The Valley of Heart’s Delight
The Valley of Heart’s Delight
Chapter One traces the Silicon Valley design community back to its origins in the 1950s, when a small number of technology companies first began to put “designers" on their staffs. Drawing upon corporate and archival records, interviews, and surviving artifacts, this chapter describes the campaigns of the first generation of designers as they sought to demonstrate to a skeptical engineering audience that “design” could improve not just the appearance but the functionality and marketability of a company’s products. The example of two companies in particular—Hewlett Packard and Ampex—reveals the stages by which designers achieved a hard-won credibility as they advanced from fitting electronic components into sheet metal enclosures to helping to define brands.
Keywords: Industrial design, Hewlett Packard, Ampex, IBM
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