Article October 26, 1968 Issue

An Interview: with an Industrial Designer

with contributions from David Rowland

David Rowland, industrial designer in New York City, was in high school when he built his first chair. "It was the most awful thing you ever saw," he says. Some twenty years later a Rowland chair won the Gran Premio at the 13th Triennale di Milano, an international design exhibition in Milan, Italy. It is currently in the Recent Acquisitions: Design Collection exhibit in New York's Museum of Modern Art. Although he studied at Principia College and Cranbrook Academy of Art, and under the famous Bauhaus design professor Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, he attributes this breakthrough to something far greater than his own natural talent or academic and artistic training.

Very uncomfortable! My motives for building it were false. I wanted to impress my friends by designing something that was different—that they would rave over. Since then, I have discovered that the different is seldom better, but the better is always different. If we strive merely to be different, it's a shallow and short-lived thing, but if we strive to be better, then being different will take care of itself.

A number of things took place during the years between the design of my first chair and the design of this first successful one. Before a better chair could come, better motivation was needed. Christian Science gave me direction and guidance. Mrs. Eddy says in Science and Health, "The devotion of thought to an honest achievement makes the achievement possible."^{Science and Health, p. 199;} I noticed that we are so often inclined to devote emotion, anxiety, fear, to wondering if what we are doing is going to please somebody else. Or, before we devote ourselves to the things that do count, we devote ourselves to the things that don't count. The thing that does count is honest achievement.