Thelen: [Feedback] Now why does it doing that, is it because the mics are too close to each other? That seemed to be… Franz
Staples: She has been accused of that many times. Thelen
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Staples: She has been accused of that many times. Thelen: So somebody thought this way of having the designer playing a more central role may have been new. It is not something, Oh my God I am going to invent something new. But at a certain point people say you know what now we have to hire a different kind of people in a different kind of way. Conceive of the division of labor in a different kind of way. Staples: It sounds pretty trite maybe, but Barbara is really bright and most of the people who were designers are very talented, but they are not necessarily bright and Barbara just in her tenacity in wanting to make sure that she could go into the shop as a woman. Charles: Well, that is different. Staples: It is not, it is not. She just knows when it is right or when it is wrong and sometimes you have to sort of fight for the rightness of things and Barbara’s a good fighter… End of track 3. End of card 1. Thelen: Okay, here we go, we are recording now. Charles: We are in the twenty-first century. Thelen: This is a crazy interruption of a couple of hours to repair the equipment which we hope is now repaired with some additions. We left off in the middle of a conversation, a great conversation about how trying to parse how the relationship between the two of you was beginning to become a self-conscious sense of doing something a little differently than had been done before. Staples: That is a pretty powerful statement. Thelen: Help me get that one right. Staples: I do not think we invented anything new, I think we just did it differently. Charles: I think what was happening at about this time was that some museums, in this case at least American history at the Smithsonian [feedback] was moving from object - they had - what I want to say is moving from object-based exhibits to idea-based exhibits. They were still object-based exhibits, but I think that they were beginning to use, in a stronger way, objects to illustrate ideas, rather than objects, just in their own right as a beautiful pot or a beautiful castanet or something like that. I think they had done that a little bit before. There was an exhibit they did in the late sixties and I cannot quite remember the name of it, but it was something about building the nation or something like that, that was going in that direction. I think that with We the People it was much more in that direction, trying to talk about the will of the people, the electoral process. All of these kinds of actions and the history of them, protest in general and so on, versus just, here is a lot of political memorabilia, although we used masses of it. I think their next exhibit that Jeria Figuysmar did, which I think was Productivity if not it was Nation to Nation, was also very much going in that direction. Using lots of stuff, actually Productivity was much more, not using lots of stuff, very much ideas and cartoons. I think this was a changing point in how museums began to approach things and we happened to be in the right place at the right time. Thelen: We went from too strong a statement to you happened to be in the right place at the right time with certain skills with certain partnerships. Charles: I think that is true. We did not know what was happening when we were hired to do We the People. We had done a computer show, we knew how to put stuff together. Staples: We knew how to do everything. Thelen: And we now know that designers can do anything. Charles: But I do not think we were at all aware that this was a change happening in the museum world at that moment, I think that would have been, had a kind of self-consciousness, hey we got a job, a big cool job. Thelen: Well, can you imagine at what point did you or the field, maybe through contracting or through a different way of getting work or through different people you were working with have a sense of becoming something different? At least the world thinks we are and are hiring us in a different way? Staples: Somehow I think we did a lot of theater in We the People. The capitol steps were represented kind of theatrical solution to an idea. I think we had several of these other landscapes that were not nearly as big or dramatic as that, but they were in fact the inside of the airplane, the presidential airplane, Appomattox furniture. Charles: I think a really critical person is Ben Lawless, who hired us, who is hiring other people. I think he was clearly setting an agenda at the museum or saying, “hey let us look at these in new more exciting ways.” Disneyworld of course, Disneyland had happened, Disneyworld I am not sure when it happened. At least ten years later there is a lot of talk about Disneyworld in museums and what does that mean for us. I think there is also, I think you mentioned Dave, that historians are beginning to look at social history. I think historians also do not have jobs so they are moving into the museum world, so that is there. It is a little early for NEH [National Endowment for the Humanities], but I have always felt that when NEH started requiring both a very labor intensive application process that made you really think through what you were doing and required scholars to be part of teams, that in fact, I think, I think the Smithsonian was in the forefront. I think once as a government agency that they could not participate in NEH, I think other people started pushing ahead quite fast, scholarship wise. But historians are moving into the museum world, so they are trying to look broader, they are not just object people. I think it is just a whole thing happening. There is firms, not us certainly, although from the Eames office, it would be interesting to see who all has worked at the New York World’s Fair in sixty-four and the Montreal Fair, I think certainly Woodson Romarez in New York had worked on some of those, they were doing stuff not so much in WVanishington but in New York, Jeria Minguysmar, maybe has worked on some of that. I do not know what they had done before being hired at the Smithsonian because I do not know their history. Thelen: And the humanities councils were also hiring… Charles: Were they starting then? Thelen: They were starting to hire humanists, scholars. Before the interruption here we were also talking about developing the eye of the visitor or the critic or the tradition that you have had at Eames where you would ask what are you trying to do here. Do not let me put words in your mouth. Maybe I got this wrong, I wrote the note, what is at stake here is getting a visitor orientation, getting a sense of I wonder how this will be seen? Am I making this up? Staples: No I think you have heard that, but I am not sure. Charles: The question is how to get the idea across. I was partly saying that particularly on topics we are the original visitor and can play that until we know too much. Thelen: I do not know, what does that mean? Charles: I think I was using the example of Crossroads of Continents. We knew zilch about Artic people, Eskimos, Artic life, all this ivory carving so on a project like that, where we do not come with much pre-knowledge, there is a period where we are sort of the first visitors, if the curators cannot get their ideas across to us. We have to be able to understand it enough to design it and we cannot just take it at face value. And we do not just take it at face value. [feedback] I am going to take her out of here. [feedback, door closing]I think we are very comfortable saying, “we do not understand that, what does that mean, what are you trying to say here, it is not getting across.” I think a different idea was the one that rather than presuming that you understand what the ordinary visitor is going to get or not get. Thelen: Which was the older way, you assumed you knew. Charles: I do not know if it is the older way, but people would say I think that is really interesting, but I do not know if Joe Blow will. I do not want, I want to say,” well you find it interesting, why do you find it interesting?” I find it interesting, so and so finds it interesting, why do not we assume Joe Blow will find it interesting. Why should we assume we have more inside knowledge or something. That having been set up, now going to really put foot in mouth. I am not very confident with most visitor studies. Thelen: That is a big statement, go ahead. In what ways? Charles: (pause) I guess, I think they might be useful or are useful if you are trying to find out what visitors know or do not know about a subject in terms of pre-evaluation or formative or whatever it is called, I do not know the right terminology so that if you found out, for example that visitors really believe the Civil War was not about slavery, but you want to get across that it really is about slavery, you might double your efforts in the ways you develop the exhibit. What I am less confident in is the sort of develop the ideas of the exhibit and then test them. Thelen: Whether the visitor understood what you were trying to get across. Charles: Part of the problem is they are developed to the sophisticated level that the final product might be I think you can develop whether people can manipulate it, particularly on the interactives, whether they are getting the right thing to do or figuring out the right things to do. I think it is very hard to…an exhibit is, it is a physical experience of being in a space. It is not just about getting ideas across that you could read in a flat panel. So part of what we are trying to do in a three dimensional experience that absorbs you and that is very hard to pretest. Thelen: Is the kind of study, the ones that you are uncomfortable with the ones that just test, did the curators’ idea or the designers’ idea get taken on board. Can they list the three causes of the Civil War or whatever, did they get it? But there is another kind of visitor study, and it is one of the pioneers in my experience, someone named Deedee Hillkey at the… Charles: We know Deedee. Thelen: Okay, you know Deedee and what they were saying, we do not really care, there is not a lesson to be got here. What we want to know is how do they process it. She would then do ethnographic kind of studies of what happens when a family goes through the Museum of American History. And Conor Prary does this kind of work too. Where the issue is not right or wrong, know or do not know, the issue is how do visitors process stuff. Charles: What is an example of how would they process it? Thelen: Okay, we go through, let us say you have a barn. And over here you have a sign that says the barn was invented in 1492 or whatever it says over there. An example would be, and I am going through with my granddaughter, or better let us say I am going through with my daughter and I also grew up on a farm in Ohio. I am saying, “hey Jenny remember when you were a little girl, they had things like this called barns.” And Jenny says, “well yes Daddy.” And pretty soon they are talking about having dinner at the farm with grandma. They are really interested in how does the exhibit get moved from there to the interactions with the visitors. Lois Silverman’s work, I do not know if you have run into it… Charles: Not really. Thelen: Lois did stuff where she strapped a tape recorder onto people when pairs would go through, mothers and daughters, lovers and so on and she would listen to what they say to each other as they process it. She came up with the idea that they were using it to strengthen a relationship. So if people have not seen each other in a while and they go to a museum of American history and they talk about it, the interesting thing is how they make it theirs. Charles: So it is not so much… Thelen: It is not about the facts or the knowledge… Charles: And it is not about changing this particular exhibit… Thelen: Right, it is really about how do, you could call it market research if you wanted. Its really about how people take on board what they are looking at, how they make sense of what they are looking at. Charles: And that might influence how you do it later on. Thelen: Exactly. Charles: That is much more interesting to me. I got very annoyed, I do not remember if it was our exhibit or not. I think maybe it was a little test exhibit at the Renwick that Screvin did, was not that his name? He was a very early tester. And it was all about ceramics and there were all these questions, who made it and this and that. Basically you could have read the labels and not looked at the ceramics, whereas it should have been a visual experience, to get excited about these ceramics. So that is the kind of stuff that, at least drove me crazy when it was first happening then. Thelen: That had the equivalent, and I do not want to interview myself here, but that had the effect also, in testing, the testing world, can students repeat the, you know whatever fact that was being tested and in fact it is still being used. But this other approach to visitors is the much more like the one you were describing at Eames, which is you guys…does this make sense or not make sense, I saw one of those grandmas…or let me feel it and see oh that feels real sharp or that’s hot or something. I am sorry to be interviewing myself. Staples: Do you want a job? Thelen: I do not think I am going to get one. Charles: So I am not sure how I got quite into that. Thelen: So what I am asking is…it is taking the point of view, what we are trying to understand is what shift in viewpoint about exhibits is taking place that is somehow involved in parallel to think as an overall design. Let me ask it just bluntly, as someone thinking about design do you worry about visitors? Do you worry about what effect it might have? I mean I think you internalize this stuff all the time, do not you? Staples: I do not think I worry about the visitor, I worry about our solutions more than I would worry about the visitor getting it. Charles: But the solutions involve a lot of thinking, well on the physical side, we have worked, I think, very hard to, I get into this a little in the topography piece. You know, to get things at the right height, to make it easy to read things, things you can hold onto. I think a lot of the furniture, good quality furniture design is coming through in terms of how does this physical thing work and how does it last? Similarly with topography, I am not sure where it all came from, but I think of topography. It is sort of like the chorus line in a ballet, you want to have all their legs up at the same height, you want to know where you can find the information. You want the visitor spending their energy, they have only got so much time, on getting a good experience and not on trying to figure out how to read a label because it was not written right or the type is too small or it is too low. You want to quickly say, “hey that is neat or I can find out about it there.” You should not have to look all over and say, “oh they put the label up there for that.” I think we physically work very hard to make the experience work, you might say. Thelen: Did you want to say something? Staples: No, I was just thinking about the number of years that we have been doing this and the number of solutions that we have done, we try not to do the same thing every time. We try not to make our design overpower the objects, you know, the design is…the success of the design is to be quiet. The objects are the stars, but they include the text too, which makes the objects meaningful. We got through this struggle, if you are designing a case and you are going to put objects in it, where do you put the labels? Do you put the labels in front of the objects, behind the objects, above the objects? For a long time we did, reader-rails inside, so you would have the edge of the case and there would be a sloped plane that would have some text on it and on top of that platform you would have the objects. Charles: We may have been the first people to do that, now it is ubiquitous. Staples: Now you do design where labels are outside the case. There are reasons for that, it is not always defensible, but there are. Charles: They are generally easier to read. Staples: People cannot read them inside the case. Thelen: But I am thinking those are very much visitor-oriented, I have seen what you wrote about topography to make an exploration like that a point of, I forget what you call it, a central dramatic point consistency so it is easy to read. I find all that to be mindful of the visitor. Charles: I was writing that at a time when graphic designers were putting things everywhere. The last thing, it seemed, to be desired was you could actually read it. Staples: It is like what happened to Vogue magazine, sort of in the fifties. It went bezerk and lost its artistic value and just became a collage of type and cropped pictures and very strange, did not know where to go, but it looked design-y. Charles: There was a graphic period that was not just Vogue. Thelen: Looked design-y, that is a good word. Chalres: We are happy not to look design-y. Thelen: In fact, you do not want to the success of design is that it not be noticed. Charles: In this field. I wrote a piece that I will find and give you. We did an exhibit called Views of the Vanishing Frontier that was for the Joslin, incredible bodmer watercolors, the whole trip up the Missouri River, wonderful exhibit. It came here to WVanishington. At that time the WVanishington Post had a column in the Style section about, it was called something like Firsthand, but the idea was creative people talking about what they did. So I called up the Post and spoke to the editor and said, “We design exhibits.” And the response I got was, “You do what?” Thelen: When was that? Charles: Eighty-three. Thelen: Eighty-three, wow. Charles: And I said, “Yes, they do not just go up on the walls, they do not just jump up there.” I wrote the piece basically that we were stars until the moment it opened. We are the people making it all happen, we are running around, we are making it all happen. The moment it all opens we disappear. Many people will not even know that a designer was involved, they will not even think about it, it is just there. And that’s okay. Thelen: I am interested that the Post would not even think that an exhibit got designed. Charles: I was a little astounded. You know, the National Gallery, traditionally in art museums you had a preparers, you had curators who said, “I think yellow is a good color for that wall and I would like the church, Niagara here and I would like this here and this here,” and the preparators hung it on the wall wherever the curator says. Gil Ramenell, who unfortunately died too young, was the graphics curator at the National gallery, but they got a sense that he had more design sense than more of the other curators or the other curators started asking him more to help them do things and I think in like 1968 before the National Gallery even had a design department. This is really a time when, I think the history museums with somebody like Ben were in advance of this, because it is always been more complex to install history or natural history than art shows. But it was not necessarily a field, nobody was teaching it. Thelen: Did you start to become, did you start to think, there is someone else doing something similar maybe there is a bunch of us who have in common that we design. Charles: When you lose a job to somebody. Thelen: Well talk about that. So the first jobs you were in effect commissioned by this Ben. Charles: By Ben and Chicago Historical Society, by Harold Scramston. Thelen: By Scramston, okay. At a certain point the museums decided, oh there is more than one person out there, let us bid it somehow. Do you remember when you started to be mindful. Suddenly it became a competitive thing. Staples: I think it always had been competitive, but not so many competitors. Charles: Right, I think like I would say on Nation to Nation or Productivity, which Jeria Finguysmar got, we might have had our noses, well why did they go to them and not us. But there was not a formal competition as far as I know. The first time I think about, we mentioned. The bicentennial we had more work than we knew. We started the two of us and two more people came from Eames in seventy-three. We did We the People that was in seventy-five, fifteen thousand square feet. We did Federal City, Plains and Realities with Washburn in the Castle that opened in seventy-six. We did twenty thousand square feet at the Kennedy Center, America on Stage that opened in 1976. Was that it? It was about forty thousand square feet around the mall, more than Eames had ever done. It sort of like three years later… Staples: Did you say America on Stage? Charles: Yes, America on Stage, We the People and the Castle all opened. Plus we did a job out in Chicago for Harold. We were sort of overwhelmed with what was happening and we got up to sixteen people and then we had no work in seventy-seven and we slowly let people go, sold quilts Bob mentioned earlier to make payroll. No work. Then we got a call from Burlington Northern. We did a whole proposal for them that did not go anywhere. I guess we were asked to go down to New Orleans and on the way back from New Orleans Ben had told us that Coca Cola had been asking about a designer. Maybe he mentioned a couple of us, I do not know. But we were coming back from New Orleans and so we called up and stopped and talked to the Coke people and initially the guy was just going to meet us in the lobby. Then we talked and he invited us up and then we missed our airplane anyway. We eventually did planning work for Coca Cola, so we thought, everything is going to be okay. We have got these two big jobs, Burlington Northern and Coca Cola, and we were are offered a jazz museum, that is why we had been down in New Orleans. We turned it down because we did not think we could handle it with these other two. Of course these other two disappear, jazz museum gets done, but not by us. The first project that I consciously remember there may have been a competition, who there were competitors and there was not a formal RFP was the Gerald Ford Museum in Grand Rapids. I think they did invite several people out for interviews, but again I do not know who else. This whole RFP thing, I think starts happening in the late eighties or early nineties when there is the whole movement of corporations being more responsible, not insiders. There was a whole government has to be really contract things and bid everything. There was a movement in the air. Staples: Views of Vanishing Frontier… Charles: That was a competition. Staples: I think that was with… Charles: Applebom, that was selective competition. 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