 |
Katherine McCoy
After 24 years one of America's best known design educators is leaving Cranbrook Academy of Art
'The complexity I'm interested in is complexity of meaning. I'm not so much interested in the layers of form as the layers of meaning'
Katherine McCoy was born in Decatur, Illinois, in 1945. She studied industrial design at Michigan State University before joining Unimark International in 1967. She went on to work at Chrysler Corporation and Omnigraphics Inc. In 1971, McCoy became co-chair, with her husband Mike McCoy, of the design department at Cranbrook Academy of Art, which they continued to direct until 1995. By the 1980s, their sometimes controversial programme had established itself as one of the most innovative in American design education, producing a stream of graduates who have gone on to make their own mark in the profession. Their company, McCoy & McCoy, has worked on two- and three-dimensional projects for Formica, Xerox, Unisys, MIT Press, Philips, Tobu Stores Tokyo and other clients. McCoy is a past president and fellow of the Industrial Designer's Society of America and an elected member of the Alliance Graphique Internationale. She served on the Design Arts Policy Panel of the National Endowment for the Arts and chaired the Design Arts Fellowships Grant Panel. In 1994. the McCoys were jointly awarded a Chrysler Award for Innovation in Design. 'Cranbrook Design: The New Discourse', an exhibition of work by McCoy, her students and graduates, travelled to New York and Tokyo in 1991. She has written widely about design and education, and her teaching methodology has featured in many international publications; including Eye (no. 3 vol.1).
Rick Poynor: What attracted you to design?
Katherine McCoy: I wanted to be an architect, but this was the early 1960s and the male high-school counsellor said, 'Oh, you wouldn't like architecture, it has too much math. You should be an interior decorator.' Industrial design was the university course that covered interior design. When I got in I discovered this whole discussion of problem-solving. For the first project we had to do 50 thumbnail sketches before we could go any further - 50 alternative concepts! - and I thought, 'This is the way I think about life.' It was so natural after trying other directions and thinking I was an artist, and the high-school teacher trying to turn me into a painter.
RP: How did you make the move from industrial design to graphic design?
KM: I'm really grateful that I have a foundation in industrial design because graphic design still isn't taught with much conceptual methodology other than the 'Aha!' method of intuition: have your brainstorm, get the idea and then turn it into form. Industrial design has so much more method to it. I discovered typography in the course of industrial design. I took one graphic design course at university, but it was really weak programme: ten weeks of Chancery Italic calligraphy. It didn't seem to make a lot of sense, but I began to develop a love of typeforms.
I graduated with an industrial design portfolio that included some interiors and graphic design. My first job was with Unimark International, which was fortunate because it was interdisciplinary and that is what I wanted. The bulk of our work was corporate identity and I learned graphic design from several graphic designers at Unimark. It wasn't the ideal training because there was no formal structure, but it was very valuable because the designers were so good. I found I had a natural affinity for the logic of grids. Unimark was dedicated to what they called European design. Basically, they were bringing Swiss graphic design to the US, based on rationality and systems, objectivity, clarity, all those things inherited from the Bauhaus. It felt right with my earlier attraction to problem-solving. It was the way I wanted to see the world . . .
|
|
