The Interface : University of Minnesota Press : 9780816674527 : 0816674523 : 15 Aug 2016 : "In February 1956 the president of IBM, Thomas Watson Jr., hired the industrial designer and architect Eliot F. Noyes, charging him with reinventing IBM&;s corporate image, from stationery and curtains to products such as typewriters and computers and to laboratory and administration buildings. What followed&;a story told in full for the first time in John Harwood&;s The Interface&;remade IBM in a way that would also transform the relationships between design, computer science, and corporate culture. IBM&;s program assembled a cast of leading figures in American design: Noyes, Charles Eames, Paul Rand, George Nelson, and Edgar Kaufmann Jr. The Interface offers a detailed account of the key role these designers played in shaping both the computer and the multinational corporation. Harwood describes a surprising inverse effect: the influence of computer and corporation on the theory and practice