the Utopian ideal of design that
informed, delighted, and somehow liberated its users.
The McCoys gave up their chairmanship at Cranbrook in 1995 after
sustaining twenty-four years of coherent and energetic work. They
moved to Chicago, where they spend every fall semester as senior
lecturers at the Illinois Institute of Technology's Institute of
Design. Katherine in particular has somewhat moved away from studio
teaching, and has instead been concentrating more on theoretical
issues having to do with both the teaching and practice of graphic
design in the context of new media. In fact, this has brought her
back to issues of design methodology, information and
communications theory and the audience, not far from where she
started both under the influence of Unimark and the late '60s
obsession with process over form. Like many other educators facing
the shift in technologies brought on by design for electronic media
and the web, Katherine recognizes that we are facing a profound
shift that cannot be answered with the same set of principles that
framed the backbone of the last several decades of design for
print. But she does bring a depth of experience and perspective to
this new challenge (and, again, phenomenal energy for study and
research). She initiated and chaired the American Center for
Design's “Living Surfaces” conference in 1992, the first U.S.
design conference on the subject of new media, and has written many
articles and lectures devoted to this new phase of her ongoing
work.
Katherine and Michael spend the rest of the year in the
mountains of Colorado, in what, from afar, looks like
semi-retirement. But up close the image shifts completely: in their
totally wired encampment they continue their projects and their
research. Even the teaching doesn't really stop—this year
Katherine and Michael have launched “High Ground,” a series of
studio charette workshops open to professional designers in their
studios. Katherine has often advised younger designers that they
must regard the design of their own careers as a project itself,
and that they must choose their paths carefully. Even in that
remote location, the path that Katherine has taken, and continues
to take, integrating life and art and design and work, resonates in
the work of so many others from coast to coast. It is for work
accomplished, but an exemplary process still in progress, that this
AlGA Gold Medal seems most appropriate.
First published in 1999 by AIGA.
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