We now know them simply as the Eames. History has merged Charles Eames (born 1907) and Ray-Bernice Alexandra Kaiser (born 1912) into a unity in the annals of design. They are remembered for their contributions to furniture design (including, of course, that chair), to architecture (including the Case Study program), to museum exhibit curation, and to documentary filmmaking. In each of these fields and throughout their career the Eames advocated user-centered design (UCD) before there was a word for it (the term was coined in 1977, the year Star Wars came out) and long before UCD officially was applied to architecture and interior design. Now we have interior designers like Ilse Crawford talking about design empathy (see the episode devoted to her in the NetFlix series Abstract: The Art of Design) but in the mid-twentieth century the Eames were among the very few to espouse the notion that design’s purpose was to enrich people’s lives.
Charles Eames died in 1978, a few years before the release of the first digital recording medium, the compact disc. Ray Eames died in 1988, one year before Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web. (In one of those quirks of history, Charles and Ray each died on August 21.) Yet together they foresaw the shape of these things to come. “Everything hangs on something else,” said Ray, observing the strings of causality that lead from conception to creation. “Eventually everything connects,” said Charles, observing the interrelatedness of things that would be embodied in hypertext and the World Wide Web. Charles also said that “the quality of the connections is the key to quality per se,” expressing the impetus behind the development of digital sound in its attempt to eliminate noise from the system. Together, these concepts—connection, communication, purity of message—form the goals behind the web and web design.
A Communications Primer
It is fascinating to contemplate what the Eames might have contributed to web design. Of course, it is not certain that web design would have interested them, but their existing oeuvre indicates that web design would have been a natural extension of their work. The World of Franklin & Jefferson exhibit, their contribution to America’s Bicentennial, illustrates this. According to the Eames Office website (put up after their passings, obviously), “the last exhibition prepared by the Eames Office was the most complex in both research and execution.” Complex doesn’t begin to describe it. The exhibit was so stuffed with artifacts and their accompanying texts that it was nearly impossible for the average museum goer to take it all in during a single visit, thus inhibiting its communicative power. The Eames attempted to create, in effect, a web of interrelated objects that in retrospect anticipated hypertext. (A great American Masters documentary, Charles & Ray Eames: The Architect and the Painter, demonstrates this.) Had Charles and Ray—in addition to the physical exhibit—had a website as an extended exhibit platform, they might have pared down the walk-through to more realistic dimensions and imbued the web exhibit with the full density of interrelation they saw in their material. Each type of exhibit would have been of a form to match its function and the physical exhibit could have communicated its message more crisply.
An earlier work more directly (and, in its way, more successfully) concerned with communication is the Eames’ 1953 short film titled A Communications Primer. As its title implies, A Communications Primer illustrates the communication process, how connection can be achieved and how it can be interrupted. A worn copy of the film can be viewed on YouTube. If you are of a certain age, it will remind you of the films you endured during late spring afternoons in an airless schoolroom, with flags in the front of the room and a mimeograph projector tucked into a corner, curtains drawn so the light emanating from the 16mm film projector could reach the screen. The image is grainy, the colors faded, the sound tinny. Elmer Bernstein’s score for wind quintet completes the experience, its distorted flutes and reeds bathing the images in mid-century strains. Look and listen past the sight and sound artifacts and you will find the perfect vehicle for the message.
Illustrating this message is a graphic showing a dispatch being sent from a source and delivered to a destination, passing a signal from a transmitter to a receiver and encountering noise along the way [at approx. 1:00]. The YouTube copy accidentally illustrates the Eames’s point: despite the image imperfections and un-remastered sound, and the jumps and drop-outs in each, enough of the signal remains to allow the message to come through regardless. Less noise would be better; too much noise and the message would be lost, represented in the film by the decreasing legibility of text run through a photocopier again and again (and again and again) until the lines of words are reduced to ribbons of smudge. In an association perhaps more instinctual than intentional, digital technology is offered up as a solution.
Of course, “digital” was not yet in the lexicon in 1953 (unless it pertained to fingers). The Eames use the word “binary” to describe the technology and show it with punch cards passing before the camera [16.05]:
“As theories and equipment and men develop, it becomes apparent that one sure way of handling multiple factors is to build a system that can handle each decision in its time. Men have long known the theory on which complex problems of many factors can be solved, but the number of decisions, the calculations necessary were prodigious, and not until the recent development of the electronic calculator could these areas be touched. The problem became one of communication between man and machine, between machine and machine, between machine and man. The cards are punched or not punched, light passes or stops, and by this binary system information is fed to machine.”
A photograph rendered in half-tone further extends the idea that any medium can be conveyed digitally [14.30]:
“…the method and the signal are such that they must be fed to the transmitter in a series of positive decisions. The system calls for the key to be either up or down. The code calls for a dot or a dash. The current flows, it ceases to flow, it flows. It is black or white, it is stop or go, on or off, one or none, go or no go, or black or white—as in this small area from a halftone reproduction in a magazine. The press that printed it is capable of printing but one color of ink at a time, in this case black ink on white paper. In order to transmit the image, it had to be broken down to many points of decision, black or white. We know that such a limitation is not at all restricting if enough decisions are made. In this case half a million decided points give fair rendition; a million would be better.”
Again, the Eames had not conceptualized that a series of on/off signals could encode sound and image without dependence upon a physical substrate (though they do point out the origin of “bit” in “binary digit” [5:45]). Yes, digital information resides as a file on a hard drive or as pits in the polycarbonate layer of a CD, but this is far different from ink dots on paper. Charles and Ray may not have made the conceptual leap to true digital information, but they may have inspired those who did. No one can now watch A Communications Primer without seeing that the perfect solution to extracting noise from a signal is to create a signal of pure information, a signal impervious to the surface noise of a record or tape, the smudges of ink, or the fading of dye.
All this would be mere technological arcana if it did not have a point, and the point is communication and how it binds us together. The Eames elucidate such communicative binding by showing birds in flight [11:23]:
“When we watch them turning and wheeling, how often have we wondered what holds such birds together in their flight. Communication is that which links any organism together.”
The film posits human society as an organism, with communication as the glue holding it together. This communication need not be verbal. We see a river of people walking along a city street, opposing currents smoothly navigating past each other [11:37].
“It is communication that keeps a society together, and though these people seem unaware of each other’s existence, neither looking nor speaking, one group meets and filters through the other with hardly two individuals coming in contact, so constant is the flow of information and so complex the web of communication that keeps them apart and holds them together.”
The organism that is human society has developed symbols as a means of communication [12:04].
“The symbol, the abstracting of an idea, communication at once anonymous and personal: personal because of the countless individuals that created its form, each one who in his turn added something good or who took something bad away; anonymous because of the numbers of individuals involved and because of their consistent attitude.”
Art is a conveyance of such symbols. The Eames use “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte,” a pointillist painting by Georges Seurat, to make this point (if you will excuse the pun) [19:37].
“It is the responsibility of selecting and relating parts that makes possible a whole which itself has unity. The line on which each color breaks, and the point at which each dot that makes up this painting is placed, affects the whole canvas. The communication of the total message contains the responsibility of innumerable decisions made again and again, always checking with a total concept through a constant feedback system.”
The responsibility of decision: this is the burden on the communicator. Whether the medium is smoke signals, flags, Morse code, or a mélange of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, the end goal—communication—is the same. A sophisticated delivery system is no substitute for a clear message [20:20].
“These elements of a communication system act together as one great tool, and though the tool makes complex tasks, it never relieved the man of his responsibility. No matter where it occurs, no matter what the technique, communication means the responsibility of decision all the way down the line.”
Connection and Communication
Connection. Communication. Purity of message. We want to connect with others. We want to communicate information, ideas, and feelings, and be open to the same. We want to create a web of relationship, of people with ideas, of ideas with other ideas, and ultimately of people with each other. And we want to eliminate noise from this communication, whether the literal noise of interference with and corruption of signal, or the metaphorical noise in a means of communication not sufficiently focused or formed. The Eames had this goal and showed how it is fundamental to all communication. In design this means first imagining our users and their needs, then determining what they might seek and what we want to present, and finally creating an experience that merges their needs with our desires—with style and ingenuity and, if we are lucky, genuine emotion. “Only connect” was E. M. Forster’s plea to join head with heart. The Eames managed this often. Let it be our goal as well.
