Powerhouse Museum’s Interface exhibition traces rise of the machines

THE Interface exhibition at Sydney’s Powerhouse Museum raises interesting questions about the role of electronic devices in our lives.

2003/13/1 Typewriter, Olivetti 'Valentine', metal / plastic / rubber, designed by Ettore Sottsass and Perry King , made by Olivetti Co, Barcelona, Spain, 1969 From the exhibition: Interface: people, machine, design Powerhouse Museum To be used in conjunction with exhibition only; must credit

THERE is some irony in visiting an exhibition devoted to design at the Powerhouse Museum, starting with its location on the edge of Sydney’s Darling Harbour.

If you haven’t been there, imagine a bay that once, perhaps a century or two ago, must have been attractive but is now covered in concrete and bitumen, shadowed by immense flyover expressways and filled with a distinctive kind of cheap tubular architecture.

The whole area is not only extraordinarily ugly but, by any standards of architecture and urban planning, thoroughly depressing. It manages to be inhuman in scale without ever achieving a compensating sense of grandeur or power.

The Powerhouse Museum is not much better from a design point of view. You walk into a cramped foyer from which you have to turn a corner and go down an escalator, at the bottom of which is the chaos of an exhibition devoted to the stage production of Strictly Ballroom. It is from here that a ramp finally leads up to the space devoted to Interface: Peoples, Machines, Design.

The subject of the exhibition is industrial design, and specifically the way design, in the 20th century, made technological devices such as typewriters and then computers both easier to use and more appealing, so that they began to address a consumer market rather than merely the needs of business.

It’s worth pausing to consider the history of the idea of design. It is the equivalent of the Italian disegno or the French dessin, which both mean drawing as well as intention or purpose. The common word in English, drawing, literally means to pull or extend a line from point to point. The word design entered English usage from Italian and French through the influence of art theory and therefore became a highbrow synonym for drawing.

In modern English usage design came to mean the drawing, or by extension the idea or plan, for anything one wanted to make or build: thus the design of a machine or a tool. Because of the other meaning of the word, it possessed a connotation of purpose and intention that drawing did not.

The concept of industrial design arose with the Industrial Revolution and the problems of mass production. This new form of manufacturing had radically transformed both the level of output and the role of the worker. As Adam Smith explains in The Wealth of Nations (1776), where a single inexperienced worker could once barely make a single pin in a day, a factory with 10 workers and the appropriate machinery could produce more than 48,000 in the same time.

But as Karl Marx and others such as John Ruskin and William Morris saw, this process also stripped the craftsman of his agency and initiative. Once he had been responsible for the whole process of producing a particular item, but now he was confined to the endless repetition of a single step in the process while the next was performed by his neighbour on the production line.

In effect, artisans previously had worked in the same way as artists, responsible for the planning of their work, the collecting of raw materials, the form of the item they made and every part of its execution. Now they were mechanically repeating tasks that had been imposed by others. It is not hard to see how, as the work of so many artisans was rendered meaningless in this way, that of the fine artist became increasingly romanticised and fetishised, not for its skill or the quality of its execution but merely for an abstract conception of creativity. The artist was romanticised as a last surviving example of free work.

Meanwhile, since workers had no agency in their work, someone else had to lay down the plan for them to follow. This became the job of the designer, who had to determine the most efficient way to produce goods.

They also had to be appealing and attractive, and this led to the realisation that a new kind of aesthetic was called for, one that was compatible with the new conditions of manufacture. Good industrial design was not going to be achieved by making mass-produced copies of handmade objects. It would be a matter of finding how to produce something elegant and functional that did not claim, however, to be something other than it was.

Such principles of industrial design apply to everything from clothing to kitchenware, and furniture is an interesting case. A company such as Ikea, for example, is based on the idea of producing furniture in a rigorously industrial manner while still being comfortable and attractive; the fact most of the furniture is to be self-assembled — put together by people with little or no skill — means the criteria of design have to be stringent.

The Powerhouse exhibition is mostly devoted to typewriters and computers but it does include some telephones and radios, each of which raises interesting design questions. The telephone, for example, once required two hands to operate; clearly the single-handed telephone, allowing the user to write with other hand, was an enormous improvement.

But the telephone is a symbolic device too. The executive desk with several telephones was once a sign of status and in the age of the mobile phone telephony has again become a matter of prestige, although significantly as a consumer product rather than as part of the furniture of a business or administrative office. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say the distinction between the corporate and consumer associations of these devices has been largely abolished.

The popularisation of office devices, in hindsight, was initiated with the typewriter and with the compact and elegant designs of Olivetti, several of which are included in the exhibition. Typing was once the job of secretaries — presumed to be young and semi-educated women — letters were dictated, and no senior businessman or public servant knew how to used a keyboard. The only positive, romantic and masculine association of the typewriter was with the work of writers and journalists. That began to change as the typewriter became portable and stylish.

It was Olivetti’s example that inspired later designers at Apple.

Even when the first desktop computers came into use about 30 years ago, there was no thought of making them things of beauty, and the original operating systems were extremely cumbersome. Those were the days when you needed to have done a course to be capable of using a computer, and even the simplest word-processing functions required one to learn a list of codes and instructions that were far from self-evident.

Overused as the term is, Apple’s designs were indeed revolutionary: you could unpack a new computer and learn to use it without even consulting the manual; it was intuitive and, because all options were available in pull-down menus, essentially self-teaching. In recent years, somewhat perversely, this has become less true with the increasing range of software options, many of minor usefulness.

But Apple was equally concerned with the exterior of its computers, as all the designs in the exhibition remind us. When the standard office computer was large and ungainly and burdened by dismal associations with office drudgery, Apple achieved with its Macintosh computers something even more surprising in hindsight than it was at the time: it managed to produce machines that looked stylish, that evoked fun rather than drudgery, machines you wanted to have in your office and, even more important, in your home.

At first, stalwarts of the PC claimed the Mac was just for students, designers, writers and other lightweights, and that their bulky old machines were superior when it came to the heavy lifting. The rivalry continues to this day, although in the meantime PC computers have emu­lated the ease of access of the Mac, and Apple has grown from a niche market to become a market colossus.

A large part of Mac’s success, however, came from its co-adaptation with the emerging universe of the internet. The Mac seemed the perfect spaceship for navigating through this new cosmos, and it was the internet more than anything else that made everyone want to have a computer at home. Now, things have gone even further and people want to be connected all the time, even when in ­public.

There is clearly something not quite right when people sit together in a restaurant each absorbed in their mobile device: the passion to be connected easily leads to a radical disconnection. But the title of this exhibition draws our attention to another important question. The achievement of the Mac was to create an intuitive and humanly intelligible interface with a digital reality that is anything but human.

From one point of view, computers and the internet are a wonderful aid to many human activities, including that of the writer. They constitute a kind of intellectual prosthesis that — thanks to the congenial interface and the reticulated structure of the worldwide web — we can use as an almost seamless extension of our natural rational functions of reason, recollection and reflection.

But we should not be seduced into thinking the prosthetic device is the mind itself; its effectiveness is entirely proportionate to the quality of the mind that governs it. And what happens when the mind using the prosthetic device is not strong enough? The danger is it will become a mere appendage of the machine, adrift in the amorphous world of the web, especially if it never learns to know and commune with itself alone, in silence and offline.

Interface: Peoples, Machines, Design

Powerhouse Museum, Sydney, to October 11