A Q&A with Iconic Furniture Designer Bruce Hannah, Part II
Spotlight articles shine a light on designers and design materials we admire. Our founder and principal designer Rebeccah Pailes-Friedman has met many wonderful designers as an educator and career designer, and in our Spotlight interviews we ask them about their work and their design journey. In this interview we spoke with legendary industrial designer Bruce Hannah. We had such a wonderful conversation that we split the interview into two parts. Be sure to check out Part I!
Bruce Hannah is a renowned American industrial designer celebrated for his innovative and practical approach to design. A graduate of Pratt Institute in 1963, Hannah’s career blossomed through his collaboration with Andrew Morrison, resulting in groundbreaking furniture designs for Knoll International in the 1970s. Establishing his own design office in 1976, Hannah continued to create award-winning products, including the acclaimed Hannah Desk System, recognized as a “Design of the Decade” by the Industrial Designers Society of America in 1990. He joined the Pratt faculty in 1993 and has received numerous accolades for his teaching and thought leadership. Hannah’s influential work includes co-curating the “Unlimited By Design” exhibition and authoring notable books on design, underscoring his profound impact on the field. In Part II, we spoke to him about activities that influence his creative process, the project he’s most proud of, and the key lessons designs students need to know today.
Q: What hobbies or activities do you enjoy outside of design that influence your creative process?
A: I like to cut the lawn. I’m not strong enough to do that anymore but I found a lovely guy to do it and that’s fine. I like doing work. I like physical work. And fishing. I love fishing! My grandfather taught me how to fish, and my father used to take me fishing. Fishing has always fascinated me. I taught a class called Fishing for Ideas. I took students fishing! That started because I realized that, in this one class, almost no one had had that experience. So I took them fishing. We would go at the end of February, and we would go fishing for trout in the snow. Now if you can get more poetic than that as an experience, I’m not sure. Then of course you leave and you go to Denny’s and have lunch. You have this insanity of being totally immersed in something, because we were fishing fly rods. None of them knew how to fish with fly rods and I found this wonderful man, Mark Melanowski, who was a retired fireman who knew more about theology and bugs than most scientists. He was wonderful. I would bring a bunch of my fly rods, he would bring his, and they would all go fly fishing. Fly fishing is all about understanding what the fish are eating. Just putting a worm on there? No. What you’re doing is studying hatches of insects. As the hatch progresses the insects change. They may all start out black, little black gnats, but the next week they’re black gnats with little white wings, and the next week is black gnats with little white wings and a red tail. It’s nuts, but the fish know. If you’re in the third week and you throw them a black fly, they’re like, Yeah, we saw that one. We already saw that movie. Show us a new movie. So there’s this wonderful thing about designing fishing equipment where you have two customers, which is very unusual. You have to sell the fisherman, and then you have to sell the fish.
My biggest thing I like to do is wander around. Andy and I learned how to do that. It’s something that people don’t do well. People like to know where they’re going. They like getting on the plane to Las Vegas and getting off, and knowing exactly what they’re doing when they get to Las Vegas. There are very few people that you can wander around with and bump into things, and Andy was one of those people. We spent an inordinate amount of time wandering around New York City doing nothing.
The other part of our philosophy was: Try to do nothing. Which is hard. I would teach my students that. They were confused, Do nothing? That’s the opposite of what we’ve paying money to do here. I said, Doing nothing is the most successful thing you can do, because that’s when something will happen in your brain that you don’t expect. If you lead a very regimented life and know where you’re going all the time, you’re not going to see anything new. You’re not going to be startled. So one of the things I try to do is wander around, which is fun. My wife and I have done that. We’ll be on a super train in Italy and get off at a random stop. We have no idea where we are. Find a hotel. We are more like that as human beings. We are explorers. It’s hard to explore now because they’ve got all the signs up already. Oh, we’re at Exit 4.
Q: Could you tell us about a project or piece you are especially proud of and why?
A: Unlimited by Design an exhibit that My wife and I did at the Cooper Hewitt National design Museum. about accessibility for everyone. That was a long time in the making. It started out because I met this guy George Covington. He is a blind photographer. Let that sink it a little bit. George takes pictures to see. He was born legally blind in the early 40s, so he’s my age. His mom said no, he’s going to regular school. He ended up going to college to study journalism, and got a law degree. He ended up working at the National Park Service. He was in charge of accessibility there, making sure that things were accessible, which at the time they were not. George, with these black cowboy boots and white cane, banged on doors in the Senate and the House Representatives to get the American Disabilities Act through. George and I had this wonderful, funny relationship. We wrote a book together called Access by Design which was about making everything accessible for everyone all the time. And then we put on a conference in 1992 called Access to Daily Living, the first international conference on accessibility. All of this is tied into trying to figure out how to make the world accessible to everyone.
We worked with Diane Pilgrim to create the exhibit, who had MS and was in a wheelchair, and was the director of design at the Cooper Hewitt. There were lots of great products in the exhibit, and it was fully accessible. There was an accessible playground in the museum, which the lawyers went crazy over. Everyone wanted to play on that playground. We tried to redefine design, for all. I’m very proud of that. I wish I had paid more attention and gotten a book made of it. I think that would have been important. As we seem to do with everything that is good in the world, we take two steps forward and I think we’re going into the one step back phase at this point. Although I’m constantly surprised at how much more accessible New York City is today than it was 20 years ago, or even 10 years ago.
Q: You are also a design educator. What key lessons do you think design students should keep in mind right now?
A: They have never changed. What’s important now is the same sh*t that was important to the Egyptians. I’m involved with City Tech, which is the City University of New York’s design and architecture thing. It’s in Brooklyn. I got roped into it by a student of mine, Jenny, who said last August, Bruce, would you mind teaching an introductory class to industrial design students? So I went in. These are New York City kids, working and going to school. It’s in the mechanical engineering department. After three weeks I fell in love with them because I commuted to Pratt from Staten Island two hours each way for four years. That was not unusual. And these kids do it and they work. Half of them come late to class because they got out of work late or the trains broke or whatever, right? And then the guy that hired me, Andy Zang, said, We’ve been working on this new curriculum. Would you be interested? So we’re developing a four-year industrial design program. We’ve written 20 or so class outlines and syllabuses. It’s very different from when Kowstellow invented design education. There are so many people in charge of so many things. It’s frightening.
So the list is exactly the same. What should you teach kids? The first thing you would teach any college student is to trust themselves. It has nothing to do with skills. It has nothing to do with anything else. If they can’t trust their own intuition, we’re in deep number two. Learn how to sketch. I don’t care what you sketch with. I do not have this. I do not think that there’s a specific tool or specific paper that will make your idea better. Use an old newspaper and an old pencil that you found on the floor. As long as you can sketch out the idea so that somebody else can understand it, it’s pretty good. Same with 3D. Figure out how to teach them how to make stuff three-dimensionally. As we have little money at City Tech, I based my whole class on eight and a half by eleven sheets of paper and anything we could do with it. You can buy a ream of paper, which is 250 sheets of paper, for six dollars and it’s the cheapest material you can buy. And if you limit them to it, you cannot lose. You eliminate the glue. So we make a lot of stuff out of eight and a half by eleven sheets of paper. It’s cheap and it’s disposable. The first exercise I give them is to design a paper airplane. Everybody can do it. The cool thing is: then you ask them to write down the steps. And they go, I can’t do that. I say, You have to write the steps down. And they realize that their brain will explode into a purple cloud, because you have to learn to do that from somebody else. This is my introduction: You will learn how to make 3D things by making 3D things. There’s no manual for this. The act of doing is another thing that you have to instill in students.
So now they’re drawing things, sketching things, and they’re making things. The other thing is that they have to figure out how to tell you what they’ve just done. That’s the other thing that’s important. We have a lot of people that have good ideas, but they’re terrified of telling anybody, for some reason. Psychologists can go into that for the next thousand years. You need to make them stand up in front of the class and tell you how they made their airplane.
Those are the four essential skills. Everything else, computers, whatever, we’ve all had to learn different things. I had to learn how to draw on mylar, with ink. Insane. You think computers are hard? Try not to smudge that drawing. It’s all hard. All of those skill things are hard, but design is really about communicating your ideas. Get them out of your head, put them on a piece of paper, and have the courage to stand up in front of a bunch of people and say, Well this is what I think. What do you think?
The other thing is you have to teach them how to pick up their heart and put it back in their body. Essential lesson! Of course 3D modeling is important, but you can’t 3D model your heart that’s laying on the table, that has just been smashed. You have to figure out how to put your heart back in your body and go, Okay. I’ll do this again tomorrow.
The hardest thing to learn is to not give a sh*t what anybody else thinks. That’s the hardest. Most people can’t do that. Paul McCartney doesn’t give a sh*t what you think about his songs, which is why he wrote 695 of them. He just keeps doing it. Eventually, you’re going to like one of them, or you’re not, and he doesn’t care. Most people who are successful really don’t give a sh*t what you think about them. They just do it, and they’re all freaks. Normal people love freaks. I tell my students about this. I say, Okay, now you’ve presented it and you’re heard whatever I said, and you have to not give a sh*t about what I said. You have to absorb it. You have to kind of go, maybe that’s right. Maybe they’re correct about how I’m thinking about this. Maybe I should try to do it this way. But you really can’t care. The best designers that I know really don’t care.
The essential lesson is: trust yourself and your intuition, because you’re probably right. That doesn’t make everybody else wrong, they could all be right, too. But you have to have that feeling. Another important thing is to learn how to listen to people. That’s part of the presentation thing, to begin to learn how to listen to people. Many people lie every day. People get up, and they lie about four times before they even brush their teeth. To the person they’re laying next to, whoever. We don’t want to hurt anybody’s feelings. 90% of the time, that’s why we lie. People don’t know what they need. Did anyone know they needed an iPhone that would replace 50 products or more? It’s some enormous number of products that we don’t need anymore. Did anybody know they needed it? No, of course not. But there was this crazy person, Steve Jobs, who kept saying, That’s too hard. He had this vision of a thing that you could carry around in your pocket. Now everybody in the world has one, it has changed the world.
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Be sure to check out Part I of this interview!
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