Among the objects currently displayed in the Cantor Art Center’s exhibition cases are Henry Dreyfuss’s 1953 glossy black telephone model for Bell Telephone Laboratories and Charles and Ray Eames’s 1960s orange fiberglass chair with a desk arm for Herman Miller. Quotations from the designers hover above them, recalling the difficult balance between corporate work and design freedom. “We believed that once all business embraced the notion of design as a function of management, all of us would be employed to produce beautiful products,” graphic designer Saul Bass once said in a 1986 interview. “But it didn’t turn out the way we thought. Sure enough, Big Business embraced design, and promptly turned it into a commodity.”
That uncertainty about selling out is central to Creativity on the Line: Design for the Corporate World, 1950–1975, an exhibition of objects, prototypes, sketches, and manuscripts currently on view at the Stanford University museum. Behind each sleek innovation — whether Eliot Noyes’s 1961 Selectric Typewriter for IBM or Garth Huxtable’s 1950 sketch of a Millers Falls drill that could double as a space gun — is a compromise between a company’s needs and a designer’s creativity.