I never actually knew how hard this chair was to manufacture for the Eames. Plywood was a relatively new material and nobody knew how to mass manufacture the rounded shapes that the chair held. The thing that strikes me about this design isn't anything to do with form or aesthetics, it's the fact that this simple-looking chair inspired an idea of what a modern living space should look like. They pioneered the fact that luxury should be attainable to the masses.

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Communications

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I was surprised to hear that Charles was an extremely poor speaker. His colleagues said that he would often take 45 minutes to explain something that you or I could have told you in 2. But just because he was a poor speaker did not mean that he was a poor communicator. Just look at the breadth of his portfolio of work. The best examples of his impressive communicative skills were through his movies, like "Power of 10":

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Charles and Ray communicate the relative size of the universe in a way that is easy to understand. That sounds like something a master communicator might do!

 

This is a really important point for designers. The best way to communicate something to someone often isn't about telling them about it but showing them. 

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Humanisation

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The last point I want to touch on is the way that Charles humanised the IBM computer. Coming into the 60s the idea of a computer was something that scared a lot of people. It had connotations relating to the apocalypse and the end of free thinking. The Eames recognised that computers were the way forward, expressing them as "the natural evolution of man". They tried to get the public on side with them at the 1964-65 New York World Fair. They made a video comparing computers' actions to that of humans and presenting this in video form on loads of TVs:

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So there you go, a little snippet into my opinion of the Eames and their impact on the design of the past and for the future!

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