I recently attended an exhibition about Charles and Ray Eames that I wrote about here. On display were a number of their films and, having not seeing very many of them previously, I bought a book called The Films of Charles and Ray Eames by Eric Schuldenfrei (Is that guilt-free, or debt-free? Either way, a pleasant place to be…). As one of my undergraduate majors was film, I still have a particular interest in the medium and the Eameses’ films were particularly interesting.
Many of their films were explanations of some very abstract concepts like exponents. Very topical in an exponential growth world. Dr Schuldenfrei tells me that one “third of the Eameses’ films were sponsored by IBM over a span of twenty-two years”. An amazing collaboration for its duration but also for the absence of artistic interference by IBM.
Somehow, the Eameses managed to convince IBM to pay them a retainer of sorts on an annual basis, with nothing specified as to what was required in return. As a result, the couple would work up concepts that interested them and pitch the film ideas to IBM. It sounds like it wasn’t much of a pitch process as Dr Schuldenfrei says “(s)ome of the films were already complete by the time they were presented as projects to be sponsored”. In another essay in the book, he say “the Eameses purposely distanced themselves from the East Coast which allowed them the necessary time to develop an idea fully before presenting it to others”. This is a great example of what Cal Newport refers to as Deep Work. And how deep it was can only be appreciated in hindsight: In 1972, they made a film on the then emerging medium of Cable TV. At around 1″ into the film (which can be found on this link), the narrator, speaking from a script written by Charles and Ray Eames, cites “experts” saying that cable has potential, realisable through becoming a two way communication system with “computers in line” which would bring our society:
a cashless, checkless society, business conducted from home, electronic mail delivery, facsimile reproduction, social services, community forums, laser bright wall-sized TV… wired schools and universities liked directly to the wired cities
Remember, this was 1972. A scant 3 years after the invention of ARPANet, the precursor to the Internet. It took 30+ years for this vision to be realised, but the prescience is remarkable.
The basis for these prognostications was that the technology already existed. Much like advanced robotics, artificial intelligence or 3D printing does today. If their deep work could come to these conclusions so long before any of these technologies were widely known, I suspect those that are predicting the future based on arguably much more mainstream technologies are unlikely to have to wait 30 years to see them become reality.