12/31/2023 0 Comments Eames the power of tenI expect that many readers of this forum will find the polished 1977 version familiar: its opening shot of picnickers in Chicago, its proto Google-Earth zoom above the Earth, its journey to the farthest reaches of outer space and then its dive into the blood cell of one of the picnickers, and finally into the subatomic realm of a carbon molecule. It was at the National Air and Space Museum that I first viewed this nine-minute film, along with thousands and thousands of American Gen-Xers. It was on view from its opening day, July 4, 1976, until the end of 1979. the relative size of things in the universe,” that led to the installation of the Eameses’ 1968 version of Powers of Ten among the inaugural exhibits at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC. Powers of Ten is by far the most well-known of these, and explains exponential change or, as its subtitle puts it, “the effect of adding another zero.” It was presumably the power of the Eameses’ gifts in linking the aesthetic to the conceptual, and the film’s further promise of visualizing “. But only the Eames could so elegantly express an idea this complex, making us feel startlingly inconsequential and strikingly complex at the same time.Powers of Ten is one of several short films created by the great midcentury designers Ray and Charles Eames to explore how innovations in film could be employed to explain fundamental scientific concepts such as symmetry and biofeedback. Any security expert recognizes-if not fully understands-the global and historical complexities that lead individuals to commit heinous acts. Any teacher knows a hungry child can’t learn. Any painter knows to step back from the canvas and look at it from across the room. Stepping back to view an increasingly bigger picture provides valuable insight to any type of problem. Hunt is shifting scale himself with his focus on the implications of Powers of Ten for designers but, this way of looking at the world is a broadly applicable skill. For these folks, working within this “scale shift” is incredibly important and reasonably teachable. Hunt is speaking to designers, and generally to those who design physical things. Prompted originally by environmental thinking and more recently by the rise of networks and globalization, we are starting to recognize that it is impossible to design things in isolation from the larger systems that they live within-whether those are systems of resource extraction, manufacture, distribution, consumption, or waste. I would call this a scale shift from, let’s say, 10 1 to 10 5. Increasingly, designers are shifting scale from rethinking artifacts (whether buildings, posters or toasters) toward whole systems thinking. And of course, Powers of TenĪ recent post by Jamer Hunt does a nice job of discussing how the ideas embodied in Powers of Ten can be applied to design problem solving on a practical level. I really can’t recommend The Films of Charles & Ray Eames enough. No one brought human warmth into cold Modernism like the Eames. Any time spent with the work of Charles and Ray Eames is time well spent.
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