The story of one of the world’s most innovative corporate design programs has roots in the unlikely meeting of a pair of office mates at the US Department of Defense. Their collaboration would harmonize industry and art around a forward-thinking, people-centric aesthetic, one that continues to inform how IBM approaches nearly every aspect of its business.
Thomas J. Watson Jr. was running reconnaissance flights for the US Army Air Corps when he met glider pilot Eliot Noyes at the Pentagon during World War II. The men bonded over their fascination with flight and would reconnect serendipitously after the war. When Watson was a vice president at IBM, he retained Noyes’s employer, the New York industrial design firm Norman Bel Geddes & Co., to redesign its office machines. Noyes would assume the commission for IBM’s typewriters after Bel Geddes abruptly closed his firm in 1947.
Noyes’s first project, redesigning the popular Model B Executive Typewriter, was a huge success. He and IBM design engineers carefully crafted a whole new machine, a sleek, curvy model that far surpassed in visual appeal the uniformly boxy designs of other typewriters on the market. Consumers loved it. As did Watson Jr., who would ultimately hire Noyes for a succession of other projects, including the redesign of his own 16th-floor office at the company’s New York City headquarters.
Noyes’s goal was never just to make things pretty. It was to reflect the true essence of the subject and its relationship to the space around it. Typewriters, for example, weren’t just machines — they were vital organs within living, dynamic businesses. “Eliot knows how to put things together so that the whole thing works,” Watson Jr. said.
IBM, by Watson’s own admission, had lacked coherency in this area. “We had no design theme or effort then. No identifiable or pleasing typography. No consistent color plan,” he would later reflect. “Even our trademarks were laid out in jarring and dissimilar fashion.”