Between World Wars 1 and 2 there was a rise of artist and political groups that created many of the manifestoes you read last week. In 1919 Bauhaus comes into being. Founded by architect Walter Gropius and later lead by Hannes Meyer and then Mies van der Rohe for the last 3 years of the school, the school sought to deliver an egalitarian education and has a vision of creating a union of art and design for a new kind of designer. Their manifest stated that it welcomed “any person of good repute, without regard to age or sex” and Gropius stated "there should be no difference between the beautiful and the strong sex" when they first started, they actually had more women students than men. After the first year, the directors and faculty directed the women to feminine arts or handicrafts like weaving, so fewer women ended up completing the full coursework.

The school taught a mix of arts and crafts and students learned color theory, composition, designed and built products and furniture, design posters and books and even costumes and performances. They practiced a philosophy of modernism which celebrated the machine and machine made objects. Form follows function, coined by Mies van der Rohe, celebrates the form giving clues to the items use.

Over time, this became a very male-centric group and they purposefully adjusted the student enrollments to favor men and pushed the female students away from things like architecture, painting, and carving. Despite this there were a few women who were teaching and students who became involved and eventually married some of the male faculty.

Anni Albers, who started as a student, met her husband Josef Albers in the school. Albers taught color theory classes. Anni, who had been working in glass was steered to textiles, as a student first, and then a teacher, eventually became one of the most celebrated weavers in the US. She was honored with the first solo textiles exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in NY.

Lilly Reich, a collaborator with Meis van der Rohe, while they were both at the Deutsches Werkbund, was responsible for designing all the interiors of Meis's work and collaborated (if not fully developed) the tubular steel and leather furniture Meis is so famous for—according to .....Meis didn't design furniture before or after his involvement with Reich. Reich was in charge of the Interior Design department that had been created when Mies took on the leadership of the school and was only the second female master at the school.

When the Bauhaus was shut down in 1933, many of the faculty, students, former students who became faculty emigrated to the United States. Several landed in New York, and with the help of Dr. Robert L. Leslie, through his composing room and PM / AD events, they were introduced to the who's who of New York's Advertising and Design agencies and in turn NY was exposed to the best of these European immigrants. PM and later AD helped to expose both emerging American talent as well as spreading the ideals of European modernism to a generation of designers and art directors. Included in the PM and AD publications and AD Gallery exhibits were immigrant designers such as Dr. M. F. Agha, Herbert Bayer, Will Burtin, Gyorgy Kepes, Ladislav Sutnar among others. These designers, in turn, became clients of The Composing Room, Inc., a testament to Leslie’s business sense.

Others emigres ended up in Chicago. Photographer and artist and former teacher, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and the former founder of the Bauhaus and architect, Walter Gropius created the New Bauhaus in Chicago. It ran for a year before closing and then a couple of years later, Moholy-Nagy founded the Institute of Design, where he taught for a handful of years or so before his death in 1946. His wife, Sybil, also taught at the school and was most known for her work as an architectural historian and critic. Mies also ended up in Chicago at the Illinois Institute for Design and he led their school of architecture for many years.

Others went to a most unlikely location—North Carolina. Josef Albers and his wife Anni Albers—emigrated to North Carolina to become teachers at the Black Mountain College, where they taught for 16 years. The school, which was part art school, part collective, taught artists, writers, poets, musicians among others. It was also one of the first schools to enroll black students and alumni include Robert Rauschenberg, Cy Twombly, Deborah Sussman, Elaine de Kooning, Ruth Asawa, and Mary Parks Washington—one of the earliest black students in the school.

The legacy of the Bauhaus and the schools it spawned continue with us today. Many of the classes you take, the offerings across the school from multiple disciplines before selecting a focused major and the problem solving and creative ideation processes got their start in the Bauhaus methods and philosophies.

During World War 2, the fields of computing, human factors made some great leaps due to the industrial war machine and the money put into that. In 1945, Vannevar Bush published his seminal article in The Atlantic. Titled As We May Think, Bush proposes a new machine to help scholars and decision makers make sense of the growing mountains of information being published into the world. This is before the internet and the web and was greatly influential on the people who invented hypertext and the internet as we know it today.

Watch the two videos about Bush to learn a bit more about the man and the invention.

Then read the three articles - the original by Vannevar Bush, my piece about his work and this piece from 2003 about Google. Compare and contrast Bush's original vision with the world of blogging in 2003 and bring it up to today with tools like Medium, TikTok, Instagram or other collection and authoring tools. I look forward to your thoughts.

During the war, we also start seeing the application of human factors and cognitive science research techniques being used to understand issues with people and their use of technology. During the war, there were a lot of casualties in plane crashes. Most of these were flagged as "Pilot error". But in 1943, Alphonse Chapanis showed that pilot error could be reduced by designing or re-designing the cockpit of the fighter planes in a more intuitive design. He had seen that controls like the flaps and the landing gear were exactly the same, and split-second-decision type experiences, pilots often used the wrong control, leading to fatal crashes. Redesigning these to have different shaped handles cut the number of crashes significantly. He also showed that using shapes, colors and grouping of controls to organize and inform the pilot seriously reduced the amount of guessing wrong that had been happening.

Another psychologist working on human factors issues during the war was Paul M. Fitts. Fitts analyzed the errors pilots were making when they were reading and manipulating controls in the cockpit. He posited that many of the errors made could be anticipated and avoided through an improvement in the design of the cockpit. Realizing that it was more important to design machines that matched operators’ capabilities than to train operators to use poorly designed machines, he began work on optimizing the design of cockpits, instruments, radar scopes, gun sights and navigation systems. His work gave birth to the field of engineering psychology, which is the application of basic research in human performance theory to the design of human-machine systems.

After WW II, Fitts took an academic position at the The Ohio State University, where he established the Aviation Psychology Research Laboratory in 1949. He later moved to University of Michigan to collaborate with Art Melton in developing the program on Experimental Psychology and Human Performance.

Fitts published his paper “The information capacity of the human motor system in controlling the amplitude of movement” in 1954 [Fitts 1954]. Fitts’ research allows predicting the time a human needs to point at a target of given size in a given distance. The law was first applied to Human-Computer Interaction in 1978.