The design genius of Charles + Ray Eames

362,707 views ・ 2009-07-06

TED


Please double-click on the English subtitles below to play the video.

00:12
Charles and Ray were a team. They were husband and wife.
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Despite the New York Times' and Vanity Fair's best efforts recently,
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they're not brothers. (Laughter)
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And they were a lot of fun.
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You know, Ray was the one who wore the ampersands in the family.
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(Laughter)
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We are going to focus on Charles today, because it is Charles' 100th birthday.
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But when I speak of him, I'm really speaking of both of them as a team.
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Here's Charles when he was three. So he would be 100 this June.
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We have a lot of cool celebrations that we're going to do.
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The thing about their work
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is that most people come to the door of furniture --
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I suspect you probably recognize this chair
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and some of the others I'm going to show you.
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But we're going to first enter through the door of the Big Top.
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01:09
The whole thing about this, though, is that, you know, why am I showing it?
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01:11
Is it because Charles and Ray made this film?
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01:13
This is actually a training film for a clown college that they had.
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They also practiced a clown act when the future of furniture
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was not nearly as auspicious as it turned out to be.
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01:23
There is a picture of Charles. So let's watch the next clip.
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The film that we're about to see is a film they made for the Moscow World's Fair.
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Video: This is the land.
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It has many contrasts.
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It is rough and it is flat.
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In places it is cold.
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In some it is hot.
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Too much rain falls on some areas,
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and not enough on others.
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But people live on this land.
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And, as in Russia,
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they are drawn together into towns and cities.
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Here is something of the way they live.
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Eames Demetrios: Now, this is a film that was hardly ever seen in the United States.
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It was on seven screens and it was 200 feet across.
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And it was at the height of the Cold War.
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The Nixon-Khrushchev Kitchen Debate
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happened about 50 feet from where this was shown.
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And yet, how did it start?
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You know, commonality, the first line
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in Charles' narration was,
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"The same stars that shine down on Russia
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shine down on the United States. From the sky,
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our cities look much the same."
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It was that human connection that Charles and Ray always found in everything.
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And you can imagine, and the thing about it is,
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that they believed that the human mind could handle this number of images
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because the important thing was to get the gestalt
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of what the images were about.
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So that was just a little snip.
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But the thing about Charles and Ray
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is that they were always modeling stuff.
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They were always trying things out.
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I think one of the things I am passionate about, my grandparents work,
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I'm passionate about my work,
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but on top of all that I'm passionate
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about a holistic vision of design,
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where design is a life skill, not a professional skill.
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And you know, those of us with kids often want our kids to take music.
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I'm no exception.
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But it's not about them becoming Bono or Tracy Chapman.
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It's about getting that music thing going through their heads and their thinking.
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Design is the same way. Design has to become that same way.
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And this is a model that they did of that seven-screen presentation.
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And Charles just checking it out there.
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So now we're going to go through that door of furniture.
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This is an unusual installation of airport seating.
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So what we're going to see is some of the icons of Eames furniture.
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And the thing about their furniture is that they said the role of the designer
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was essentially that of a good host,
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anticipating the needs of the guest.
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So those are cool images. But these are ones I think are really cool.
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These are all the prototypes. These are the mistakes,
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although I don't think mistakes is the right word in design.
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It's just the things you try out
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to kind of make it work better.
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And you know some of them would probably be terrible chairs.
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Some of them are kind of cool looking. It's like "Hey, why didn't they try that?"
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It was that hands-on iterative process
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which is so much like vernacular design
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and folk design in traditional cultures.
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And I think that's one of the commonalities between modernism
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and traditional design. I think it may be a real common ground
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as we kind of figure out what on earth to do in the next 20 or 30 years.
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The other thing that's kind of cool is that
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you look at this and in the media when people say design,
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they actually mean style.
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And I'm really here to talk about design.
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But you know the object is just a pivot.
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It's a pivot between a process and a system.
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And this is a little film I made
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about the making of the Eames lounge chair.
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The design process for Charles and Ray
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never ended in manufacturing.
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It continued. They were always trying to make thing better and better.
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Because it's like as Bill Clinton was saying about Rwandan health clinics.
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It's not enough to create one.
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You've got to create a system that will work better and better.
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So I've always liked this prototype picture.
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Because it just kind of, you know, doesn't get any more basic than that.
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You try things out.
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This is a relatively famous chair.
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Its early version had an "X" base. That's what the collectors like.
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Charles and Ray liked this one because it was better.
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It worked better: "H" base, much more practical.
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This is something called a splint.
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And I was very touched by Dean Kamen's
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work for the military, or for the soldiers,
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because Charles and Ray designed a molded plywood splint. This is it.
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And they'd been working on furniture before.
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But doing these splints they learned a lot about the manufacturing process,
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which was incredibly important to them.
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I'm trying to show you too much,
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because I want you to really get a broth of ideas and images.
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This is a house that Charles and Ray designed.
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My sister is chasing someone else. It's not me.
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Although I endorse heartily the fact that he stole her diary, it's not me.
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And then this is a film, on the lower left, that Charles and Ray made.
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Now look at that plastic chair.
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The house is 1949.
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The chair is done in 1949.
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Charles and Ray,
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they didn't obsess about style for it's own sake.
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They didn't say, "Our style is curves. Let's make the house curvy."
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They didn't say, "Our style is grids. Let's make the chair griddy."
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They focused on the need.
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They tried to solve the design problem.
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Charles used to say, "The extent to which you have a design style
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is the extent to which you have not solved the design problem."
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It's kind of a brutal quote.
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This is the earlier design of that house.
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And again, they managed to figure out a way to make a prototype
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of a house -- architecture, very expensive medium.
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Here's a film we've been hearing things about.
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The "Powers of Ten" is a film they made.
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If we watch the next clip,
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you're going to see the first version of "Powers of Ten," upper left.
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The familiar one on the lower right.
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The Eames' film Tops, lower left.
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And a lamp that Charles designed for a church.
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Video: Which in turn belongs to a local group of galaxies.
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These form part of a grouping system
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much as the stars do.
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They are so many and so varied that from this distance
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they appear like the stars from Earth.
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ED: You've seen that film, and what's so great about this
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whole conference is that everybody has been talking about scale.
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Everybody here is coming at it from a different way.
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I want to give you one example.
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E.O. Wilson once told me that when he looked at ants --
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he loved them, of course, and he wanted to learn more about them --
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he consciously looked at them from the standpoint of scale.
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So here is the tiny creature.
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And yet simply by changing the frame of reference
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it reveals so much, including what ended up being the TED Prize.
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Modeling, they tried modeling all the time. They were always modeling things.
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And I think part of that is that they never delegated understanding.
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And I think in our family we were very lucky,
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because we learned about design backwards.
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Design was not something other.
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It was part of the business of life in general.
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It was part of the quality of life.
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And here is some family pictures.
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And you can see why I'm down on style, with a haircut like that.
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But anyway, (Laughter)
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I remember the cut grapefruit that we would have at the Eames house when I was a kid.
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So we're going to watch another film.
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This is a film, the one called Toys.
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You can see me, I have the same haircut, in the upper right corner.
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Upper left is a film they did on toy trains.
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Lower right is a solar do-nothing toy.
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Lower left is Day-of-the-Dead toys.
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Charles used to say that toys are not as innocent as they appear.
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They are often the precursor to bigger things.
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And these ideas -- that train up there, being about the honest use of materials,
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is totally the same
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as the honest use of materials in the plywood.
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And now I'm going to test you.
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This is a letter that my grandfather sent to my mom when she was five years old.
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So can you read it?
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Lucia angel,
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okay, eye.
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Audience: Saw many trains.
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ED: Awl, also, good that the leather crafter's guild is here.
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Also, what is he doing? Row, rowed.
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Sun? No. Well is there another name for a sunrise?
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Dawn, very good.
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Also rode on one. I ...
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Audience: You had, I hope you had --
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ED: Now you've been to the website Dogs of Saint Louis
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in the late, in the mid-1930's,
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then you'd know that was a Great Dane.
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So, I hope you had a
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Audience: Nice time, time --
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ED: Time at.
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Citizen Kane, rose --
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Audience: Rosebud.
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ED: No, bud. "D"'s right. At Buddy's --
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Audience: Party. Love.
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ED: Okay, good.
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So, "I saw many trains and also rode on one.
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I hope you had a nice time at Buddy's party."
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So you guys did pretty good, cool.
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So my mom and Charles had this great relationship
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where they'd send those sorts of things back and forth to one another.
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And it's all part of the, you know,
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they used to say, "Take your pleasure seriously."
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These are some images from a project of mine
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that's called Kymaerica.
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It's sort of an alternative universe.
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It's kind of a reinterpretation of the landscape.
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Those plaques are plaques we've been installing around North America.
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We're about to do six in the U.K. next week.
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And they honor events in the linear world from the fictional world.
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So, of course, since it's bronze it has to be true.
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Video: Kymaerica with waterfalls,
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tumbling through our --
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ED: This is one of the traditional Kymaerican songs.
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And so we had spelling bees in Paris, Illinois.
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Video: Your word is N. Carolina.
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Girl: Y-I-N-D-I-A-N-A.
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ED: And then Embassy Row is actually a historical site,
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because in the Kymaerican story
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this is where the Parisian Diaspora started, where there embassy was.
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So you can actually visit and have this three-dimensional
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fictional experience there.
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And the town has really embraced it.
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We had the spelling bee in conjunction with the Gwomeus Club.
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But what is really cool is that we take our visual environment
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as inevitable. And it's not.
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Other things could have happened. The Japanese could have discovered Monterey.
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And we could have been born 100,000 years ago.
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And there are a lot of fun things. This is the Museum of the Bench.
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They have trading cards
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and all sorts of cool things.
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And you're kind of trapped in the texture of Kymaerica.
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The Tahatchabe, the great road building culture.
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A guy named Nobu Naga,
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the so-called Japanese Columbus.
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But now I'm going to return you to the real world.
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And this is Cranbrook. I've got a real treat for you,
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which is the first film that Charles ever made.
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So let's watch that. Nobody's ever seen it.
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Cranbrook is very generous to let us show it for the first time here.
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It's a film about Maya Gretel, a famous ceramicist, and a teacher at Cranbrook.
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And he made it for the 1939 faculty exhibition.
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Silent. We don't have a track for it yet.
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Very simple. It's just a start. But it's that learn-by-doing thing.
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You want to learn how to make films? Go make a movie.
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And you try something out.
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But here is what's really great.
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See that chair there? The orange one? That's the organic chair. 1940.
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At the same time that Charles was doing that chair,
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he was doing this film.
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So my point is that this scope of vision, this holistic vision
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of design, was with them from the beginning.
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It wasn't like "Oh, we made some chairs and got successful.
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Now we're going to do some movies."
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It was always part of how they looked at the world. And that's what's really powerful.
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And I think that all of us in this room, as you move design forward,
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it's not about just doing one thing.
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It's about how you approach problems. And there is this huge, beautiful commonality
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between design, business and the world.
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So we're going to do the last clip.
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And I've shown you some of the images. I just want to focus on sound now.
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So this is Charles' voice.
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Charles Eames: In India, those without, and the lowest in caste,
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eat very often, particularly in southern India,
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they eat off of a banana leaf.
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And those a little bit up the scale
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eat off of a sort of a low-fired ceramic dish.
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And a little bit higher, why they have a glaze
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on a thing they call a thali.
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If you're up the scale a little bit more,
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why, a brass thali.
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And then things get to be a little questionable.
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There are things like silver-plated thalis.
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And there is solid silver thalis.
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And I suppose some nut has had a
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gold thali that he's eaten off of.
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But you can go beyond that.
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And the guys that have not only means,
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but a certain amount of knowledge and understanding,
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go to the next step, and they eat off a banana leaf.
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And I think that in these times
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when we fall back and regroup,
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that somehow or other,
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the banana leaf parable
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sort of got to get working there,
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because I'm not prepared to say
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that the banana leaf that one eats off of
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is the same as the other eats off of.
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But it is that process that has happened within the man
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that changes the banana leaf.
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ED: I've been looking forward to sharing that quote with you.
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Because that's part of where we've got to get to.
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And I also want to share this one.
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"Beyond the age of information is the age of choices."
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And I really think that's where we are.
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And it's kind of cool for me to be part of a family
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and a tradition where he was talking about that in 1978.
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And part of why this stuff is important
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and all the things that we do are important,
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is that these are the ideas we need.
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And I think that this is all part of surrendering to the design journey.
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That's what we all need to do.
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Design is not just for designers anymore. It's a process. It's not style.
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All that great thinking needs to really get about solving
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pretty key problems.
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I really thank you for your time.
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15:00
(Applause)
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