- Chris has served on boards of the
Design Management Institute and the
Corporate Design Foundation.
He has also been on the national board of AIGA
and the Center for Design.
In 1993, he was included in the first list
of the I.D. Forty,
the 40 most influential designers
published by International Design Magazine.
In 2002, he received the AIGA medal,
which is the highest individual honor awarded
to a designer by the organization.
The award is for individuals who have set
standards of excellence over a lifetime of work
or have made contributions to innovation
with the practice of graphic design.
Chris has lectured widely to schools and professionals
and has published articles on design for television
that have appeared in CA, Design Quarterly,
Critique, and various anthologies.
He's a contributor to the website Design Observer as well.
Ladies and gentlemen,
on behalf of the Wisconsin Public Television
and Design Madison, it gives me great pleasure
to introduce Chris Pullman.
(audience applauds)
- Hello.
And thank you for the introductions.
I've had a great time today wandering around Madison
and seeing your university
and the city.
What I'm gonna talk about tonight is my surprise
at where I ended up as a professional.
It never occurred to me that I would end up
being a designer in television,
but lo and behold, I was,
and what I'm going to talk about tonight
is really three things, how that happened
and what it was like when I got there,
and then I'm gonna mention a few of the things
that I learned as a result of my time at WGBH.
So, how it happened.
I think it all begins here, really.
(audience laughs)
We all are built in a way we have no control over,
and things happen that we think are accidents,
but they're really not.
The way we behave and things we enjoy
and who we get together with,
these are, in some ways, ordered up by our chromosomes.
Myself, I started out life very orderly fashion,
and I was a very strong and able Cub Scout.
When I got into high school,
I actually started to swim
competitively and ended up being not a bad swimmer
in a very good team.
I went to high school just north of Chicago,
not far from here.
And in the summertime,
I would go up to the Minnesota
border with Canada at the Quetico Provincial Park.
And over time, I became a canoe guide up there,
and I learned so many things from these experiences.
Particularly this one, where I learned all about ecology
before that word was invented.
And as a swimmer, I learned all kinds of things too.
I learned about teamwork.
I learned about being orderly.
I learned about clean livin'.
And by the time I got out of high school,
I was on one side of all of these choices.
I was more of an intellectual than I was a social gadfly,
and I was a straight-arrow jock,
I didn't drink or smoke,
rather than what some of my buddies were doing,
and I was more interested in values than I was in things.
I ended up going to Princeton,
and there I was in the History Department.
I was very interested in History because you learn a lot
about yourself and your country,
and I was...
American History was my topic, and by the time I got to be
a senior in college, all my roommates and my friends
were getting ready to go to law school,
and that was the most hideous prospect I could imagine.
(audience laughs)
And I really didn't know.
I mean, I figured I could be a researcher
and I could be an academic, maybe.
But a funny thing happened to me around this time.
I knew that there was, you know, painting over here
and architecture and engineering over here.
I had taken some pre-architecture courses
and I had taken a little bit of drawing and painting,
but I didn't know that there was anything in between.
And then when I was working on my thesis at Princeton,
which was in a kind of odd topic,
I was interested in American national character.
And what that means is that what's French about France
and what's American about America.
This is before American Studies was invented.
And what I chose to do with my thesis was
to investigate an idea that was widely held
among historians and economic students
about why America got to be like it is,
and that had to do with the frontier,
the idea of plenty,
the idea that you could move from here to there,
start over, change your economic and social status at will,
and that there was this vast area
of available land and potential plenty.
And everybody agreed that that was something
that you could trace in the economics and the politics
of the nation as it grew up.
And I said, well, since art is often
"a precursor of culture,
"why couldn't you look at the visual output
of the emerging nation and find the same evidence?"
And I finally got somebody in the History Department
to pay some attention to this idea,
and I started studying...
what I thought was the right thing.
Painting, sculpture and architecture,
the major sources of visual culture, I thought.
And by Christmastime, I had gotten nowhere.
There was no evidence at all that this,
this theory was right.
And then I ran across a book
that changed my point of view
and this was a book by a guy named John Cowenhoven,
and he introduced me to the notion of
vernacular art, non-professional art.
And I began to look at engineering, bridges, barns,
structures that were used for industry.
And I looked at popular culture, Currier & Ives
and the newspapers,
the itinerant painters who were not going over to Paris
and learn how to paint, come back here, and be painters.
And all of a sudden, everything clicked.
But all the stuff that I was working on,
the images that I was harvesting to prove my point,
came from an area in the library called
the Graphic Arts Collection.
And that was the place where all the photography books,
all the first editions were kept.
And I would go up there, and this was in the days
before Xerox machines and computers.
And in order to put an image into my thesis,
I had to take the picture.
Develop the film.
Print the picture
the size that I wanted to put into the--
into the narrative.
And the curator in this library
came over to me one day and said,
"You know what you're doing?
"You're designing an illustrated book."
I said, "I am?"
And he said, "Yes, there's a lot of people
"that do that for a living.
"Something you might be interested in."
I said, "There are?"
And here I was, you know, was it, approaching 20,
reading books day and night in an academic setting,
never once thinking about that somebody
had actually designed those books.
They had picked out the typefaces and designed the layouts
and the bindings and all that stuff.
And all of a sudden, I realized that this was really
the thing that I was interested in, to present information
in words and images that was convincing and honest.
And so, he said, "Yeah, these people
"are called graphic designers."
And this was an amazing announcement to me.
It really (snaps fingers) clicked.
So I scrambled and I put together a dog's breakfast
of stuff, and I called it a portfolio,
and I sent it around to a couple of places
that he advised me to go to.
And lo and behold, I got into two of them.
I got into the Arts Center in Los Angeles
and Yale
and two more different places you could never imagine.
And I had to make a decision again between
training that was basically aimed at a commercial career
or one that was perhaps a more theoretical kind of training.
And I felt that my experiences
at Princeton, so far, would make me
better qualified to work
in that kind of an environment.
So after a lot of consideration, I ended up at Yale.
And there I met Alvin Eisenman.
Alvin Eisenman was the chairman of the master's program
at Yale, a program that he founded in 1950,
the first graphic design master's program in the country.
It just so happened that the curator in this library
that I was using was a student
in the first graduating class of his,
(laughs) of his program.
So it was no surprise that he pointed me at Yale.
And after being in the presence of Alvin,
an incredible polymath,
amazing raconteur,
it was clear that this program was all about ideas,
something that I was interested in.
They had an incredible faculty at the time, too.
There was Paul Rand, kind of the dean of
professional graphic designers at the time,
Bradbury Thompson, who was one of the most respected
designers of books and magazines in the mid-century.
And from Europe, one of the great emigres that came over
during World War II,
who was our photography teacher
and a teacher of composition.
Norman Ives,
who was really the most fine arts-oriented
of the teachers we had, made beautiful collages
out of parts of letters.
And finally, Walker Evans,
probably the most important American photographer
in the 20th century,
late in his career, decided to come and teach at Yale,
much more interested in finding out what you were reading
than look at your pictures, but he was also
an extremely interesting influence.
And I should also mention another person,
and that is Armin Hofmann.
Armin Hoffman was the master teacher at the
Allgemeine Gewerbeschule in Basel
and was very influential in developing
a kind of humane brand of Swiss modernism
in mid-century.
And he was a frequent teacher of workshops at Yale.
So when I graduated in 1966,
that's me and my future wife, Esther,
who I met as a classmate,
I had to figure out what to do.
I could either teach, because I had been offered a job
to start teaching in the program as soon as I graduated,
or practice.
So I decided to do both.
Esther and I found a nice empty
hair-dresser on top of the wine store
on Broadway in New Haven,
and we fixed it all up, made a really nice studio.
It's wonderful to have your own studio, I can tell you.
And I used this studio as part of my teaching,
place where I would teach, but also, mostly,
to work with Esther separately and sometimes together
on projects that were of interest to us.
And I will show you the projects
that were most interesting to me.
Among them was doing the posters for the
Yale Symphony Orchestra.
A very fascinating director of this orchestra
wanted to make a big splash
on the campus, and he hired a bunch of people.
Hired is the wrong word.
He asked us to do them for free. (audience laughs)
But we were more than willing because
this was a wonderful opportunity to create images
and words that would entice people to come
to something they haven't heard yet.
On the bottom right there is
West Side Story, in case you can't read it.
And I found that sneaker in the lost and found in the gym,
and my roommate happened to have (laughs) a switchblade,
which surprised me, but... (audience laughs)
These posters were very, very important because they...
I must have done a dozen of these, and they were very
wonderful projects because you got enough money
to get them printed, and they were big.
They were big posters.
And we put 'em up and everybody came
and the orchestra was great.
Another project I'll tell you about is this one
in which a fellow made by accident.
This fellow was from Washington when he had married
a woman who was completely deaf,
and she taught at Gallaudet University.
And at that time, people with hearing impairment
had to use these big, bulky TTY machines
to communicate with each other,
and you had to have one at both ends,
and it was a big hassle for people to communicate this way.
And he created a small little thing
you could carry in your attache case,
a keyboard, portable keyboard.
We're talking 1967 here,
and you could plug it into the back of your television set
and somebody else could have a television set
on the other end, and he'd dial up your phone number,
put it in the cradle, and lo and behold,
the beeps on the typewriter keyboard
would type on both of your TVs.
So, this is a great tool.
And my job, he asked me, could I help him
explain and promote this product to the deaf community.
Great project.
Had a lot of interesting things about it.
And then, last one I'll tell you about is this one,
which was to do the first
bicyclist's guide to Manhattan.
Not something that you wanted to do
without thinking about it.
This was a very dangerous (laughs)
kind of business to be riding around in Manhattan.
But anyway, this was my first brush with the idea
of information design where I could do maps,
explain to people how to go from here to there,
both in text,
a little bit sort of pre-GPS for cyclists.
A wonderful project, and my father, believe it or not,
was in the map business,
so I was very interested in maps.
So I got to do a lot of maps.
And shortly after I did this project, the phone rang.
And on the other end, there was this guy, George Nelson.
Has anybody heard of George Nelson?
The same guy that I know knows George Nelson.
George Nelson, that's George,
was an important mid-century architect and designer.
He was the guy responsible for the first
open office furniture from Herman Miller
and also this, the great pop icon,
the lollipop clock there.
And so George asked me to come down
and run his graphics studio.
He was part of a larger studio where they did
architecture and product design.
So, I went down to New York three days a week
and did all kinds of stuff for him.
We did really corporate kinds of projects
and then more institutional ones.
And while I kind of was interested in redesigning
the Hanes underwear logo and put it on a truck,
I was much more interested in these other projects.
For example, creating the symbols
for traveling exhibitions of U.S. technology industry
that would go to Eastern Europe
promoted by the U.S.I.A.,
wonderful exhibits that George's office put together
that traveled all around Eastern Europe.
But the most important project was this one.
George was approached by the communications director
for the Social Security, SSA, Social Security,
and they had a huge problem.
They were jammed up in all of their offices
around the country.
People who were about to start to receive benefits
from Social Security system have to go in and fill out
a form and say who you are and how old you are
and what your situation is,
and this was it, SSA-1,
an incredibly dim, drab,
sequentially confusing, and verbose piece of design.
And people made repeated mistakes in filling out this form,
so they had to come back and back and back
and clog up the system,
and they were desperate to fix this.
Could we do it?
And so we took a look at this, this device,
this form, and we found it to be very, very lacking
in a lot of basic things about graphic design.
But more than anything, we noticed the language.
It was extremely threatening to anybody filling it out.
This is what it says at the top, there,
"Whoever makes or causes to be made any false statement
"or representation of a material fact in an application
"or for use in determining a right-to-payment
"under the Social Security Act is subject to not more than
"$1,000 fine or a year imprisonment or both."
So, welcome to Social Security. (audience laughs)
Glad to have you aboard.
This was incredible.
And we looked into it and discovered that
the users of this document were,
first of all, over 65,
often with sight impairments,
usually with some kind of crisis in their life,
in other words, they're no longer gonna work
or they've been injured or their spouse has died,
and they are gonna have to turn to Social Security
for their income.
And the most important thing we found out was
the average reading level of the applicants
was fifth grade.
So, this language is clearly language
that my roommates in law school had written,
very threatening language.
And the thing that is so important to me
about this project was learning that language
is such an important part of design.
Okay, layouts and typography and everything else is good,
but if you can't read it or understand it
or want to read it, you're in big trouble.
So we did some work on this with an expert
who was somebody who worked for the...
educational publishing people.
If you wanna make a reader at a fifth grade level,
a reading program, he knew exactly what words,
what grammar, what syntax was available to a fifth grader.
And so we used that to revise this message.
So now it says, "Please be careful,
"be as careful as you can in filling out this blank.
"This will make it easier for us to work
"on your application so that you'll get your checks
"promptly as soon as they're due.
"And thank you for helping us."
An entirely different attitude.
And then we did the normal graphic design-y stuff.
We made the type a little bit bigger.
We made the contrast better.
We put one question in a box
so you didn't have to wander around.
And we used the word checks.
That's what they want.
They wanna get their checks. (audience laughs)
This was such a revelation to me
because it was so simple.
It was so obvious and basic,
that if you wanna communicate with somebody,
you have to know what they can hear,
what they can read, and what they can understand.
So this was about mid-July, 1973.
At this point, I was teaching at Yale and also at the new...
the new Arts campus that SUNY purchased.
I was, every now and then, a letter press printer
on Long Island, doing art editions,
three days a week at George Nelson's in New York,
and I had a freelance practice in New Haven.
and this was absolutely ridiculous.
So, gradually I reduced this down
to these two things.
I kept teaching at Yale, and I kept my freelance practice.
And then, miraculously, as if I was in heat
for the next thing, the phone rings.
And this time, it's a guy named Ivan Chermayeff,
who you may have heard of.
Chermayeff and Geismar was a very eminent outfit
in New York, designed the Mobil Oil symbol
and many, many other things.
And Ivan was on the line, and he said,
"We've been working for a television station
"up in Boston making a new set
"of brand marks for them.
"And they actually are looking for somebody to come
"and lead their,
"their design efforts over there,
"and I wondered if you'd be interested."
And I said, "No, I wouldn't be interested."
(audience laughs)
And the reason I said that was that all my teachers
and all my mentors had told me repeatedly
that the only way that I could squander my education
faster than going into advertising
was to go into television.
I didn't even own a television set.
Television was the vast wasteland at this time.
Now we're talking 1973.
And I really didn't think
I was at all interested in this.
But Esther and I had been talking to each other, saying,
"Well, what are we gonna do when we grow up?
"Are we gonna still live in New Haven and work for Yale
"and have a little studio?
"And what are we going to do, and where do we wanna live?"
And we said, well, we'd like to live in San Francisco.
'Cause I had done some internships out there,
and I said that is a great place to live.
Or maybe Boston.
I like water.
I wanna live near water.
And well, Boston is on the water.
And I'd never been to a TV station,
didn't know what it was like.
So I called Ivan back up and I said,
"Well, maybe we'll just go up there
"and see what it's like."
So I did.
Esther and I went up there and I had an interview
with the general manager.
And in about 20 minutes, it was clear to me
that what public television was up to, particularly WGBH,
was very different than what I understood
commercial television was up to.
So by the end of the afternoon,
I basically said, "Yes, let's do it."
And much later, I realized that the reason I could say yes
to this was that all these experiences that I'd had
up to this point had pointed me
in a direction of a career that I knew that I wanted
to be content-driven,
pro-social, and with a big reach,
like Social Security.
And WGBH had all those things in spades.
I mean television reaches everybody.
In 1960,
people in the United States crossed over
from getting most of their information about the world
from newspapers to getting it from television.
So, I said yes,
and off I went to Boston.
And so now I'm gonna tell you what it was like being there.
And I have to tell you up front,
this is gonna be hard for you to understand,
all of you youngsters, that in 1973,
there were three networks, period.
Three, ABC, NBC, and CBS,
and then there was PBS but just barely.
It had been invented,
public broadcasting.
Although it originated here as a system,
it wasn't invented until Lyndon Baines Johnson...
had created it in 1968,
so it was very freshly minted.
And way down at the bottom was
one of 350 local little stations.
In 1970, WGBH thought of themselves as a local broadcaster,
taking the signal from PBS and spreading it out
to its market.
When I got there, there was maybe 175 staff.
I think maybe that's even a big number,
maybe a $4 million budget,
and a design staff of six
that included five designers and one office manager,
and then me.
So it was really focused on local fundraising.
Experimenting with local programming.
If something was really good, maybe it would go national.
And those programs began to spawn ancillary things
outside of television.
And it had--
The whole feeling was like a start-up.
It had an electric kind of energy.
And I have to tell you one other important thing,
that in addition to creating these drop-shadow
branding elements, Chermayeff and Geismar also did a study
to try and figure out why design at WGBH
was kind of in the doldrums.
What they discovered was that,
like many organizations, there was an organizational chart
where major functions like legal and fundraising
and programming, promotion, engineering, and so on,
reported to the president,
and design reported to the VP of engineering.
And it was only later that I understood that this made
sort of sense because television sort of grew out of
a theater experience, and it was all about
what happened in studio here.
And those designers, in the beginning,
were mainly involved with studio activities.
But as our organization grew and our communications
were more on paper than they were in studio,
that started not to make much sense.
And they suggested to the general manager at GBH
that there ought to be a
vice presidential-level project,
position, for design.
This is a extremely visual business that they're in,
and that function should report
directly to the president.
This decision governed the job that I was offered.
And so I came into the organization
at the top of the heap, so to speak,
a very, very advantageous position to be in.
I had the responsibility and the accountability
for all of the design decisions that would be made
that represented the station out in the world.
I like to say that I worked there for 35 years
and I never got promoted.
(audience laughs)
And I think the other thing I wanna tell you about
before we get started is the culture.
Not only did GBH have a structure that was conducive
to success for a person who was coming
into the company, but it also had a culture...
like all organizations, that I had to understand
and absorb and express through the work that we did.
And just a few days after I got there,
when I had purchased my television set,
(audience laughs)
which my accountant said I could take as a tax deduction
(audience laughs) because I never had one before,
had no reason to have one.
I turned it on and this is what I saw.
Now this is 1973.
(guitar music)
* This is the station to watch, folks
* This is your own Channel 2.
* So send us your kind contribution
* Help keep your station in view
* Help keep your station in view, folks
* Help keep the wolf from our door
* Send us your kind contribution
* To Boston 02134
(viewers applaud)
- [David] The president of WGBH wrote this song.
I know it's hard to believe.
But if this tune doesn't convince you,
there's a lot of us in a heap of trouble.
Please send your contribution to Channel 2, Boston
02134.
(viewers applauding)
Thank you, thank you.
(viewers applauding)
- [Christopher] You have to--
You can't imagine what a miracle this was for me
because here was an organization
at the top of its game that didn't take itself
so seriously.
And we all had to raise money,
everybody has to raise money,
but we could do it in a way that,
that didn't turn people off,
that made them feel warmly towards us.
There was another thing that was discovered,
and that was that people didn't refer it to as WGBH.
They referred to it as Channel 2.
And so Chermayeff and Geismer had proposed to me,
as I went in the door, you have one mascot,
which is David O. Ives, the president,
but you have a second which could be the deuce, you know.
Think of it as a character.
This was a great suggestion, and we thought of it
as a character, all the time.
So, Thanksgiving is coming, right?
We have special programming.
And so we dressed this digit up every which way to Sunday.
And you can see that we had the sports program.
This is an evening at symphony with a white tie.
Mystery, down at the bottom.
And the craziest, wildest, and most
affectionate extension
of this idea was the 2-mobile.
(audience laughs)
Now I noticed coming in from the airport
the Oscar Mayer wiener truck.
(audience laughs)
And I have to tell you, growing up in Chicago,
I had seen the Oscar Mayer wiener truck
in Chicago, and I loved it.
So when we were trying to think of,
"Well, what are we gonna do for the next
"fundraising period?"
I said, "Well, why don't we,
"why don't we make a great big two and stick it
"on a chassis and drive it around, honk,
"and people will pay attention to us?"
And everybody looked at me and said,
"We can do that?"
I said, "I don't know.
"Why don't we try it?"
So we made it, and the 2-mobile
is one of my favorite of all projects.
I like to drive it around.
And you'd drive down the street,
and people would go
(audience laughs) as it went by.
It was wonderful to see 'em light up like that
because this is somebody they knew at this place.
And we also made a little pull-toy that was a premium,
also a 2.
But this kind of relaxed atmosphere
suited me to a T.
And I brought with me the proposition that we,
we go down and dirty with communications.
There had been a very stuffy...
internal newsletter that was generated
by the president's office, and it was
of no interest to anybody.
And so I was asked to think about a different way
to spread some news around the organization.
And so nooz was born and produced on a typewriter.
We had a golf ball, Selectric typewriter,
and we had Marcia Storkerson who could type
about a million words a minute.
And so we did all our typesetting on the typewriter.
We even did it for our program guide,
which is a kind of fold-up affair,
the size of a map, you know, when you were done folding it.
We would mail it folded like that, and it opened up.
And it was all done on typewriter.
And believe it or not, we used to do full-page ads
every week on the back page of the Boston Globe,
and we did those on the typewriter.
It was a revelation to me that
you could do this kind of stuff.
And my favorite ad that we did was this one.
(audience laughs)
Up at the top, it says,
"For those unforgettable evenings."
(audience laughs)
So, you borrow somebody else's glamor
and put it to work.
But the biggest, biggest hurdle for me was this,
television.
I didn't know anything about television.
And almost immediately after I got there,
we had to make a,
a signature that would go at the back-end
of all our programming.
It was mandated by PBS, and we had to make a,
a visual and oral signature.
There already existed a sound signature
that had been used.
And so Gene Mackles, who knew more about this than I did,
and I got together, and we..
My very first project was to make
a video version of the--
Of the--
(loud bright logo music)
Now, you may recognize that if you watch television,
and it's still in use, this thing, 40 years later.
But that was my introduction to, actually, video.
And from that, we went on to make
all kinds of introductions to our programming,
Masterpiece Theatre and Mystery!,
this wonderful animation using the characters
of this strange character, Edward Gorey.
And we proposed that we take these wonderful drawings
and we blow-up, oops,
we blow-up patterns and use them as set elements
for the host.
And we put her in a nice red dress,
and we'd have a piece of furniture,
and then we would be done.
So we made dozens of these elements that you could
switch around, depending on what the program was about.
Every program had ancillaries that were attached to it.
We did a wonderful series of American short stories
that were made into hour-long dramas,
and we made a viewer and educator's guide
that went with it.
And you have to remember that this was the place
that Julia Child got her start
and also the place that How-To programming got its start.
So we did all of Julia's stuff, including her books.
After Julia came the Victory Garden,
and we did a book for Victory Garden,
and there was a week when,
on the New York Times best-seller list, we had two books.
I love to do books.
Graphic designers love to do books.
And it was a wonderful opportunity to take the information
that had been gathered through months and months
of programming and put it into a trade book.
We also did promotional stuff, calendars...
using royalty-free images
from the Burpee Seed catalog.
And then came This Old House,
and of course, we had the sought-after tool tie
that you could get as a premium.
We also had a radio station, 89.7,
and it was primarily a classical music station.
We had a wonderful program called Morning Pro Musica
that was carried around the country.
And so I made a couple of posters for them
that were used as premiums.
And The Early Bird, it was a morning program,
and it started every day with bird sounds.
The first four or five minutes was just bird sounds.
It was a fabulous program.
We had classical in the day-time,
and then at 8:00, we had jazz.
A very bad plan, because you had to completely change
your audience between 7:59 and 8:00.
(audience laughs)
But we only had one radio station,
and so we had to figure out something.
So we,
Doug Scott and I, figured out a way
to promote both services at once.
So we invented-- We invented these composers.
"We play both sides," it says there,
and of course Fats Wagner was one of them.
And we had a lot of fun with this ad campaign.
These were some of the other guys,
Chick Corelli and Bix Buxtahude,
and my favorite was Glen Mahler.
(audience laughs)
So we promoted the radio station,
as well as the TV station.
By the end of the '80s,
the institution had begun to have a different self-image.
It started to think of itself as a national producer,
because we had a lot of programs that were now
up and running that were national.
That changed what we were paying attention to.
We focused now more on national programs than local.
We had huge technology shifts in the '80s
that we had to deal with.
And the outreach stuff accelerated,
and the company really changed from a kind of
start-up mentality to a more mature,
business-like organization.
Not that we didn't continue to make fun of ourselves,
but it was a much, much more serious operation as it grew.
I mean, we had all these programs
that we had to figure out what to do with,
and they were all different.
And it was...
They had different audiences,
they had different personas,
and they had different designs.
And it was only at this point that I finally figured out
what the difference was between commercial television and,
and public television, and that was they had
completely different business models.
Commercial television creates a program that will attract
a certain demographic that itself would attract
a certain advertiser in order to make a profit.
And that's the reason that programming is made
on commercial television, with very, very few exceptions.
On the other hand, on public television,
a program is proposed to fill an unmet need,
to bring ideas and insights to a wide audience
for a social benefit.
And many of these programs are programs
that commercial television wouldn't touch
with a 10-foot pole.
And one in particular I will mention
that happened in 1983 was Vietnam: A Television History,
the first major review of what the heck happened
to us in that crazy war.
We made posters and press materials
which were physical at that time,
with the incredibly amazing and beautiful photography
that was available from that episode.
And we made a 13-hour program that was
very, very important for our company
and for me.
And we also made our first
digital title sequence.
It looks pretty dumb now, but it was, (laughs)
it was amazing what you had to do to make something
that was born digital in 1983.
So, here's the title sequence in the tail-end of the,
of the tease that comes before the title sequence.
- [Johnson] If this little nation goes down the drain
and can't maintain her independence,
ask yourself what's gonna happen
to all the other little nations.
- [Christopher] Good question.
(helicopter blades chopping)
(slow dramatic music)
Music by Mickey Hart from the Grateful Dead
and the sound of the helicopter was such
a primal connection to,
to that fracas.
And for this program, we also produced
a 16-page tabloid newspaper.
It wasn't the newspaper itself.
It was the slicks that were sent
to every local newspaper in the country
suggesting that they print it and put it inside
the Sunday edition for the Tuesday airing.
And in this piece, we had original writing
for each program, each of the 13 programs,
pictures of all the characters, maps,
and a timeline that went along the bottom
that went from the departure of the French
to the departure of the Americans.
It was exactly everything that today
would be on a website, but we didn't have a website.
And then, oh my God!
(audience laughs)
The computer changed everything.
And in an instant.
It was incredible.
In the course of about two years, three years,
WGBH became the...
the company and the country that had
the highest per capita...
Macintoshes.
And we used them for everything.
And among other things, we started using HyperCard...
an incredible invention by Apple that,
that allowed us to make the first really interactive...
teacher guide or viewer guide because you could actually
click on this thing down in the corner and get video.
It came on floppy disks like these,
which we also used for our program
in 1991 to celebrate the--
Whatever centennial it was for Columbus's voyages.
And we used this as an excuse to point out
one other thing that we were doing a lot of,
and that was what I would call...
editorial animation.
The parts of the story that you couldn't tell live
and you had to explain using graphics.
This was a project that I was very, very interested in.
And I will show you one,
one example of the kind of
informational editorial chunk that we would make
as part of this program,
and it has to do with
Magellan's voyage.
- [Voiceover] With a Waldseem||ller map published in 1507,
the world began to assume its modern shape.
What was now called America was clearly identified
as being not as Columbus believed the edge of Asia
but a new and previously unknown part of the world.
(slow mysterious music)
- [Christopher] Incognita, it says.
- [Voiceover] Remained unknown.
(slow mysterious music)
Until in 1519,
Ferdinand Magellan began the voyage that finally found
the strait Columbus had searched for in vain.
- [Christopher] So this is the 3-D...
- [Voiceover] Magellan, like Columbus,
sailed under the Spanish flag.
Like Columbus, he sought a western strait
to the Spice Islands.
- [Christopher] Listen to the music.
- [Voiceover] He found it in November 1520,
and only then did it become apparent how colossal
was the error Columbus had made in calculating
the distance to the Indies.
For after entering the Pacific,
Magellan faced another 5,000 miles of ocean
before reaching the Philippines.
(slow mysterious music)
Finally, Columbus's dream of sailing West
to reach the East was realized.
He just hadn't reckoned on an unknown continent
and the world's greatest ocean being in the way.
But now with Magellan's voyage,
the world as we know it today came into being.
It was a world which, even though he had helped define it,
Columbus would never know.
- [Christoper] This moment when you look at the globe
and you see almost all water,
that was the key moment,
and that sunrise that came over to,
to expose the huge expanse of ocean.
This was a program that epitomizes the--
the chore of the designer in a television studio,
and that is that you address
an area of content and you create this octopus
of associated family members,
where each part had to communicate
the same sort of idea and brand
around a similar area of content.
And this is what we basically did as designers,
was to find a way to create a family of related materials
that expressed clearly a particular area of content.
So by the '90s,
the station had to start to think of itself
not just a television and radio station
but an educational publisher
because now they were beginning to be all these other ways
that you could distribute content.
And this changed also the way we had to behave.
There now was more of an institutional awareness.
Rather than just programming, it was about WGBH
as the sort of mother ship,
multimedia focus on all these different
amazing things that we had to make,
non-broadcast media proliferation,
and crazy Web growth.
So we started to focus more on the institution
than on the programs.
For the first time, we made a pamphlet
that actually asked the question,
"Well, what do you do there at WGBH?"
And we started to do annual reports.
And you can see that now, it's all about WGBH.
It's not about a particular program.
And we also had to start doing our financials
as part of this.
And then, oh no!
(audience laughs) The Internet!
This is our very first,
really ugly website.
And it was for a program, a wonderful program,
called Rock & Role: An Unruly History.
This was done by the very first designer
that I hired who was already born digital.
This is a wonderful program, and because I like it so much,
I'm just gonna play you the title sequence.
Unfortunately, it's not my work,
but it's one of my designers' work.
Gaye Corbett, it was her project,
and this is the opening to this 13-hour
history of rock and roll.
And the problem was how do you make an image
that stands for all those different kinds of bands?
(rock music)
(flames sparking) (crowd cheering)
(rock music) (flames lapping)
(loud explosion)
(rock music)
That was really fun to make. (audience laughs)
I can tell you.
(electric guitar music) But we also promoted...
(electric guitar music)
on our own air, in our--
- [Voiceover] Stay tuned for Rock & Roll, next on GBH 2.
(rock music)
- [Christopher] With our very first 3-D guy, right?
He came with a little, early Maya package
and produced that as our first 3-D promo.
But the big thing was, was the Internet.
And I'd say the Internet was so important
to public broadcasting because all that stuff
that ended up on the cutting room floor (whistles)
was now available for researchers
and for people interested in the subject.
This was the website for Evolution,
another project that commercial television
wouldn't touch, ever.
And what's really interesting about this
is we published this in 1999,
and if you went to Google now and put in "evolution,"
this is number two on the list.
(audience laughs)
It's the long tail.
It's still the best summation
of Darwin's theories that you can find
on the Internet.
And for kids, Zoom.
Anybody watched Zoom when you were little?
(audience member mumbles)
Yes?
Oh-two-one-three-four.
Anyway, by-kids, for-kids,
now all you had to do was
send it in an email.
Used to be you had to send a letter.
So we've revived Zoom,
and this was the fateful
2000 vote for kids.
And we were doing a lot, a lot of kids programming
at that time.
We had Fetch and Peep
and Curious George and Arthur.
And Arthur, lo and behold,
at the end of the '90s, was the most watched
kids' program on television,
not on public television, on anything.
And so we made a big blow-up Arthur for our roof.
(audience laughs)
(laughs) That was a lot of fun.
By the end of the '90s, beginning of 2000...
our self-identification had changed again.
We now thought of ourselves as public media content
and distribution company.
Distribution used to be PBS's chore.
In other words, we would make the programs,
they would distribute them.
But now, you can distribute yourself
at all these different media.
And so this meant, oh, I'm sorry...
And by this time, we now had a staff of 1,000 people,
a budget of $200 million,
and 54 designers
in print, on air, and interactive.
We had a real focus now on distribution,
controlling our own products out into the market,
national leadership pressures
because we were such a big company,
and out-front on a lot of issues.
For example, we had to go to bat with Comcast
to make sure that public television was carried on cable,
on basic cable.
They weren't gonna do it, and so we went to the mat
with Comcast in Boston and eventually got a deal with them
that was then replicated around the country.
Social media proliferated,
and we had to learn to love it.
We also had a leadership shift,
which was really important about the culture.
And there was a real business orientation.
This was a big company now with a lot going on.
The first podcast was really picked up by our radio station.
They loved this new medium,
and we started to have stuff all over YouTube.
And finally, after a while,
everybody learned how to stream.
And so here's Frontline, our documentary program.
They have 60 to 70 programs now you can stream live,
not live, but stream,
huge population.
And even Masterpiece Theatre, of all things,
now has a blogger and book clubs and fan clubs
and contests and trips.
This whole business of using social media
to promote, market television and radio
is really important.
So, to the octopus come a few more legs.
And by this time, we really were
a big media company, producing over a third
of all the prime time programming and a lot of the website.
Here's Boston over there and Cape Cod
(audience laughs) and Madison was over on that side.
(audience laughs)
But "produced in Boston, shared with the world"
began to be our motto.
And then the phone rang again.
This time...
it was Harvard.
There we are.
That's us up behind the Harvard stadium.
That's the Harvard Yard over there.
Boston down there, BU, MIT.
Harvard called us up and said,
"Well, we have just purchased,
"under an assumed name,
"most of Austin,"
which is the little neighborhood that we were in,
and we were now right in the middle of their plans
to build a second campus across the river
from the original campus.
And they slipped the horse head into our bed and said,
"You need to move." (audience laughs)
This was 2001, I think.
Right about this time,
I was thinking about
maybe I should do something else
besides work for public television.
But then I was asked,
along with the president
and the chief financial officer,
to be the building committee to figure out
where we were gonna move to and what we were
gonna make as a new building.
Well, when I was at Princeton,
I took pre-architecture courses.
I had always been interested in architecture.
This was an incredible opportunity.
And we took over a year to figure out where to go,
and we finally found a site right there.
This is a kind of homely office building
with no tenant that had been sitting there.
And across the street was a brown-field site
where garbage trucks came and got maintenanced.
I was in charge of the architecture selection process,
working with the board,
and I can tell you I was very frightened about
getting an architect that was gonna put us in bankruptcy.
Luckily, we found a wonderful architect,
Polshek Partnership in New York.
They had done a lot of work with non-profits.
And when they came up and visited us, they said,
"You are just like a university,
"so that's the way we're gonna think about you.
"You have all these faculties inside.
"Each have their own little bailiwick."
And they went to work, and, make a long story short,
we had this problem.
We had an office building, existing building.
We had a space across the street
where we had to build our studios at grade,
and we had to figure out a way to make
one campus out of two buildings with a street in between.
And this was the solution.
This big, two-story high, 450-foot long,
like a sky-scraper on its side,
and it held about a third of all of our staff.
And this is what it looked like.
The radio studio is here close by.
And then as you walk up the street,
you come to a,
a theater and a major public space.
Inside, for the first time,
we had a public space people could come and visit.
We could have events.
A wonderful light-filled space.
For the first time in 50 years,
we got a screening room.
We never had one.
A 200-seat theater that we could have events
for our own use and community use.
And we were able to make, finally,
a decent recording studio.
We had a nasty little damp space
about as big as this corner.
And this was a wonderful floating space,
completely isolated,
where now we could have live performances
as part of our classical service,
and we would own those recordings.
This was a LEED-certified building with a green roof
and a lot of solar on the top.
And the other big change we made was
we opened up the outside of our building.
Three-quarters of our staff in the old building
lived against the windows in closed offices,
and everybody else lived in the dark on the inside.
(audience laughs)
And we made,
we made the transition to 55% open,
and nobody sits against the windows.
The light is for everybody,
and if you're in an office, move back from the windows.
Everybody got a clear story at the window in the top
the lighting at the top,
and it completely changed the internal atmosphere
of our workspaces.
Also part of my responsibility was
making the informational graphics
on the inside of the building.
And at the entrance to a particular section
of our staff, we would make these big murals,
like this one for Masterpiece and Mystery,
using the wonderful archive of images
that we had available to us.
That was a lot of fun.
But the most interesting
and most challenging part of this was that
our new site was right along the turnpike
on its way into Boston.
And this spot, right on the end,
hanging over the turnpike
would see 500,000 cars a week go by
from west to east into Boston.
And so we knew that we wanted to be more visible
than we were back in that little dark spaces
we had on Western Avenue.
We wanted people to understand as they went by
what our business was and to be interested...
in the building itself.
We wanted the building to,
in some way, through its form or its behavior,
express what we did there.
And so what we ended up having was a,
a series of LED panels
logarithmically spinning down the side of the building.
And this is what it looked like from inside your car,
dead-ahead for half a mile as you approached our building,
didn't have to take your eyes off the road to see it.
And the most interesting part of this was to figure out
the editorial goals that this would have.
This was a new channel of information.
And so I spent a long time
talking with other people in the station to figure out
the highest and best use of this.
And we ended up moving from our original assumption
that it would be an extension of television promotion
to a place where we said,
"No, this is a mural,
"not a sign."
We removed all language from it.
No "Become a member."
No "Tune in at 9:00,"
none of that stuff.
No third party messages,
and very little motion.
This was a pulsing heart
for a story about cardiac surgery
that we did on NOVA.
From the ridiculous to the sublime,
we put one image a day drawn from the content
in television, radio, or the Internet.
And over time, most of those cars are commuters,
people would get an understanding of what we do here.
Each image was selected to be beautiful in its own right,
without any reference to anything else.
And if you wanted to know what it was,
you had to go on our website
and we would tell you what it was
and promote the program there.
For the first time, this project
allowed us to achieve
the kind of quality standards in our workspace
that we always demanded in our programming
and never had.
We had nasty little spaces to work in.
And the big problem for me
was to try to engineer a new building
that had new features that didn't break our culture.
And then...
on the 1st of October,
almost my anniversary, 2008,
exactly 35 years to the day I decided I would leave
WGBH and try out Life 2.0.
So I'll tell you a few things that I learned.
First, work on things that matter.
You can't control all your options, as a designer,
but I chose to work on this side of the scale.
And even if you don't have a job there,
you can participate in other ways.
Everybody needs a designer.
Every little non-profit needs a designer.
Every little start-up needs a designer.
You can teach.
You can participate in things like Design Madison or AIGA.
You can give back,
as well as put yourself in a position
to work for things that matter.
Work for people you like and respect.
I really believe that birds of a feather flock together.
When I got to GBH,
it was clear that everybody was there
because they wanted to be there.
They liked the values there.
They liked the product.
They liked working there.
And so I had a lot in common with all these people.
They became my friends.
Many of the people were more or less my age.
All my designers were my buddies.
We went out together. We socialized together. We did everything.
Very few people were married.
We had a kind of social life,
as well as a professional life together.
And after a while, I began to feel
that I should say "Thank you" to these people
who were basically my staff.
And so I decided to, when Christmas rolled around,
I would make little gingerbread cookies
for them in shapes.
I would pick a theme, like jungle animals.
And then I would make all these cookies
the night before the Christmas party,
and I would bake them up, and I would ice them.
And so this is jungle animals, this one here.
And I would make an animal for each person
that suited their particular persona.
So this is Tom Sumida,
and I had just made him senior designer,
even though he wasn't so senior,
and he was really full of himself,
so I made him a lion.
I made him the king of the jungle.
So every year, I would make one of these.
And after a while, I just, I got so sick
of the smell of these cookies. (audience laughs)
I just, I couldn't do it anymore (laughs).
So I started to make little 5x7 watercolors.
Because when I moved to Boston,
I had started to paint a little bit.
And I felt comfortable with this medium,
and so I made water colors.
So again, I would pick a theme, like teapots, right?
And then I would make a teapot for each person.
The one on the left there,
of course, is for our IT guy. (audience laughs)
Or birds was another theme.
This was the year we were working on Evolution.
And this is one of Darwin's finches.
And I made this one for Gaye, who was the lead designer.
And then in the middle is Steve Baker.
He was the guy who ran the on-air promo area.
And he was a bass player in our house band,
called the Desperation Ensemble (audience laughs)
that we would perform once a year at the Christmas party.
And the last year I was there,
I had just taken a wonderful sailing trip
for two weeks with the producer
who was the executive producer on the Columbus project
I had gotten to know.
And he kept, he kept a boat in the Mediterranean.
And every summer, he would take the summer off,
and he would invite people to come and crew on his boat.
And you'd go from one place to another
around the Mediterranean.
It was wonderful.
So I said, when I got back, I said,
"Well, duh. We'll do boats."
So my last year, I did boats.
And so this is,
this is Li Wei, who was a designer in our interactive area.
And she had, was just about to have her first baby.
Next to her was Anya,
and she had asked me just before this
if she could take a leave of absence for a year,
so she wasn't going anywhere.
We had a person on our staff who was
the photo researcher and photo retoucher,
and this was for her, this was for Lisa.
You might recognize this image from Sheeler,
the painter, photographer.
And these are just a few things,
it's pretty hard to read here,
but a few things we'd like her to do by 5:00,
"if you don't mind."
(audience laughs)
Our major program on the history
of Native Americans in this country,
Allison was the lead designer and had found
this wonderful image of a tepee with a flag
on one of the staffs.
And so I put it on a flat boat,
and I sent it down the Missouri for her.
Most of the people that we work with are pretty nice,
but there was one person who was the producer
for the Internet for American Experience,
just an impossible person.
(audience laughs) And Toby Bottorf was the guy,
I made this for him.
He wanted to sink her boat more than anything.
And then there's Greta over here,
who, with Doug every lunch time,
would do the crossword puzzle in the Times
in about 20 minutes.
So it's very important you work with people
you like and respect.
Have high standards, that's another thing I learned.
Do not let the Dilbert mentality enter your business.
It's demeaning and degrading
and depressing and cynical.
It's very important that no matter what you cut,
the budget, the staff,
whatever it is,
you don't cut your standards.
You do more with less and keep your standards.
There were many times, well not many,
a few crucial times in my time at GBH where
there was this temptation to...
bring in a big underwriter for a sleazy program.
And you just, you just can't do it.
It's not worth it.
Have a sense of humor.
This is the wonderful poster by Paul Rand for IBM.
Even he could have a sense of humor.
Even IBM could have a sense of humor.
I've always thought that humor and its cousin, wit...
are like grease for communications.
They make people smile.
They make people wanna know more.
And it's not right for everything.
Certainly, there are projects
which humor would not be appropriate.
But where it's possible,
I say use it, and I say humor is different
than good humor.
I think every institution should be good humored,
if not funny.
Do a lot with a little.
I've always loved this Picasso bowl
made out of old parts from a bicycle.
That's so wonderful as an avocation
of something from nothing.
I really feel, as a teacher,
that nothing is learned without constraints.
And as a designer,
if you have no constraints,
you will drown in the possibilities.
So I think constraints are very important.
I think in this state,
in the state you're in,
you are beset by all kinds of constraints,
particularly in the university,
and it's something that you have to learn to love.
Make a silk purse out of a sow's ear is my advice.
What I learned is it's all about theme and variation.
I collect quilts.
And this is the quintessential example
of that idea of theme and variation.
This is the theme, right, nine squares,
five dark, four light.
Put together,
suddenly a secondary pattern,
a pattern of white appears,
and also a pattern of dark blue, occasionally, diagonals.
The variations, the simple variations
in hue and value in an otherwise
very, very strict set of rules,
nine squares, produces this wonderful event.
Here's a nice family.
You might recognize them. (audience laughs)
Everybody's different.
But somehow, there's a family resemblance
that you can't miss among the Kennedys.
And that's what this is all about.
The idea is to create
a family of related materials.
Almost everything you do will involve
being a variation of something that already exists.
It's almost impossible to imagine a project
that is unique and has no precedent.
Everything you make joins a family of materials
that already exists.
And so I've always felt
that the game is what's fun to play.
To have as few constants as possible
and as many variables as possible.
And that is the best game because it gives you
the most things to do.
Design is not just the application of formal skills.
It is a way of life
and a way of thinking, I believe.
I don't know how many of you have ever been
to a Shaker village.
When you go there, what you see
is an incredible example of design thinking.
Every piece of furniture, every textile,
every paint color, every building,
every barn, every seed catalog,
every song and every dance are all part
of the same environment,
a social and intellectual and spiritual environment
that is so coherent.
For me...
I feel that...
a good education is the one that prepares you
for the thing that you've never done.
That's why I was so interested in my time at GBH
where every other week, there would be some new
incredible weird thing that you never encountered before,
whether it was in technology
or change in corporate culture
or change in personnel
or a change in going from being a designer
to being an architect, you know.
Institutions have a character
is another thing that I learned, just like people.
When Esther and I were on our way
to Thanksgiving one year,
out the window, we saw this.
Unbelievable.
"We now have an opening for a new pilot." (laughs).
"The only air service in the Blackstone Valley,
"apply at Charlie's,"
which is a little hash house next door.
This is a branding problem right here,
waiting to be solved.
(audience laughs)
But!
This is a company with a persona (laughs).
(audience laughs) Right?
What I witnessed at GBH was
a company that changed just like a person changes
from a youth to an adult.
They look different.
They have a different size.
They have more serious issues to attend to.
But inside, they're the same.
And my job as a designer
was to project through the things that we made
an honest and approachable persona
for the institution,
to learn what the institution was
and to help shape it.
Number nine, design is different from art.
I'll get back to my chromosomes here.
I figured out late in the game
that the people I knew who ended up
being successful designers were people who got their
energy and their professional satisfaction
from solving problems that somebody else posed to them.
Whereas, the people who ended up being artists
were people that were predisposed
to have their intellectual energy
and professional satisfaction from solving problems
that they posed for themselves,
and sometimes not even knowing what those problems were.
And so it's very important to try to feel what you are
and where you get your interest and energy.
And this obvious last one,
you are what you eat.
Every decision you make,
every experience you have becomes part of you.
And all the things that I did,
experiences that I had before I got to GBH,
I think, prepared me to be happy
and successful in that environment
because of what that environment was like.
And it brought me experiences
that I never could have imagined.
I never thought I would end up there.
Now, the problem I face is that,
getting back to this diagram...
what I decided to do when I left GBH
was to try to behave more like a painter.
I don't know if my chromosomes
are gonna serve me well to do that,
but I'm giving it a shot,
and in the summertime,
I go up to this little unheated cottage
that we have up on the shore,
and I paint.
And I have liked to paint those rocks,
those big boulders that are on the shore.
They were dropped there by the glaciers
that disappeared 10,000 years ago, erratics that fell down.
And I enjoy painting them.
I find painting to be a mesmerizing activity,
not so different from design in that sense
that when I go out there and I spend
an hour to three hours painting,
I'm not aware of time,
except when the tide goes out
and I'm trying to paint the tide.
(audience laughs)
So I've been painting these rocks for,
I don't know, eight years or so.
I'm not sure whether...
(laughs) how long that's gonna last,
but the rocks have lasted a long time, so...
(audience laughs)
But I now also have a studio.
I've had a studio for about five years now.
And in the wintertime, I paint from references
rather than out in the field.
But I've also started to paint some strange,
peculiar vegetables, (audience laughs)
the kind you find in the back of the cupboard
(audience laughs)
after a couple of months.
And I'm not sure exactly where this is gonna go,
but you never know.
So, thank you very much.
(audience applauds)