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The path that led me to sculpture was through a long career in Industrial Design.
Fresh out of design school I landed a job at IBM - a company with a fabled design history. IBM’s visionary CEO Thomas J. Watson Jr. engaged Eliot Noyes in 1956 to create the first corporate-wide design program in the U.S. to oversee all the visual expressions of IBM. Noyes brought in progressive architects such as Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Eero Saarinen, and Marcel Breuer to design IBM’s buildings, the innovative graphic designer Paul Rand who designed the iconic IBM eight-bar logo and the annual reports, and Charles and Ray Eames for exhibits and films. Watson’s belief that “Good design is good business” led to the creation of a unique working environment for those of us in the IBM Design Program.
Eliot Noyes died just a few months before I started at IBM in 1978. I was sorry to have never met him, but had the good fortune to work often with IBM’s next Design Consultant, the brilliant industrial designer Richard Sapper.
One of the experiences I value the most at IBM was the corporate-wide design reviews, held at least annually. Over a period of several days the designers, design managers and the outside consultants from all over the world would convene to review all the products currently under development. The reviews were a fabulous course in what good design is all about. We learned so much from our talented colleagues and had the benefit of Richard Sapper’s insightful and compelling outside view that prompted many a lively discussion.
My work took me from New York where I designed the covers and control panels for IBM’s largest mainframe computers to Florida and North Carolina where I primarily worked on desktop personal computers. As a team we were always searching for new ways to repackage the personal computer and this led to many innovative form studies. The last couple of years at Lenovo brought some interesting new projects – retail store design, exhibits and a garden design for the new headquarters campus.
