Educational Ideas
Ray and Charles Eames were not only the most beloved power-couple of American design, but they also explored filmmaking. From the 1950s to the 1970s they produced over 125 promotional and educational short films which may not be as well known as their plywood creations or lounge chairs. The goal for those movies was to be accessible interfaces between art, science, and technology as well as illustrating and communicating their design ideas. They show complex correlations in a precise and entertaining way to make them approachable for a mass audience. At the same time, they in no way lack the distinctive visual style that runs through the Eames’ epochal body of work. While the furnitures, toys, and art projects made by the couple were driven by necessity, engineering, and career perspectives, the films mainly came from a personal passion for photography of Charles Eames. The results were very innovative for the time, inspirational, and no less influential than their other creative endeavors in those respective fields. From product features to toy commercials and exhibition guides to full-on scientific educational videos, the scale and variety of subjects the films touched on are very impressive as well. Powers of Ten might be of the most popular Eames Office productions. In 2004, it even got parodied as a Simpsons couch gag.
““Powers of Ten takes us on an adventure in magnitudes. Starting at a picnic by the lakeside in Chicago, this famous film transports us to the outer edges of the universe. Every ten seconds we view the starting point from ten times farther out until our own galaxy is visible only as a speck of light among many others. Returning to Earth with breathtaking speed, we move inward- into the hand of the sleeping picnicker- with ten times more magnification every ten seconds. Our journey ends inside a proton of a carbon atom within a DNA molecule in a white blood cell”.”
Several of the early Eames Office films were produced for Herman Miller. Those clips could be described as instructional as well as promotional videos, that show how the products work in detail, but also might enrich the lives of the people who use them. Admittedly, slow-paced 8-minutes about the production process for fiberglass chairs can feel veeery long for today’s viewing habits but I promise there are a lot of precisely composed visuals in those videos. No doubt that you could screengrab a lot of stills and use them as “tasteful content” for your Instagram mood board. The same goes for the beautiful film showcasing the famous Case Study house. Imagine your grandparents showing you a slideshow with photos of a house they used to live in to give you some context for their lives in a time before you were not even born yet. Just that your grandparents were among the most influential designers of the twentieth century and built a dream house oozing with aesthetic excellence. “I like to joke that if the Eames’ had Instagram, they would have been really good at it. [They] were obsessed with details,” says Amy Auscherman, who is responsible for Herman Miller’s corporate archives. In 2018, she began preserving the Eames Office film catalog in collaboration with the Library of Congress.
You could even assess that Ray and Charles Eames were actively involved in the analog version of Instagram - four decades before the app launched. In 1972 the Polaroid Corporation commissioned the Eames Office to produce a film introducing the now-iconic SX-70 instant-photography camera. Using a mix of live-action footage and animation segments, it lovingly demonstrates potential uses for the camera and intelligibly illustrates how it works. The video was first presented at a Polaroid stockholders meeting and later used by the camera company as a sales tool. It is one of many instances that show how the Eames films that deal with technology and science are conveying a genuinely curious and candid approach. Those traits probably have eluded many of us in a time in which both science and science fiction mainly predict dystopian nightmares in the coming decades or centuries à la Black Mirror. The optimism towards technology transported in the Eames films feels like a breath of fresh air in that context. Maybe they can inspire to see other possible pathways that technological evolution could lead to. Another great example of that could be Computer Glossary, aka Coming to Terms with the Data Processing Machine. The film was part of IBM’s pavilion at Hemisfair, at the 1968 World's Fair in San Antonio, Texas. It aimed to promote an understanding of the computer through entertainingly showing the path that electronic data travels while introducing various terms relating to data processing.
Sources:
Design Museum
Eames
HermanMiller
Architecture Foundation
Cultured
Eames Office
Thumbnail image: Charles and Ray Eames selecting images in their studio.
Source: Eames Office
